A new United Nations commission of inquiry has concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, citing mass killings, forced displacement, the destruction of essential infrastructure, and even measures to prevent births as evidence of genocidal intent. While Israel has rejected the findings as “distorted and false,” the commission underscored that all states are legally obliged to prevent and punish genocide. Against this backdrop, the ECPS spoke with genocide scholar and peace activist Dr. Mark Levene. In the interview, he warns that genocide is not an aberration but “a dysfunction of the international state system,” arguing that Gaza exemplifies how structural failures and powerful alliances allow atrocities to continue unchecked.
A United Nations commission of inquiry has concluded on Tuesday that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, finding “reasonable grounds” that four of the five genocidal acts defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention have been carried out since the war began in October 2023. These include mass killings, inflicting serious bodily and mental harm, deliberately creating conditions to destroy the group, and preventing births. The report cites statements by Israeli leaders, such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vow to bring “mighty vengeance,” as evidence of genocidal intent reinforced by systematic military actions. Israel has categorically rejected the findings, denouncing them as “distorted and false,” but the commission underscored that all states bear a legal duty under international law to prevent and punish genocide.
It is against this backdrop that the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) spoke in depth with Dr. Mark Levene, genocide scholar, peace activist, and Emeritus Fellow in History at the University of Southampton. In this wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Levene situates Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza within a broader theoretical and historical framework of genocide studies. His intervention goes beyond the binaries of “self-defense” and “terrorism” to expose the systemic dysfunctions of the international state order that allow such atrocities to persist.
The urgency of Dr. Levene’s analysis is underscored by his activism. On September 6, 2025, he was arrested during a peaceful sit-down protest in London’s Parliament Square. Alongside nearly 900 others, he was detained under the Terrorism Act simply for holding a sign declaring, “I Oppose Genocide, I Support Palestine Action.” This lived commitment frames his reflections on Gaza and lends moral force to his scholarly perspective.
The title of this interview—“A Dysfunctional International System Enables Israel’s Genocide in Gaza”—captures its central thesis. For Dr. Levene, genocide is not an aberration but “a dysfunction of the international state system.” Contrary to the dominant framing of genocide as a violation of an otherwise rules-based order, he argues that “you cannot separate what is happening in one state from its relationships with others.” Modern genocides, whether in Myanmar, Rwanda, or China, must be understood within the interlocking political economy of nation-states. Gaza, in this reading, is not exceptional but symptomatic: a structural outcome in which powerful allies shield perpetrators from accountability.
What emerges in this interview is both a historical and moral diagnosis. Dr. Levene emphasizes the asymmetry of power between Hamas and the Israeli state, notes the persistence of genocide despite multiple international rulings, and insists that the key question is systemic: “Why has this been allowed to continue?” His reflections range from the rationalization of mass violence through developmentalist fantasies—such as the so-called “Trump-Riviera Plan”—to the moral responsibilities of genocide scholars. Speaking as both historian and activist, he affirms that “we do have to speak truth to power,” even when power refuses to listen.
Here is the transcript of our interview with Dr. Mark Levene, lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Genocide Is a Dysfunction of the International State System
UN Security Council meeting on the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, New York, August 25, 2016. Photo: Ognjen Stevanovic.
Dr. Mark Levene, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: In“The Changing Face of Mass Murder”(2002), you argue that extreme violence cannot be understood solely through the acts of perpetrators but must be situated within broader political and societal conditions. How might this framework help us interpret Israel’s ongoing campaign in Gaza beyond the binaries of “self-defense” and “terrorism”?
Dr. Mark Levene: That’s a big question! Let me go back a little beyond that particular article, which was written quite a long time ago. I’ve always argued that genocide cannot be understood as something attributable to a single actor. There is always a dynamic at play between what we call perpetrators and victims, and I think that kind of categorization is not always helpful.
In the case of Gaza, we can identify two sets of perpetrators, but the asymmetry between them in terms of power and actions is very stark. Hamas can be seen as a perpetrator, if we use that term, but the Israeli state is also a perpetrator—albeit one with vastly greater lethal capacity. So, the dynamic is profoundly unequal.
In genocide—or at least in the mindset of those who commit it—there is always this dynamic with the other party. In law, this often translates into ordinary people being encompassed within broader categories. What is significant is that when there is a political-military struggle between two sides, entire populations become encompassed within that logic. They are punished simply because they are perceived as part of the “other side” of the conflict. And that is what is happening here.
But the point I want to make is that genocide, in the modern world, occurs essentially within the framework of nation-states—not all nation-states, not all the time, but often enough to form a recurring pattern. I see it as happening within an interconnected, interrelated political economy—in other words, within the international system of nation-states. You cannot separate what is happening in one state from its relationships with others. I cannot think of a single modern case of genocide—whether in Myanmar, Rwanda, or even China—that can be understood entirely in isolation, as if it were only about internal dynamics between a state and a population it deems so troublesome that it considers or actualize the destruction of that whole communal population.
Does that help as a starting point? It’s a tricky issue and difficult for us to fully grasp—not least because genocide is so often understood primarily through the prism of the UN Convention on Genocide, as if it were an aberration. It is framed as something that violates the norms of a rules-based, civilized international system of nation-states, in which genocide is presumed not to occur, and any such event is treated as a transgression. I don’t see it in those terms at all. I see genocide rather as a dysfunction of the international state system. In that sense, we have to view what is happening in Gaza, for instance, by asking: how is it that almost two years on from its beginning in October 2023, the genocide committed by Israel is still continuing? I actually warned on October 11, just four days after it began, that Israel was on the cusp of committing genocide.
And I do want to say something about the other side as well, because Hamas also has a role. As I said earlier about perpetrators and victims, the reality is always more complex. But the question we must ask, nearly two years on, is: why has this been allowed to continue? It’s a fundamental issue, because we’ve had so many statements, analyses, and commitments—culminating in the UN grouping, which just yesterday (September 16, 2025) declared this a case of genocide. The ICJ, ICC, and countless scholars weighed in much earlier, affirming the same. Yet it continues. That sense of helplessness felt by so many around the world, horrified by this abomination, stems from precisely this question: why is it still happening?
I think the answer lies in Israel’s relationships—not only what Israel itself is doing, which I see not as exceptional but symptomatic of the world system we inhabit. What is happening is clearly tied to Israel’s relationship with an extremely powerful actor on the international stage, namely the United States, but also with countries such as my own, the United Kingdom, where the response has been, to put it mildly, ambivalent. Why has the UK not been more proactive? On the one hand, the legal framework is very clear: this is genocide, and it has been clear from very early on. Yet on the other hand, we face the evident failures of the political system. This, I believe, reflects the deeper dysfunction of the global order itself.
States That Oppose Genocide Routinely Assist Those Who Commit It
Anti-Israel flyers displayed during a demonstration at Place du Châtelet, Paris, March 28, 2009. Photo: Olga Besnard.
Your essay“Why Is the Twentieth Century the Century of Genocide?”(2000) links genocide to the structural dynamics of the modern international system. Do you see the current assault on Gaza as symptomatic of a systemic dysfunction within the nation-state order, especially when powerful states shield Israel from accountability?
Dr. Mark Levene: The simple answer is yes—I’ve just explained why. Yes, clearly that is the case. But, again, I should say that I have not spent the last two years, or indeed the last 30 or 40 years, just looking at Israel’s relationship with Palestine or Gaza. What is happening here reflects the way that states that commit acts of genocide are often shielded by other states.
I wouldn’t say it’s normal, but the ambivalence of other states in relation to those committing such acts is rather standard. There is almost a routine process whereby a state might commit genocide, while the rhetoric of other states suggests opposition, yet their actions and policies—through omission or commission—may actively assist that state in what it is doing. And one can think of, indeed I could enumerate, examples in the recent past where this has been the case.
So, in a way, I have a very gloomy prognosis here: I don’t think what is happening in the case of Israel, and what it is doing as a state in relation to Gaza, is somehow entirely exceptional. It is actually indicative of something broader—a deeper malaise, a wider dysfunction that exists within the international system of nation-states. These are the same states that, on the one hand, created the Genocide Convention, which in effect says, “thou shalt not do this.” That is how I see it, in almost religious terms—an extension of “thou shalt not do this.” But in practice, the system still allows it to happen.
Gaza Is Accelerated Genocide; the West Bank Is Creeping Genocide
In your study of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (1999), you coined the term “creeping genocide” to describe gradual elimination under a developmentalist state agenda. Could Israel’s long-term blockade, de-development of Gaza, and deliberate destruction of infrastructure be understood as a comparable case of creeping genocide?
Dr. Mark Levene: Well, yes and no. I’d say something rather different here. I think what is going on in relation to the entirety of Palestine, i.e. what we would now include as the West Bank, is creeping genocide, though it is accelerating. What I think is happening in Gaza is at the extreme end of accelerated genocide. I don’t think this is creeping, actually, even though it has taken two years to get Israel thus far. And I would emphasize this developmental—you mentioned development. The developmentalist aspect is something we should focus on a little bit. And the way I would approach it is by returning to what is, in my view, highly indicative of what is actually taking place here—and what, to ordinary eyes, might seem completely off the map—namely, the Trump-Riviera Plan. But this is going to be determined, this area is going to be turned into a sort of Riviera of the Middle East. That, to me, is not, in terms of how genocidal actors think things through, off the map. We ought to take it extremely seriously. Because genocide is always, in some ways, linked to the latent ideas, even in the back of one’s head, of states that are trying to envisage transcending the conditions under which they normally exist into something else, into something where they can truly develop themselves as they would like to in their heads.
Does this make sense? What I’m trying to say here is that states in the modern world, the international system of nation-states—are developmentalist. They have to develop in order to survive within an international system which is, by definition, social Darwinian. It’s a sort of, almost a competitive race to the top, or race to the bottom. Normally, states cannot realize what is unrealizable. If we take the case of Israel, the thinking would be we would really love to have a state which was streamlined, which didn’t have any Palestinians in it, which we could turn into a corporate security entity, as we have it in our heads, which is going to be the Mecca of the Middle East, if I can be a little bit ironic. Before October 2023, Israel was maneuvering around that idea, but no concrete projection of a developmentalist arrangement granting them the totality of Palestine to use as they wished yet existed.
The crisis of October 7th—and it really was that—I mean, I’m sure you’ve spoken to Omar Bartov about the trauma Israel suffered on that day—it’s what I would call the perpetrator’s never-again syndrome. Namely, we have a situation where, in the past, the victim group has attacked us, posing a mortal threat to our existence. This came to pass in a very real way on October 7th with what Hamas did. One could argue that what Hamas was attempting was itself genocidal; it simply lacked the means and capacity to carry it through. This became a green light for the Israeli state to bring out its tucked-away, last-resort plans—to tear up what had been in place up to that point and strike out toward something completely different and new. In other words, even if what Israel was doing up to 2023 was grotesque and hideous in relation to the West Bank and Gaza, after that moment there was a genuine rupture. From then on, Israel was attempting to realize what had previously been unrealizable: sweeping away the population of Gaza and creating something entirely new.
Now, this is hideous, but it is part of the mindset of genocide. It’s a sort of drive toward transcendence. That Riviera plan sits at the extreme end of that developmentalist thinking. You might call it fantasy, but it is fantasy being put into practice. The way the Israeli defense forces are bulldozing Gaza into non-existence—turning it into rubble—is a precondition for that transformation. What is actually happening on the ground is the pulverization of a people, of an entire population, rendering them so destitute and degraded that they can be removed.
Now, again, I can make comparisons. I wouldn’t say this is a unique action of Israel. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza should be seen within a much broader framework of politically mandated ethnic cleansings in the modern era. But that doesn’t excuse it in any sense, because all those ethnic cleansings—though not listed as elements of genocide in the Genocide Convention—are, in practice, genocidal. I have no doubt of that, even if it puts me at variance with the Convention.
What is happening in the West Bank, however, is creeping genocide. You could put it like this: Gaza is stage one; the rest—the Bezalel Smotrich plan for the West Bank, which also entails total ethnic cleansing and is unfolding piece by piece, olive grove by olive grove, village by village—is creeping genocide, but under the aegis of the international state system. And the fact that Israel has a powerful ally supporting it, doing nothing to stop this—namely, the United States—means this creeping genocide is accelerating very rapidly. These facts on the ground are intended to sabotage any aspiration of those states and people who advocate a two-state solution. This is precisely what Smotrich and those within the Israeli government are attempting to achieve. That’s the way I see it. It may sound horribly cynical, but then genocide is, by definition, cynical.
Framing Gaza as a ‘Problem Population’: The Logic of Genocide
Pro-Palestinian protesters hold signs. Photo: Oliver Perez.
You argue that genocide is often undertaken by states perceiving a “problem population” as a threat to their developmental or geopolitical survival. How does this resonate with Israel’s depiction of Gaza’s entire civilian population as complicit with terror organization Hamas?
Dr. Mark Levene: That’s a rather tricky question, isn’t it? I’m not sure that I am entirely—again, if we take other historical examples, one closer to home: the Armenian Genocide of 1915 in Turkey. There were groups who were defined as terrorists by the Ottoman state in 1915, and there is still a problem area I have written about: the degree to which insurrectionary groups, or groups challenging the integrity of the Ottoman state in wartime, were clearly—some of them at least—debating or actually practising terrorism against the state. That’s my position. There were other insurrectionary groups in Europe at that time; it was not only Armenian groups.
The difference here is that the Ottoman response—more specifically, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) response—was enacted by a regime that did not represent the Ottoman population as a whole. The Israeli government does not necessarily represent the Jewish population in Israel as a whole. But that CUP regime chose to encompass the entire Armenian population as insurrectionary—despite many complex cross-currents—and pursued a programme of their deportation or elimination. The stated aim was ethnic cleansing—to remove them to the desert regions to the south of the empire—but the result was genocidal.
Now, in the Palestinian population in Gaza, which I’ve never been to, so I can only speak second- or third hand, I’m sure there are a lot of crosscurrents of political, social, and cultural attitudes and feelings, as there are in all societies. Those would include people who were supporters of Hamas, and who—part of the thinking—would like to wipe Israel off the map. Does this, therefore, justify an attack on the whole population of that region: a population that is not just a “problem population,” but one that is co-responsible for what Hamas did? You can hear what I’m saying: I cannot justify what Hamas did. I think it was not only morally wrong but strategically an error. But can one justify treating the whole population as collectively responsible—and therefore punishable—which in effect legitimizes what Israel is now attempting, namely ethnic cleansing that, given there is nowhere else to go, results in creeping elimination day by day, hour by hour?
So again, this is what I’m saying: I hate what I’m saying, but I think there is a general genocidal thinking that goes on here. We almost have to get into the mindset of a perpetrator, and one can read it in, actually, all the various utterances of government ministers, but also social commentators and so on, who have been speaking in the last two years of wiping this “problem population” off the map, of making it disappear somewhere else. This is the mindset of genocide, unfortunately.
Holocaust Memorialization Risks Collapse in the Face of Gaza
In “The Holocaust Paradigm as Paradoxical Imperative”(2022), you warn against a sacralized, exceptionalist reading of the Holocaust that blocks solidarities with other victims of mass violence. How might this paradigm be shaping Western reluctance to acknowledge Gaza as genocidal?
Dr. Mark Levene: So again, it’s a very big question. The brief answer might be this: what I call the Holocaust paradigm refers to the way what happened to the Jewish populations of Europe under the Nazi aegis—not just under Nazi occupation, but, and this is a historical point I would want to develop more fully elsewhere, involving the co-responsibility not only of the Nazis but also of other European states in the destruction of the Jews. That is a major theme of mine.
Looking back retrospectively, the key moment was the 1990s, and I think that timing is significant because it came at the end of the Cold War. From then onward, the West, primarily, elevated this destruction of the Jews, of a key component of the European population, into something sacralized—turned into a kind of sacred act. It was not only made exceptional but also set up as the benchmark by which we ought to understand genocide.
Part of the reason lies in why this memorialization took shape. On one hand, it was tied to notions of tolerance and possibly of a multicultural society, which Europe by that time seemed more willing to embrace. The Holocaust became a peg upon which that notion could be hung. On the other hand, my argument is that this came after the collapse of the West’s number one enemy, the Soviet Union. With the Soviet Union gone, the West needed a figure of antithesis, and the Nazis filled that role—as the most awful, insidious, diabolical example imaginable.
At the same time, in the 1990s, genocides were occurring within Europe—most notably in Bosnia-Herzegovina after the collapse of the Soviet system in the East—which showed how close such horrors could be. And so there emerged an almost edifice of Holocaust memorialization that became very significant. It became, as you say, sacralized. One could not touch it. If you wanted to talk about other genocides, you had to do so by asking whether they fit within the frame of this sacralized genocide.
This shaped interesting directions of travel: one could point to Rwanda and say, yes, here is another genocide we should also recognize and memorialize. But Armenia in 1915, for instance, was always politically fraught, for reasons tied to structural relationships between states, and so it never fully entered the pantheon of what was considered “in” or “out.”
So, to return to your question, the simple answer is yes: Holocaust memorialization became central to a self-referential notion of the West as the “good guys.” The Holocaust carried a significant emotional weight within that way of thinking.
I think what’s striking about the present—and I say this as someone who is Jewish—is that I do not wish Holocaust memorialization ill; on the contrary, I wish it well. It offered us an opportunity, potentially, to recognize that the world has witnessed many genocides. But I believe it is now in danger of being smashed to smithereens by what is happening in Gaza.
There is another aspect here. We are very focused on Gaza, yet Holocaust memorialization in this country—in Britain, for example—still issues statements as if Gaza were not happening. It continues to speak only about what befell the Jews in the 1940s, which of course it should do, but it seems unable to draw any reference to what is unfolding today. That inability is deeply troubling. It creates an obstacle to connecting past genocide to contemporary atrocities.
What is revealing about Holocaust memorialization is that it deals with something fixed in the past. You can point to it and say: this was terrible. But what is terrible now is not being addressed. From a Jewish communal perspective, and from the broader framework of Holocaust memorialization, this represents another catastrophe—a consequence of the many consequences flowing from the genocide in Gaza.
We Have to Speak Truth to Power
Israelis walk next an Israeli election billboard of Likud Party showing US President Donald Trump shaking hands with Likud chairman and Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Beth Shemesh, Israel on September 8, 2019. Photo: Gil Cohen Magen.
Finally, across your scholarship you stress the moral responsibility of genocide scholars not only to analyze but also to warn. In the face of Gaza, what role should genocide scholars play: cautious analysts, public intellectuals, or active witnesses?
Dr. Mark Levene: Again, that’s a very big question, because it involves a whole spectrum of human beings who are “genocide scholars.” And I can’t speak for them. Some see themselves as public intellectuals, while others see our role as being able to have an impact on situations like this through our analysis and what we say. I’d also note, of course, that within the genocide and Holocaust arenas of scholarship there is a lot of unease and fractiousness now about how we view what is happening in Gaza. Not everybody is on the same page, and I think one should acknowledge that there is a multiplicity of viewpoints.
I can only speak for myself here. My background is not only as a genocide scholar but also as a peace activist. I spent my formative years, my late 20s and early 30s, as a peace activist in a Europe which, as we saw it, was on the verge of nuclear annihilation. So, my own position, for what it’s worth, is about speaking truth to power. And the sadness of that, from a personal point of view, is that power is not very interested in listening.
In the end, one has to resort to action, as I did last week. I felt impelled to join Palestine Action, a group in Britain challenging the relationship of the British government to the genocide in Gaza—through what it allows to happen on its soil, or through its engagement in selling components for F-35 planes that have been used to bomb Gaza. Palestine Action has been challenging, non-violently, the British state’s role in this process, as well as companies on British soil, including one just down the road from where I live in the Welsh borders: Elbit Systems, a major Israeli defense manufacturer with an embedded role in the British defense industry.
I felt impelled to support Palestine Action, even though it has been proscribed as a terrorist organization. Ultimately, I can only do what other human beings can do: put my feet non-violently on the ground—and in this case, be arrested under Section 12 or 13 of the Terrorism Act in Britain—for saying no to genocide. I was arrested simply for sitting in Parliament Square in London with a poster saying, “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” And for that, I am now, apparently, a supporter of terrorism.
We have reached a point where what should be blindingly obvious—that my government, and all governments, should be doing something to stop this—seems to be beyond their capacity. So, I don’t exaggerate my role as a genocide scholar. Most of the time, we are not listened to in high political or elite circles. So, there is a limit. We have to be aware of those limitations. But we still have to speak truth to power.
In an interview with the ECPS, Professor Henri Barkey—born in Turkey and one of the leading US experts on Middle East politics—warns that Turkey has crossed a decisive threshold under President Erdogan. “Turkey has now become a full-blown authoritarian system,” he stated, arguing that Erdogan has removed the “competitive” element from competitive authoritarianism by subordinating the judiciary, jailing rivals, and even deciding opposition party leadership. While repression deepens, Professor Barkey sees a paradox: “The system is becoming more authoritarian, but society may be resisting much more than we realize.” He highlights youth-led mobilization, fears over arrested Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu’s popularity, and Europe’s limited leverage, concluding that Erdogan’s overreach may ultimately galvanize opposition forces.
In a wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Henri Barkey, a leading scholar of Middle East politics who was born in Turkey, delivered a stark assessment of the country’s current trajectory under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “Turkey has now become a full-blown authoritarian system,” Professor Barkey stated, emphasizing that the transition from “competitive authoritarianism” to outright authoritarian rule marks a dangerous turning point.
Professor Barkey—Adjunct Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and holder of the Bernard L. and Bertha F. Cohen Chair in International Relations at Lehigh University—has long studied Turkey’s political development. He previously directed the Middle East Center at the Wilson Center and served on the US State Department Policy Planning Staff during the Clinton administration.
Professor Barkey situated Erdogan’s consolidation of power within a broader historical and political context. Turkey’s modern history, he observed, has been marked by cycles of democratic openings and authoritarian retrenchment. Yet, despite repeated interruptions—from military coups to autocratic turns—“the Turkish public, by and large, has adapted and adopted a sense of democratic culture.” The resilience of ordinary citizens, he noted, remains a crucial counterweight to authoritarian encroachment.
At the heart of Professor Barkey’s argument is Erdogan’s dismantling of institutional safeguards. “He is turning Turkey into a complete authoritarian system because he controls the judiciary, and judges and prosecutors essentially do whatever he wants them to do,” Professor Barkey explained. Recent episodes—politically motivated trials, the dismissal of opposition leaders, and the manipulation of party leadership contests—demonstrate, in his view, the collapse of even the minimal competition that previously characterized Turkey’s hybrid regime. “In other words, Erdogan is now deciding who will lead the main opposition party.”
This tightening grip, however, is not without risk. Professor Barkey underscored a paradox: “There’s a kind of dialectic here: the system is becoming more authoritarian, but society may be resisting much more than we realize.” Millions of citizens, particularly the younger generations who have never known a Turkey without Erdogan, have mobilized in protests, demanding change. Professor Barkey noted that such resistance is difficult to gauge because “people are afraid to speak out” and reporting is restricted, but he insisted that “at some point, this is going to break.”
Erdogan’s own fear of rivals, especially Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, reflects this tension. Professor Barkey argued that the regime’s extraordinary measures to sideline Imamoglu—ranging from imprisonment to retroactive annulment of his university degree—offer “the clearest demonstration that he’s terrified.”
Professor Barkey also highlighted the role of external actors in shaping Erdogan’s room for maneuver. In his view, former US President Donald Trump “doesn’t believe in democracy” and effectively gave Erdogan “carte blanche” at home by refusing to criticize his repression. Europe, for its part, remains uneasy with Erdogan’s authoritarian aims and worried about migration pressures, but Professor Barkey noted that Erdogan feels confident he can “withstand European pressure” while focusing on demolishing the opposition. Ultimately, the combination of a permissive US stance under Trump and Europe’s limited leverage has reinforced Erdogan’s sense of impunity.
Ultimately, Professor Barkey’s analysis suggests both danger and opportunity: the danger of entrenched authoritarianism, but also the possibility that Erdogan’s overreach may galvanize opposition forces. As he concluded, “Authoritarian leaders always make mistakes… and I think Erdogan is already making them.”
Professor Henri Barkey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and holder of the Bernard L. and Bertha F. Cohen Chair in International Relations at Lehigh University.
Here is the transcript of our interview with Professor Henri Barkey, lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Erdogan Realizes He’s Weak: People Are Fed Up and Want Change
Professor Henri Barkey, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: Turkish President Erdogan has long relied on a blend of populist narratives and authoritarian tactics to consolidate power. Given the backlash over Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu’s imprisonment, the use of lawfare through corruption investigations, the appointment of trustees to CHP-led administrations, and the wave of nationwide anti-government protests, do you believe this strategy is now undermining rather than sustaining his authority? Could this moment mark a potential inflection point for his populist-authoritarian model?
Professor Henri Barkey: It’s interesting you say that, because I actually had a piece published in Foreign Affairs Online where I basically argued very strongly that Erdogan had made a terrible mistake by imprisoning the mayor of Istanbul, and I thought this was the end of Erdogan. Imamoglu is still in jail, and Erdogan is still the president, and he has gone ahead and imprisoned a lot more people—journalists and other members of the opposition party—and he is also trying to get rid of the leadership of the opposition party.
But to me, all of these are indicators that he realizes, after 23 years in power, that people don’t want him anymore. He has actually lost public support, and he has to resort to these incredible machinations to stay in power. In other words, he realizes that if there were elections any time now, he would not be re-elected, and his party would lose. In fact, in the last municipal elections in 2024, the main opposition party came in comfortably—comfortably for Turkey—as number one, and his party came in second.
What is going on today in Turkey is that Erdogan realizes he’s weak. He has support—it’s not that he doesn’t have support—but of course, he has the state machine, which he can always mobilize to get anything he wants done. However, for him, it must be very difficult to accept that he, who used to be genuinely popular in Turkey and who won elections genuinely, is now losing support. People are fed up. People want change. And it’s natural.
Imagine if you are 25, or maybe even 30 years old. All your conscious years have passed under one leader. People want change. So, it’s partially psychological, but partially also, of course, due to his responsibility for what’s going on in Turkey. The economy is not doing well. Inflation is high. He made terrible mistakes. And naturally, people want change.
The System Is Becoming More Authoritarian, but Society May Be Resisting
In your writings, you describe Erdogan’s evolution from a reformist leader promising EU-style democratization to a populist-authoritarian consolidating near-total power. How has this transformation shaped Turkey’s political trajectory and institutional resilience over the past two decades?
Professor Henri Barkey: Turkey—if you look at its modern history from World War II onwards—has experienced many different variations over the past 80 years. There have been democratic governments, military coups, and repeated interruptions in its political system. But what strikes me is that the Turkish public, by and large, has adapted and adopted a sense of democratic culture. Not perfect, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it exists. The Turkish public has a stake in elections and in the freedom to say what they want and to act as they wish.
Of course, there have been authoritarian periods—Turkey is going through one now—but you still see a certain resilience. The fact that 15 million people, after Istanbul Mayor Imamoglu was arrested, signed a petition to have him declared the candidate of the main opposition party is an incredible demonstration of people’s stake in the democratic system.
So, what’s happening is very interesting. On the one hand, underneath, there is this democratic culture. Again, I don’t want to exaggerate—it’s not perfect. But whose democratic system is perfect these days? Everything exists on a scale. What has happened in Turkey, however, is that Erdogan has essentially transformed the country into a, quote-unquote, “competitive authoritarian” system. Elections still take place, outcomes are largely determined, but there remains some element of competition. Certain offices may be won by the opposition, and the opposition can still win seats in Parliament, and so on.
But now he’s actually taking the competitive part out of competitive authoritarianism and eliminating it altogether. He is turning Turkey into a complete authoritarian system because he controls the judiciary, and judges and prosecutors essentially do whatever he wants them to do. We have seen people sent to jail for no reason whatsoever—simply because he doesn’t like them. Authorities have claimed that the main opposition party engaged in questionable practices in its primaries or conventions, and suddenly the justice system decides that leaders who were elected a few years ago should no longer hold their positions, and someone else should replace them. In other words, Erdogan is now deciding who will lead the main opposition party.
This is partly because he is clearly afraid of the current leadership, and especially of the mayor of Istanbul, who is in jail. Turkey has now become a full-blown authoritarian system, and I don’t think this is going to end well. By that, I mean authoritarian leaders always make mistakes, because there is never anyone around them to say, “Mr. President, Mr. Prime Minister, you shouldn’t do this; there may be consequences.” People always agree with them. So of course, mistakes are inevitable.
And I think Erdogan is already making mistakes. He has galvanized the opposition in a way that, if truly free elections were held today, he would be seriously doubted—he would not win. People can see that what he is doing is deeply unjust.
So there’s a kind of dialectic here: the system is becoming more authoritarian, but society may be resisting much more than we realize. It’s hard to see this resistance all the time because of restrictions—even on reporting. People are afraid to speak out. But at some point, this is going to break.
Imamoglu’s Jail Proves Erdogan’s Fear
Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu addresses supporters during a protest under the banner “The Nation Stands by Their Will” outside the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality on December 15, 2022. Photo: Tolga Ildun
The mass protests following Imamoglu’s arrest have been driven largely by younger generations who have never known a Turkey without Erdogan. How significant is this demographic factor in shaping the country’s political future, and do you see parallels with youth-led anti-authoritarian movements elsewhere?
Professor Henri Barkey: As I alluded to earlier, if you are 30 years old, Erdogan became your Prime Minister when you were 7 or 8 years old. I’m picking age 30 as an example, but imagine: all your conscious years you’ve seen one leader. And the other thing, of course, is that in terms of the communication systems—television, radio, newspapers—they are completely dominated by Erdogan in Turkey. So, you wake up to Erdogan, you go to bed with Erdogan.
And I’m not saying there isn’t a youth that actually supports Erdogan—there is. But there is certainly a youth that says, “Look, we would like to see somebody else.” In 2023, during the national elections, the main opposition party presented as a presidential candidate Mr. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who was unimaginative, did not appeal to the youth, and gave them no reason to galvanize. Now, for the first time in a long time, you have a leader on the opposition side. People criticize him, and that’s fine—he’s not perfect—but he has managed to capture the youth’s imagination. You see a great deal of mobilization, and that’s why they put him in jail.
Erdogan has many different court cases against him to keep him in jail. And in which country do you see a political leader arrested like this? He didn’t commit murder, he hasn’t done anything dangerous. But he has been in jail since March 19th. It’s been almost six months now, and he’ll be in jail for a very long time, because they don’t let you out—as if you were an axe murderer about to kill people. Journalists and others stay in jail for one or two years, and then suddenly maybe they decide to let you go, find you innocent, but you’ve already spent two years in jail.
We’ve seen this, of course, in the cases of the Kurdish political leader Selahattin Demirtas or the civil society leader Osman Kavala—they’ve been in jail for no reason whatsoever. And in the case of the mayor of Istanbul, they even annulled his university degree 30 years after he got it. Imagine if somebody decided to find some technicality and say, “Oh, my university degree is invalid, and therefore everything else I’ve done since then is invalid.” You can’t do that. But they come up with excuses to prevent an opponent from running against Erdogan.
The fact that Erdogan goes to such lengths to stop Imamoglu from running tells you how afraid he is of him. To me, that’s the best proof, the clearest demonstration, that he’s terrified.
Imamoglu’s Jail Time Only Raised His Standing
A photo from the mass CHP rally in Istanbul on March 29, 2025, protesting the unlawful detention of Ekrem Imamoglu, organized by party leader Ozgur Ozel. The event brought AKP and opposition supporters face to face. Photo: Elif Aytar.
Imamoglu’s repeated electoral victories and rising popularity have made him Erdogan’s most formidable rival. By imprisoning him and pursuing politically motivated trials, has Erdogan inadvertently elevated Imamoglu into a symbol of democratic resistance, similar to Erdogan’s own trajectory after his imprisonment in the late 1990s?
Professor Henri Barkey: He is smart enough to have realized that he owes his popularity, at least in part, to the fact that, as mayor of Istanbul, he was kicked out of his job and spent a short time in prison. That actually enhanced his standing. Moreover, if you remember, not in 2024 but in the previous municipal elections, Imamoglu won with a small majority. Then the Erdogan government came up with an excuse, claiming irregularities in the elections, and ordered that they be held again. People saw through it. What happened? Imamoglu won by a much larger margin against the same candidate. Why? Because people were angered by Ankara’s political interference in their choices. Even those who did not vote for Imamoglu the first time decided to vote for him the second, just to punish Erdogan.
Anyone should have learned that lesson. He hasn’t. The alternative, of course, is that he knows the lesson, and this time he intends to prevent Imamoglu from running. He will find him guilty and keep him in jail so that he can go into the next elections unopposed. He is also trying to destroy the opposition party, aiming for it to nominate, or to be led by, the candidate who ran against him in 2023, because he knows he can outmaneuver him and thinks this is the way to secure another term.
So, I think that’s his intention. I believe he’s made up his mind. He knows he can’t beat Imamoglu, but he can beat the new CHP leadership. And unfortunately, we will see a lot more people going to jail.
Erdogan Wants to Take the Competitive Part Out of Politics
Opposition party deputies, members and the members of civil society organisations had to guard the ballots for days to prevent stealing by the people organized by Erdogan regime in Turkey. The photo was shared by opposition deputy Mahmut Tanal’s Twitter account @MTanal during the Turkish local elections on March 31, 2019.
We’ve seen Erdogan’s government dismiss elected CHP mayors, replace them with trustees, and initiate corruption investigations against opposition-led municipalities. To what extent does this strategy reflect a deliberate effort to transform Turkey into a de facto one-party state, and could it ultimately backfire by strengthening opposition solidarity?
Professor Henri Barkey: I think my previous answers essentially say yes, of course. But you’ve noticed he’s now doing something else. He’s putting pressure on individual mayors of localities and forcing them to change parties and join his party. I saw today—though I forget where—that a deputy mayor was resigning from the main opposition party and joining Erdogan’s party. You can imagine the kind of pressure they must be exerting enourmous force her to do that, because it doesn’t make sense, when CHP is running high, to switch parties. But we’ve seen a number of cases like that.
So he’s not going to completely eliminate the main opposition party; he’s going to completely weaken it. He will make it what it was, let’s say, five years ago, before the opposition’s rejuvenation—when it won a few municipalities and a number of seats in Parliament, but had no influence and couldn’t do anything.
What’s very interesting is that all these corruption investigations have been initiated against opposition parties, opposition mayors, and sub-mayors. Not a single AKP mayor—or municipality—has been similarly treated. Can you really tell me there’s no corruption on the AKP side? No, but they’re all part of the system. That’s what I’m saying.
What Erdogan wants is to take the competitive part out of Turkey’s politics, because in his mind it should no longer be competitive. So it’s going to be only authoritarian. He’s turning Turkey into an authoritarian state.
Erdogan Cannot Control the Exiled Opposition Abroad
With the judiciary, media, and much of the bureaucracy subordinated to the presidency, are there any institutional safeguards left to counterbalance Erdogan’s authority? To what extent has the post-2016 purge of alleged Gulen-affiliated judges, prosecutors, academics, media, and civil servants accelerated Turkey’s democratic backsliding and hollowed out state capacity?
Professor Henri Barkey: Today the judiciary is completely under Erdogan’s control. If a judge rules in a way that Erdogan does not appreciate, he gets kicked out and sent somewhere else. The same applies to prosecutors. And there must be an internal state security apparatus that keeps tabs on all of these people, so that whenever pressure is needed, it can be applied.
So what’s left? What is the source of opposition today? I think, to a large extent, it’s the online environment—whether internet newspapers, journalists, or individuals with blogs and podcasts. Whenever Erdogan feels pressured, he tries to throttle the internet, slow it down, or impose bans on opposition networks by preventing them from broadcasting online. And they don’t have any other outlet, since they are not allowed to appear on mainstream television.
But that’s very hard to sustain all the time. It looks bad, and it can actually increase opposition if overused. When you slow down the internet, you slow it down for everyone—including people who simply want to buy things online. So it’s not clear to me that this is a viable long-term strategy. It’s more temporary and occasional. He did it this week with X, or Twitter.
So the online space remains, essentially, the main source of opposition. And you also have in Turkey a large number of journalists, academics, and public figures who are actively opposing him. This is what I meant earlier: there is still an element of democratic culture.
Now, you mentioned the Gulen movement. I know people who were professors at Gulen-owned universities. They were perfectly good academics, with international reputations, publishing internationally. They were not necessarily Gulenists. If you get a job at a university, you get it through established structures and processes. Yet all these people lost their jobs and became unemployable. That was a major blow to Turkish civil society and to the country’s intellectual world.
The Gulen movement was defeated, yes. But parts of it should not have been touched—for example, the universities. And by the way, I don’t know exactly what happened during the coup. To me, the coup remains an enigma. Maybe Gulenists were involved, but I think there were other factors as well. I suspect Erdogan knew ahead of time that a coup was coming, and when it happened, he took advantage of it. In the process, many people were smeared without due process.
This is something Turkish society will one day have to come to terms with. Gulenists who were guilty, yes—but not everyone was necessarily a Gulenist. And many suffered a great deal.
Another source of opposition, by the way, may be Turks who have emigrated to Europe. Yes, there is a large pro-Erdogan community abroad that tries to organize support. But there are also many dissenters now living in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. They are a major source of opposition—and unlike in Turkey, Erdogan cannot control them, because he cannot throw them into jail.
You Can’t Have Democracy in Diyarbakir and Fascism in Istanbul
A Turkish man in Hyde Park, London, shows support for protesters in Istanbul following the eruption of nationwide demonstrations—Turkey’s largest anti-government unrest —challenging then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s authority in June 2013. Photo credit: Ufuk Uyanik.
The PKK’s recent renunciation of armed struggle and ongoing talks involving Abdullah Ocalan and the DEM party suggest potential openings for renewed negotiations. How do you interpret Erdogan’s ambivalence toward these developments? Could a genuine Kurdish peace process pave the way for democratization, or is it more likely to be instrumentalized for political survival?
Professor Henri Barkey: To me, this is a very interesting situation because, with your question about democratization, how can you have… as a Kurdish leader once said, very correctly: you can’t have democracy in Diyarbakir and fascism in Istanbul. That is to say, what does it mean to democratize? Turkey needs to democratize. Turkey needs to deal with the Kurdish question. Turkey has to recognize that there are people who are not Turks, who have a different language, who would like to live as Turkish citizens but would also like to be able to express themselves in their own language or in any other fashion, and not have to go to jail for that.
The fact that the PKK has decided to renounce armed struggle is a good thing. They should have done it a long time ago, because the armed struggle wasn’t going anywhere. They had been completely defeated. They were just up in the northeast of Iraq, in the Qandil Mountains, stuck there with 158 Turkish bases in northern Iraq that completely dominate the area. One or two attacks a year is not what’s going to make the PKK the PKK. So the PKK was defeated, and they finally came to this realization. It’s good that they abandoned it. But I don’t think there is going to be a peace process. I don’t think this is going to go anywhere.
Because, first of all, Erdogan himself doesn’t believe in democracy. I mean, what did the opposition, the DEM party, say they want? They didn’t ask for anything specific. They would like, of course, prisoners to be released. They want to deal with what to do with the fighters who are abroad, in Iraq, who would like to be able to integrate into society. But basically, what the leadership has said so far is that they want democracy. They want to be able to participate. But this is not something Erdogan wants. Everything Erdogan is doing is, as I said, taking the “competitive” out of competitive authoritarianism and establishing a completely authoritarian state. So this is not going to work.
Now, it turns out that on the Kurdish side, the main leader who’s in jail—Ocalan—doesn’t happen to be a democrat either. So it’s a big question mark. He’s 80 years old now. He must be thinking about his legacy, and that’s why he’s trying to… but he also can’t make a deal that is going to be rejected by the democrats in Turkey. So he’s also stuck. I’m sure Erdogan’s idea was probably to convince the DEM party to vote for either a constitutional change, or more likely for early elections, that Erdogan would make sure he would win. That’s probably still his plan.
Bahceli’s Gamble on Kurdish Talks Faces Dead End
The one interesting question mark here is that, to a large extent, this whole process started with an initiative from Erdogan’s main right-wing coalition partner, the MHP, led by Devlet Bahceli, who used to be the most anti-Kurdish figure in Turkey. He said Ocalan should not be released, but should come to the Turkish Parliament and address Parliament. That was really an amazing statement by him, and he pushed the process.
I wonder if Mr. Bahçeli, who’s at the end of his life and has run the party without much to show for his years in power or as a party leader—what has he done, what has he accomplished?—maybe that was his way of creating an inheritance, if you will, for his followers: that he would bring domestic peace to Turkey. Well, if that’s his incentive, that’s fine. It doesn’t matter how you get there, as long as you do it.
So the big problem Erdogan has is: to what extent is Mr. Bahceli committed to continuing the process? And Mr. Bahceli himself must realize that, the way things are going now, the DEM party is not going to be able to make a deal with Erdogan. There will be talks—we’re going to see a commission has been created, supposedly there will be conversations—but this is not going anywhere. And in the meantime, Erdogan is destroying CHP, and this puts the DEM party in a terrible situation.
Trump Gave Erdogan Carte Blanche
Nested dolls depicting authoritarian and populist leaders Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan displayed among souvenirs in Moscow on July 7, 2018. Photo: Shutterstock.
And lastly, Professor Barkey, given Washington’s strategic interests—from NATO cohesion to cooperation with Syrian Kurdish forces—how should the US and EU respond to Erdogan’s escalating repression of the opposition? Would stronger political and economic pressure risk reinforcing his anti-Western populist narrative, or is greater confrontation inevitable?
Professor Henri Barkey: Let’s be honest here. What Erdogan has done since March would not have happened if you had a different president of the United States. Here you have Trump, who is upset about Bolsonaro getting tried, and he imposes sanctions even on the judge who is judging him. And then he has not said a word about what’s going on in Turkey. Trump doesn’t believe in democracy. Trump is only interested in himself and his own interests. So, he’s decided that he likes Erdogan, and he can do business with Erdogan, and therefore, Erdogan can do whatever he wants. And that’s what Erdogan is doing.
Let’s say Biden or Kamala Harris had been at the White House today. Erdogan would not have done any of these things, because the US government would have really pushed very hard. Whether it was investments or any other type of help that the Turks would need, they would not get.
The Turkish economy is in terrible shape. Inflation is much higher than the official figures indicate, and it’s still at 30% for a modern economy. The Turkish economy may be in better shape structurally, but I think it is still fairly dynamic. You go to Europe, you see Turkish exports everywhere—and I’m not just talking about tomatoes and agricultural products. I’m talking about sophisticated products, industrial products, electronic products. The Turkish economy has a number of advantages that probably would do a lot better with improved economic management from Ankara. But it has still managed to perform not poorly, given the circumstances.
Biden, or a Democratic president, or even a Republican president who cares about this—I mean, George Bush would have been up in arms about it. Trump has given Erdogan essentially carte blanche. And this is why we have not seen any major Turkish incursions into northern Syria.
Now, it’s not that Trump is attached to the Syrian Kurds. He couldn’t care less about them. But Trump would like to take American troops out of Syria, while also realizing that ISIS is on the mend, ISIS is getting stronger, and he doesn’t want a major ISIS insurrection again like what happened back in 2014. So he’s probably still thinking about it and has decided to reduce the number of troops, but not pull them out. As a result, Erdogan hasn’t gone into Syria.
But the truth is, the Syrian Kurds do not threaten Turkey. It’s just something in some Turks’ minds, and it’s a way of galvanizing the population behind you. The Kurdish problem in Turkey is a long-standing one, and there are many people who still don’t trust the Kurds. And Syrian Kurds are Syrians—people forget that. The Turks complain that Syrian Kurds control a large chunk of territory. Yes, they do. They happen to be Syrian Kurds, by the way. Turkey itself controls an enormous chunk of Syrian territory in the northwest—as big as Lebanon. But that’s okay, Turkey can do that. So you have these anomalies.
Erdogan is careful, because with Trump you don’t know from one day to the next how he might turn on you. So Trump is letting him do everything he wants to do in Turkey, but doesn’t want him to go into Syria and mess things up there. Fine—Erdogan can live with that. So Erdogan is quite happy.
Erdogan Thinks He Can Withstand European Pressure
The Europeans are very unhappy with what’s happening in Turkey, because they realize what Erdogan’s aims are. And you’ve had a huge exodus of Turks who’ve gone to Europe, escaping the Erdogan regime. The immigration problem from the rest of the world through Turkey to Europe has always been Erdogan’s carte majeure. But whatever Europeans do or threaten, Erdogan is going to ignore, because he essentially thinks he has maybe 6 to 12 months in which he has to focus on defanging or demolishing the opposition party. Once he is done with that, he won’t do anything else. So he thinks he can withstand European pressure for this long.
The interesting thing about Trump is that there’s a way in which people are also afraid of him because of his unpredictability and his very tough talk. It doesn’t always mean anything—the Chinese have seen it, and the Russians know exactly how to react—but they’re big powers. Everybody else is afraid. I’ll give you an example. It’s a minor one, but the day before yesterday, the Iraqi Shia militia released an American researcher, Elizabeth Tsurkov, whom they had been holding for two years. They kidnapped her. And I think the only reason they released her—and this is why Trump’s craziness pays off—is that he probably threatened the Iraqi government and said, “You don’t get this person out…” And the Iraqi government said, well, they are the Shia militias, we don’t have control over them. And he probably said, “I know you have control over them, I know you can do it, do it now.” Biden and the Kamala Harris government have not tried very hard to get her out.
So Trump’s unpredictability is why Erdogan has to be careful. As long as Trump gives him, as I said, carte blanche at home, Erdogan is very happy, and he can get away with it. What’s more important to him? Winning the election, staying in power for another term. That’s all he cares about.
So the answer to your question is that not much is going to happen. The Europeans are not going to be very successful. Now, if Turkey were to go through a major economic crisis again, with major demonstrations and instability, that could be different. But given how the whole region is at the moment, I don’t think that’s in the cards right now. The Europeans are going to continue doing some business, they’ll put some constraints on Turkish economic exchanges, but there’s only so much they can do. They can criticize the Turks, but the Turks don’t care. Or I should say, the Turkish government doesn’t care. Erdogan has essentially won.
Ozturk, Ibrahim. (2025). “Capitalist Disruptions and the Democratic Retreat: A US–EU–China Comparison.” Journal of Populism Studies (JPS). September 11, 2025. https://doi.org/10.55271/JPS000116
Abstract
The accelerating erosion of regulatory safeguards, widening wealth inequality, entrenched elite influence, and the proliferation of surveillance regimes mark a new phase in the global crisis of corporate capitalism—one that is narrowing the normative and institutional gap between liberal democracies and authoritarian states. Building on Karl Polanyi’s notion of thedouble movementand Fernand Braudel’s distinction between market exchange and capitalist domination, this article develops a comparative political economy framework to examine how structural disruptions in capitalism are reshaping global governance and fueling the rise of populist authoritarianism. The analysis contrasts the institutional trajectories of the United States, the European Union, and China, highlighting both convergent and divergent patterns in their responses to this systemic crisis. By integrating insights from political economy, comparative governance, and authoritarian studies, the paper advances a theoretical synthesis that explains the mechanisms of “authoritarian convergence” without reducing them to a deterministic path. It concludes that resisting this drift requires re-embedding markets within democratic institutions and forging a renewed, inclusive global social contract capable of constraining both corporate and state power.
Keywords: Corporate Capitalism, Authoritarian Convergence, Populism, Democratic Backsliding, Karl Polanyi, Double Movement, Fernand Braudel, Global Governance, Inequality, Regulatory Failure, Comparative Political Economy
By Ibrahim Ozturk*
1. Introduction: Capitalism, Crisis, and the Convergence of Systems
With the collapse of central planning and the global decline of communist ideology in the early 1990s—preceded by the wave of neoliberal deregulation in the early 1980s associated with the so-called Washington Consensus—liberal democracies came to be viewed not only as models of modern governance, marked by openness, transparency, and institutional pluralism, but also as systems capable of guiding countries such as China and, later, Russia toward a liberal worldview grounded in free-market economics and democratic governance.
After an initial period of reform—primarily in the economic sphere—beginning in China in the early 1980s and later in Russia in the early 1990s, developments appeared to support the anticipated trajectory of convergence, broadly continuing until the mid-2000s. However, the post-2008 Great Stagnation marked a decisive turning point, dispelling the “liberal fallacies” rooted in overoptimism and ideological faith in inevitable convergence. Not only did several countries once expected to converge begin diverging from liberal democratic norms, but many established democracies with market economies also started adopting features traditionally associated with authoritarian governance. Moreover, regimes long regarded as illiberal—such as China and Russia—demonstrated remarkable adaptability by integrating market mechanisms, digital innovation, and populist rhetoric into their authoritarian rule. Taken together, these developments underscore that liberal and authoritarian regimes are not merely coexisting but, in significant ways, are converging.
That is, as liberal regimes increasingly adopt features characteristic of illiberal governance, illiberal regimes have, in turn, successfully integrated into the market and globalization processes driven by corporate capitalism, while maintaining their authoritarian political systems. This two-way process—referred to in this article as reverse convergence—is rooted in a common underlying factor: the systemic crisis of corporate capitalism.
Economic activity, which ought to be embedded within society and regarded as an integral part of social life (Polanyi, 1944; Braudel, 1982; Block, 2003; Sandel, 2012), has instead come to be perceived as a narrow, detached sphere shaped by the immunization of the corporate capitalism (Greider, 1992 & 2003) through “financial fundamentalism” that Vickrey (1998) warned against. Increasingly, it is viewed as a domain dominated by elites, operating contrary to the broader public interest—or at least perceived as such by large segments of society.
Especially in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, this perception has fueled a countermovement marked by diverse forms of critique. Despite their ideological differences, these critiques converge on a common theme: the call to restore the will of the “virtuous people” against unaccountable elites (Mudde, 2004; Laclau, 2005; Müller, 2016; Norris & Inglehart, 2019)—a formulation closely aligned with the core definition of populism. In this sense, the global reaction against corporate capitalism has been effectively appropriated and redirected by authoritarian populist forces (Fraser, 2017; Zuboff, 2019; Piketty, 2020; Brown, 2019).
Recent political and economic developments in the United States (US), the European Union (EU), and China—where these transformations are particularly pronounced—reflect dynamics long anticipated by scholars, most notably Karl Polanyi (1944) and Fernand Braudel (1984). Polanyi, through his concept of the “double movement,” explored how societies historically respond to the destabilizing effects of unregulated markets by demanding protective social and political countermeasures. Braudel, in turn, distinguished between market economies and hierarchical capitalism, highlighting how modern economic elites operate within spheres largely insulated from democratic accountability.
More recently, these foundational frameworks have been extended by scholars analyzing the rise of digital capitalism. Zuboff’s (2019) theory of surveillance capitalism, Wark’s (2019) notion of the vectoralist class, and Varoufakis’s (2023) concept of techno-feudalism each offer critical insights into how corporate power, digital infrastructures, and state capture are reshaping the structures of political authority. Building on the approaches of Polanyi and Braudel, this article investigates how structural transformations in global capitalism—particularly under the pressures of digitalization, the expansion of cyberspace, rising wealth and income inequality, and the ensuing populist backlash—have increasingly blurred the boundaries between regime types.
This study uses comparative case analysis to examine the US, EU,andChina as key regions where the disruptions caused by corporate capitalism align with the rise of authoritarian populist strategies. Each case offers a unique way of managing, challenging, or exploiting the structural pressures of global capitalism. Through this comparative approach, the paper aims to explain why and how different political systems are increasingly adopting illiberal norms, such as centralized authority, elite entrenchment, and norm erosion, even as they officially support divergent ideologies.
The structure of the paper is outlined as follows. After this introduction, the next section details the theoretical framework behind the concept of reverse convergence. Section 2 examines the contributions of Polanyi, Braudel, and other key scholars, situating their ideas within the context of current global trends. Section 3 presents a comparative empirical analysis of governance patterns in the US, the EU, and China, utilizing policy documents, governance indicators, and regulatory frameworks. The final section presents the normative implications of these findings in a nutshell. The article ends with key policy implications and recommendations.
In an exclusive interview with the ECPS, Aryeh Neier — founding Executive Director of Human Rights Watch and former President of the Open Society Foundations — delivers a powerful assessment of Gaza, free speech, and international accountability. Neier argues that criticism of Israeli policies must not be conflated with antisemitism, stressing that “even antisemitism constitutes protected speech.” He further asserts that “Israel is engaged in genocide,” citing systematic obstruction of humanitarian aid and disproportionate force in Gaza. While the ICC remains “the only viable path” for justice, he warns that political barriers persist. From US policy dynamics to global human rights challenges, Neier offers rare insights into one of today’s most divisive debates.
Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), iconic human rights defender Aryeh Neier — former Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), founding Executive Director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), and former President of the Open Society Foundations — reflects on Israel’s war in Gaza, free speech controversies, and the challenges of international accountability. With a career spanning more than six decades and seven honorary degrees, Neier brings unmatched authority to one of today’s most polarizing debates.
At the heart of the conversation lies his assertion that criticism of Israeli policies must not be conflated with antisemitism. “Differentiating antisemitism from anti-Israel speech is something that the Trump administration has failed to do,” Neier argues, highlighting how US political discourse has blurred the lines between prejudice and legitimate dissent. He warns against undermining free expression on American campuses: “Even antisemitism constitutes protected speech,” he insists, while adding that universities must balance academic freedoms with preventing disruption to institutional activities.
Turning to Gaza, Neier presents a grave legal assessment: “Israel is engaged in genocide,” he says, grounding his conclusion in the 1948 Genocide Convention. He points to two central factors: Israel’s sustained obstruction of humanitarian aid and the use of disproportionate force. “Starvation, as a method of warfare, is forbidden under the First Protocol of the Geneva Conventions,” he stresses, adding that the denial of food, water, and medical supplies, combined with the use of 900-kilogram bombs in densely populated areas, “seems to me to amount to the crime of genocide.”
Aryeh Neier also emphasizes the limitations of international mechanisms. While the International Criminal Court (ICC) remains the most viable forum for prosecutions, enforcement will require political shifts. Drawing parallels to the former Yugoslavia, he notes, “Slobodan Milosevic never imagined he would face trial, yet years later he was sent to The Hague.”
On US policy, Neier identifies Evangelical Christian groups, not AIPAC, as a dominant influence shaping Washington’s stance toward Israel, complicating responses to international legal rulings. He also warns of growing generational divides within US politics, with younger voters increasingly critical of Israeli policies — a factor he believes may eventually reshape policy debates.
This interview offers a profound exploration of the intersection between human rights, international law, free speech, and accountability. From Gaza to US campuses, Neier challenges political distortions and underscores the urgency of protecting both humanitarian principles and civil liberties in an age of polarization.
Here is the transcript of our interview with human rights champion Aryeh Neier, lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Why Gaza Meets the Genocide Threshold
Destruction in Shejayia, Gaza City, Gaza Strip. Photo: Dreamstime.
Mr. Aryeh Neier, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: As one of the most influential human rights defenders in modern history, you have stated that you are persuaded Israel is “engaged in genocide” in Gaza. How do you define genocide in this context under international law, and how do Netanyahu’s increasingly populist and authoritarian coalition policies — particularly regarding humanitarian aid, military conduct, and civilian protections — factor into your conclusion that the legal threshold has been crossed?
Aryeh Neier: As far as the legal definition of genocide is concerned, it is the 1948 Genocide Convention that defines the crime under international law. The crime consists of destroying a national, racial, ethnic, or religious group, in whole or in part. This destruction can occur through direct killing or by creating conditions of life intended to bring about the death of such a group, in whole or in part. The attempt to commit genocide is also a crime under international law, just as the actual commission of genocide is. Regarding those who organize the effort, I’m less focused on the coalitions they may form. To me, the guilty parties are those who possess both the authority and the intent — and intent is the crucial factor under international law in defining the crime of genocide.
You have linked your conclusion primarily to Israel’s sustained obstruction of humanitarian aid. From a legal perspective, do you interpret starvation as a method of warfare here as evidence of specific genocidal intent to destroy a population, in whole or in part? To what extent does Netanyahu’s populist-nationalist rhetoric and reliance on far-right coalition partners signal deliberate policy intent rather than reckless disregard?
Aryeh Neier: Again, I’m not concerned with the coalition that may be supporting Netanyahu. The issue is whether they exercise the authority that makes them guilty participants in the crime of genocide. Starvation, as a method of warfare, is forbidden under the First Protocol of the Geneva Conventions. It is absolutely prohibited, and those who act with intent to cause starvation should be considered to have participated in the commission of genocide.
Although I focus heavily on the denial of humanitarian assistance — including food, water, and medical supplies — to the population of Gaza, I would also include, as part of the crime of genocide, the use of disproportionate force by the Israeli government. For example, the Israeli government used 900-kilogram bombs in its attacks on Gaza, particularly in the early months. Bombs of that size can kill people within 200 meters and are utterly inappropriate for use in a densely populated area like Gaza.
While such weapons might have legitimate uses in warfare — for example, destroying a naval base or a military factory producing large amounts of armor — their use in crowded urban areas inevitably means that a very large number of civilians will be killed, and that is what happened in Gaza. Therefore, the combination of the way these attacks were carried out and the denial of humanitarian assistance, including food, water, and medical supplies, seems to me to amount to the crime of genocide.
From Blockades to Bombing Patterns
Based on your experience at Human Rights Watch and the Open Society Foundations, which forms of evidence are most critical for establishing war crimes liability in Gaza — convoy interdictions, caloric deprivation, bombing patterns, or policy directives?
Aryeh Neier: All of the above are factors that can be considered as evidence. If there were to be a criminal trial in the International Criminal Court (ICC), there would need to be clear evidence showing what the defendants actually did. There would have to be witnesses who could testify to their actions, as well as an examination of any available documents, along with testimony from observers who were present. The Israeli government has done as much as it could to limit the possibility of such testimony by preventing international journalists and human rights groups from entering Gaza. Therefore, the witnesses would most likely have to be people from Gaza who experienced these crimes, along with some Israelis who are knowledgeable about the practices and could testify before the ICC.
Given the populist pressures within Netanyahu’s coalition, which levels of command responsibility appear most salient — cabinet-level policy decisions, directives from the defense establishment, or field-level operational orders? How should investigators document the causal link between strategic blockade policies, child malnutrition, and elevated civilian mortality?
Aryeh Neier: I don’t think one can specify in advance how a prosecution would proceed. It would be up to the prosecutors to determine what evidence they are able to obtain. If they can secure military directives, they would use those. But if they are not able to access such directives, testimony from individuals who were present when decisions were made would become important. If that is also unavailable, they would need to examine patterns of action by those who committed the crimes. They would look at actions taken, for example, to destroy farms and greenhouses in Gaza, which provided some of the food. They would examine those who obstructed trucks attempting to deliver assistance and review the orders that limited the number of trucks entering Gaza. All of these would be factors. It’s impossible to specify in advance what evidence the prosecutors would rely upon.
ICC Remains the Only Path for Gaza War Crimes Accountability
The flag in front of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands on March 27, 2016. Photo: Dreamstime.
You once critiqued the UN Human Rights Council’s bloc politics and selective scrutiny. How should advocates leverage UN mechanisms on Gaza while mitigating the reputational drag of perceived selectivity and ensuring even-handed standards?
Aryeh Neier: The UN Human Rights Council is a political body. The various governments that serve on the Council at any given moment have their own political interests. They often form blocs, and, to some extent, those blocs protect the countries that are members of them. So, if one is dealing, for example, with crimes committed in Sudan, there may be African countries that have alliances with Sudan or obtain oil from it, and those countries may be protective of the Sudanese government. Similarly, when addressing Russia’s crimes in Ukraine, there may be countries from the former Soviet Union that still maintain alliances with Russia and would shield it from scrutiny. It is, therefore, impossible to rely on the UN Human Rights Council as a fully neutral body capable of making impartial decisions on crucial human rights matters. One tries, as much as possible, to mitigate that factor, but it cannot be entirely eliminated.
Having been a key advocate for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR), how do you compare the feasibility of creating a similar ad hoc tribunal for Gaza versus relying on the International Criminal Court (ICC)? What lessons from Bosnia and Rwanda are relevant here, and which pitfalls should be avoided?
Aryeh Neier: The reason it was possible to create the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda is that the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council all accepted the establishment of those bodies. None of them exercised their veto power to block their creation. Unfortunately, if there were an attempt to create an ad hoc tribunal along the lines of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia or the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the United States would almost certainly exercise its veto to prevent the formation of such a body. Therefore, I don’t think we can expect that there will ever be a special tribunal for Gaza. I believe the International Criminal Court, which is not subject to such veto power, remains the only possibility for criminal prosecution for the crimes committed in Gaza.
European Courts May Pursue Cases Against Israeli Officials
If Israel were to initiate domestic investigations into alleged violations, how should the ICC evaluate their credibility under complementarity rules? In the absence of genuine proceedings, should European states more aggressively invoke universal jurisdiction to pursue accountability?
Aryeh Neier: One could evaluate whether Israel is acting in good faith in prosecutions in the same way one evaluates any other situation in which there could be prosecutions. That is, is there a genuine investigative process, and does the investigative process actually lead to indictments? If Israel were to claim that it is engaged in an investigation and its performance does not inspire credibility, then I think the International Criminal Court should proceed on the basis that Israel is not doing what it should, and therefore only the International Criminal Court is capable of bringing such a prosecution.
I think it’s entirely possible that some European countries will, at some point, exercise universal jurisdiction with respect to crimes committed in Gaza. It is likely that Israelis will travel to various European countries. The countries that have condemned the crimes taking place in Gaza may become aware that someone who was a military figure is traveling within their borders, and in those circumstances, one could imagine that universal jurisdiction would take place.
There have been, for example, a number of prosecutions in European countries of Syrian officials who traveled in different European countries — in Switzerland, for example — and Switzerland used universal jurisdiction to bring such persons to trial. I don’t imagine this would involve the highest-level Israeli officials, the people who have the most significant responsibility for the crimes committed in Gaza. But I think it could well happen that there will be such cases, and we won’t know until it actually happens whether there will be such trials.
There are a couple of organizations. There’s an organization based in Switzerland, for example, called Trial, which specifically looks for such cases and tries to ensure prosecutions take place. I don’t know whether they’re looking at any cases right now; they might be, they might not be. I think most of the Israeli officials who have a high level of responsibility for the crimes in Gaza are avoiding travel to European countries.
Future Political Shifts Could Open Door to Prosecutions
Israelis protest at Tel Aviv against Netanyahu’s anti-democratic coup on April 1, 2023. Photo: Avivi Aharon.
You have noted that both the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the ICC lack direct enforcement powers and rely on state cooperation. What realistic regional or transnational coalitions, in your view, could translate court rulings into tangible protection or material relief for civilians in Gaza?
Aryeh Neier: I’m not sure that an international coalition could achieve that. I think the critical step is to try to bring a case before the International Criminal Court. The ICC has jurisdiction over individuals, not countries. And if, at some stage, it was possible to bring top officials responsible for the crimes in Gaza before the ICC, that would be the way to secure some form of accountability.
When the wars in the former Yugoslavia took place, the officials responsible for major crimes never imagined they would face the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Yet, eventually, Slobodan Milosevic was sent to the court by other officials in Serbia, and Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were ultimately captured and brought before the tribunal.
It took many years. It may also take many years in the case of Gaza. But it cannot be ruled out. It is possible that, over time, there could be political change in Israel and that future leaders might seek to ensure some form of accountability. One cannot predict how this will develop.
According to numerous expert assessments, the US administration may be violating both domestic and international law by supplying arms to Israel despite documented restrictions on humanitarian aid to Gaza. Based on your experience with US accountability mechanisms, do you believe American officials could face future legal challenges under the Arms Export Control Act or under aiding-and-abetting doctrines in international law?
Aryeh Neier: I think I would give the same answer to the question of whether Israeli officials might, at some stage, face accountability and eventually be held responsible. One cannot predict how matters will develop politically in the United States. It is unlikely that the Trump administration would pursue the prosecution of those who may be complicit in the genocide taking place in Gaza. However, one cannot know who the officials will be in the United States 10, 15, or 20 years from now, and it is possible that, at some stage in the future, there might be a willingness to prosecute American officials. I would not say it is likely, but it’s possible.
Evangelical Influence Shapes US Policy Toward Israel
A man clasps his hands in prayer during the opening ceremonies of President Donald Trump’s “Keep America Great” rally at the Wildwoods Convention Center in Wildwood, New Jersey, on January 28, 2020. Photo by Benjamin Clapp.
You have emphasized that Evangelical Christian groups, rather than AIPAC, exert disproportionate influence on US policy toward Israel. How does this ideological alignment affect Washington’s responses to ICJ and ICC proceedings?
Aryeh Neier: Certain evangelical groups in the United States have managed to incorporate Israel and its prospects into their theology. These groups are particularly strong in the southern states, creating a powerful political bloc that is immensely supportive of Israel. A prominent figure within that bloc is Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, whom the Trump administration has designated as its ambassador to Israel. Placing someone like that in such a key diplomatic position highlights both the strength of this bloc within the United States and the political difficulty of overcoming its influence.
You had warned that President Biden risks losing young voters over his handling of Gaza. To what extent do you see US domestic politics colliding with international humanitarian law — and could electoral considerations meaningfully shift US policy?
Aryeh Neier: There has been a generational division in the United States. Among other things, older members of the Jewish community have tended to be very supportive of Israel, whereas many younger Jews, particularly those attending universities, are often highly critical of the Israeli government’s policies. I believe this divide extends beyond the Jewish population to the broader American public. The generational gap is quite wide, but how it will ultimately play out is uncertain. It may become a significant factor in shaping US policy in the years to come, or it may not.
Refusing to Buy Israeli Weapons May Pressure Policy Change
In your work on sanctions and human rights, you have argued that targeted measures can drive behavioral change. In Gaza, which tools — such as asset freezes, travel bans, or conditionality on arms transfers — would be most effective in influencing policy without exacerbating civilian suffering? Looking at past cases such as Myanmar and South Africa, sanctions’ effectiveness often depends on timing and international coordination. What benchmarks should be used to assess whether external pressure is genuinely shaping Israel’s policy on humanitarian access?
Aryeh Neier: It’s very difficult to answer that question. I would not have imagined, before the sanctions were placed on South Africa, what would be most effective. But I think that, in the case of South Africa, for example, the international sports ban had a significant effect. South Africans, like the people of many countries, were very supportive of their athletes and eager to see them succeed in international competitions. When South African athletes were excluded from such events, it had a considerable impact. Economic sanctions also had a significant effect.
My guess is that, in the Israeli situation, the most significant kinds of sanctions would be those that impose limits on military support for Israel. Israel is itself a significant manufacturer of arms, and much of its international revenue comes from arms sales to various countries. So, I think that if sanctions were imposed, there should be two kinds: one, a sanction on the delivery of weapons to Israel, and the other, a sanction on the purchase of Israeli weapons.
I once spoke to an Israeli official about limiting the sale of certain weapons to other countries that were engaged at that time in very serious human rights abuses. He explained that, for Israel’s arms manufacturing to produce the weapons Israel believes it needs, the country must achieve economies of scale by manufacturing far more weapons than it actually requires for its own purposes. Therefore, it has to sell those weapons to other countries. Selling weapons internationally, he said, was crucial for Israel’s own military needs.
My guess is that this is probably still the case. Therefore, if sanctions involved refusing to purchase Israeli weapons, that might be as effective as refusing to sell certain weapons to Israel.
Anti-Israel Speech Shouldn’t Be Confused with Antisemitism
Pro-Palestinian protesters hold signs. Photo: Oliver Perez.
As someone who defended free speech in the Skokie case, how do you distinguish between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israeli state policies — especially in today’s polarized academic, civic, and political environments?
Aryeh Neier: Differentiating antisemitism from anti-Israel speech is something that the Trump administration has failed to do. It has attacked many universities in the United States, accusing them of allowing antisemitism to flourish on their campuses. Very often, however, the protests that have taken place on American campuses are directed against Israeli practices rather than being antisemitic in character. From a free speech standpoint, my view is that even antisemitism constitutes protected speech.
It isn’t the case, however, that many universities in the United States are public institutions where the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees apply. Many of the universities accused of allowing antisemitism on their campuses are private universities, like Harvard University and Columbia University, and they are not required to adhere to First Amendment protections. Nevertheless, in general, they do try to protect freedom of speech.
I believe they can and should protect freedom of speech, even for antisemites, but they should not allow such individuals to disrupt university activities, such as classes, graduations, or other events. So, one needs to look at each of those situations and see whether the university has acted appropriately. But the Trump administration, by confusing antisemitism and anti-Israel positions, has made the whole situation a mess.
Truth Commissions Won’t Deliver Justice in Gaza
And lastly, looking ahead, what model of transitional justice would best address violations committed by all parties — a hybrid court, ICC-led prosecutions, or a regional truth and reconciliation commission with prosecutorial powers? How can victim-centered justice remain central in the face of deep political deadlock?
Aryeh Neier: I think the only possibility of accountability is prosecutions before the International Criminal Court. I don’t imagine that there would be a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that could function effectively because it would have to involve both the Israelis and the Palestinians, and it’s very difficult to imagine that they would collaborate on a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Moreover, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission would not itself have prosecutorial powers. In the case of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there was legislation which provided that those who did not disclose their crimes and acknowledge their crimes still could be prosecuted. But the prosecution was separate from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission itself, and in practice, not that many persons who had committed crimes during the apartheid regime were actually prosecuted in South Africa, even when they refused to acknowledge and disclose the crimes that they committed.
So, I’m not at all inclined to think that a Truth and Reconciliation Commission could play a useful role in the situation of Gaza. I think, as difficult as it may be, one should try to see to it that the International Criminal Court is able to function with respect to the crimes committed in Gaza.
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reshapes Europe’s security landscape, the EU faces a “watershed moment” demanding unprecedented defense spending and strategic autonomy. The “ReArm Europe Plan” allocates €800 billion for defense modernization, while EU states’ military expenditure has already surged 30% since 2021. Yet, this security buildup comes at a profound human cost: since 2022, over 1.3 million soldiers have been killed or wounded, with tens of thousands more facing lifelong trauma. While Europe seeks to safeguard territorial integrity and independence, the article questions whether spiraling militarization undermines humanitarian priorities, deepens instability, and perpetuates cycles of suffering rather than ensuring lasting security.
Europe faces a serious threat to its territorial integrity, unprecedented since the Cold War. It is going through a “watershed moment in its security.” “Business as usual approach of underinvestment and fragmentation” is no longer viable given the Ukraine-Russia war and the American President Donald Trump’s frequent calls for the EU to take greater responsibility for its own defense.
Recent calls for increased defense spending by NATO members, predominantly including EU states, along with US Vice President J.D. Vance’s emphasis on “Europe’s threat within” at the last Munich Security Conference, signal the potential for tectonic shifts in the transatlantic relationship. It requires the EU to adopt a holistic and horizontal approach integrating defense and security dimensions of the continent. Nevertheless, questions remain regarding how far the EU can go, particularly within the milieu of historic transatlantic connections between the EU and the US, and the internal divergences concerning security within the EU member states. Since the wider debates have been taking place in this regard, the article will examine how a resurgence of traditional security concerns on the backdrop of Russia-Ukraine War, is going to affect the human cost of war.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has changed the European defense landscape since February 2022. European Commissions’ “White Paper for European Defense –Readiness 2030” proposed a vision to rearm Europe by enhancing the indigenous defense production and rapid deployment of military troops and assets across the EU. It clearly signifies the European Union’s maneuver to protect its citizens and consolidate its defense capabilities. “Readiness Plan,” also known as “ReArm Europe Plan” presented in March 2025 suggests leveraging over €800 billion in defense spending. As a matter of time, EU clearly understands the importance of strategic independence in the chaotic world.
Following the Russian invasion, EU leaders adopted the Versailles declaration pledging to enhance investment in defense sector. It aimed to boost the defense industry and gain strategic independence. Between 2021 and 2024, EU member states overall defense expenditure stood at €326 billion, marking an increase of 30%. The expenditure is expected to increase by more than €100 billion in real terms by 2027. It correlates with the defense investments too. In 2023, compared to the preceding year, defense investment increased by 17%, setting a record high of €72 billion. In 2024 alone, €102 billion was invested, in which beyond €90 billion was used for defense equipment procurement. Nevertheless, it raises questions regarding the utility of these enormous amounts in terms of enhancing the conditions of citizens, even those of soldiers engaged in deadly conflicts. Eventually, border defense and territorial integrity comes at the cost of losing lives, undermining the cost of human lives.
Throughout history, the recurring military conflicts and wars have brought devastating damage and countless destruction to both the lives and the physical environment. It is estimated that more than 37 million combatants have died in wars since 1800. If we take civilian deaths into consideration, the number of deceased will pile up. In the Second World War alone, which spread across much of the globe, 21 million soldiers died. Based on the data provided by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), 3.9 million people, including both civilians and combatants, have died in the armed conflicts between 1989 and 2024. Europe and America witnessed the fewest deaths, with around 370,000 and 230,000 deaths, respectively.
Parallels have been drawn comparing the casualties of the Second World War and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. Based on the issue brief by Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), over 950,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the war began between Russia and Ukraine. Most of these soldiers belong to Russia’s Far North, Far East, and prisons. On the Ukrainian side, a total of 400,000 have been killed or wounded, and between 60,000 and 100,000 combatants have lost their lives. The severe injuries may have taken the well-being of the remainder of their life. Defense spending with its strong emphasizes on defense production and modernization makes these lives and their relatives futile. It may hinder the post-war reconstruction, especially in addressing long-term psychological trauma. Along with that, there are apprehensions that this increased spending could waste resources and cause political instability without delivering real security for the citizens.
Overall, the resurgence of traditional security threats in Europe due to the Russia-Ukraine war is accompanied by sharply increased defense spending and military preparedness. This, however, comes with a high human cost in terms of lives lost and wounded, reminding that the price of safeguarding territorial integrity and security continues to be profound human suffering and loss. Human cost of war may hinder the post-war reconstructions. This needs to be taken into consideration in policy circles.
In sum, Europe’s renewed focus on defense and security — marked by unprecedented spending, strategic realignments, and calls for autonomy — reflects an unavoidable response to the Russia-Ukraine war and shifting transatlantic dynamics. Yet, this militarization entails profound trade-offs. While €800 billion in planned defense investments aims to safeguard territorial integrity, the staggering casualties — over 1.3 million killed or wounded since 2022 — highlight the immense human cost of security. Without balancing strategic preparedness with humanitarian priorities and post-war recovery, Europe risks undermining the very values it seeks to defend, perpetuating cycles of suffering and instability.
Professor Norman Finkelstein—NYC-born to Holocaust-survivor parents and, in 2020, ranked the world’s fifth most influential political scientist—tells ECPS that “Israel will mass Gazans at the border, bomb relentlessly, and force Egypt’s hand.” Professor Finkelstein forecasts pressure on Cairo amid “images broadcast worldwide,” frames today’s war as a qualitative break aimed at depopulation (“stay and starve or leave”) and argues that “an imposed famine…constitutes clear proof of genocide.” He argues that, while procedural workarounds to a US veto exist at the UN, they are politically improbable in practice; hence he looks to EU trade leverage instead—though that, too, is stalled by a ‘lack of political will.’ Downplaying doctrinal debates over Zionism, he casts Israel as a ‘Jewish supremacist state’ analogous to apartheid-era South Africa, and notes collapsing Democratic support alongside generational GOP splits.”
Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Norman Finkelstein—born in New York City to Jewish Holocaust-survivor parents and, in 2020, named the fifth most influential political scientist in the world—states the core claim that frames this conversation: “Israel will mass Gazans at the border, bomb relentlessly, [and] force Egypt’s hand.”
The interview that follows situates Professor Finkelstein’s analysis within a stark forecast of prospective mass displacement. While he cautions that “I don’t think it’s easy to predict where this will lead,” he argues that Israel is “trying to amass the entire population of Gaza on the southern border,” after which “they will… begin bombing it relentlessly.” The intended effect, he suggests, is to compel Cairo under unbearable humanitarian pressure—“images broadcast worldwide… with desperate civilians screaming to be allowed into Egypt”—to open its frontier. Whether Egypt can resist that pressure, he adds, “I’m not sure.”
Professor Finkelstein frames the contemporary campaign as a qualitative break from earlier cycles of “mowings of the lawn.” The methods are not new, he says, but their magnitude is: destruction that once shocked humanitarian observers now approaches comprehensive urban pulverization. As to intent, he maintains that the objective is depopulation: “the people of Gaza will be given two choices—stay and starve or leave.” In his view, exterminatory violence functions as instrument as well as outcome—driven by “pure bloodlust,” by a desire to re-establish deterrence (“if the thought crosses your mind that there is a military option against us, just look at Gaza”), and by the aim to break both Gazan and international will.
On proof, Professor Finkelstein argues the evidentiary bar has already been met through rigorous humanitarian monitoring and legal dossiers. He points to a “voluminous documentary record,” including a South African memorial at the ICJ, and insists that “we’ve already reached the highest threshold of accuracy in documentation when it comes to Gaza.” For him, the decisive element is engineered deprivation: “an imposed famine—a human-made famine—constitutes clear proof of genocide.”
Institutionally, he sees impunity less in legal design than in political inertia. While acknowledging UN tools that can bypass a US Security Council veto, he judges them unlikely to be activated and locates leverage instead in Europe’s trade ties—frustrated, he says, by a “lack of political will.” In the domestic US arena, he notes collapsing Democratic grassroots support for Israel and a sharp generational split among Republicans, concluding that “it’s very difficult right now to defend Israel.”
Analytically, Professor Finkelstein downplays doctrinal debates about Zionism, preferring a structural diagnosis: Israel as a “Jewish supremacist state” enforcing regional dominance through periodic “mass death and destruction,” a pattern he analogizes to apartheid-era South Africa. Read against that backdrop, the title’s forecast is not a provocation but, in his account, a logical extension of means toward an end.
Here is the transcript of our interview with Professor Norman Finkelstein, edited lightly for readability.
Quantity Has Turned into Quality: Gaza’s Destruction Is Now a Different Phenomenon
Destruction in Shejayia, Gaza City, Gaza Strip. Photo: Dreamstime.
Professor Finkelstein, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: Drawing on “Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom,” how do you conceptualize Gaza today—blockade, occupation, siege, apartheid, genocide—and how do you explain Israel’s persistent impunity despite extensive documentation of International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law (IHL/IHRL) violations?
Professor Norman Finkelstein: There’s an expression in English: there’s nothing new under the sun. For those who have studied the history of Gaza, in particular since 1967, it can’t be said that Israel has pioneered new methods since October 7th, 2023. What has changed—and changed very significantly—is the magnitude of the Israeli repression in Gaza. There is also another expression: at some point, quantity turns into quality. That is to say, if the magnitude of the Israeli death and destruction in Gaza has significantly increased, then qualitatively we’re talking about something new. So, even though the methods are not new, the quantity is of such an altogether different magnitude; then we’re talking about a qualitatively different phenomenon.
What does that mean in practice? Let’s take one simple comparison. During the last of Israel’s massive killing sprees in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge—that was in July–August 2014—it lasted approximately about 51 days. During Operation Protective Edge, about 18,000 homes were destroyed, and about 550 children were killed. The head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Moorer, when he toured Gaza after Operation Protective Edge, said that in his entire career he had not ever seen such a magnitude of destruction. Well, compare that with today. Then it was 18,000 homes; now the estimates are 200,000 homes destroyed. And the estimate is about 92 or more percent of all the housing in Gaza has been pulverized. Then it was 550 children; now the estimates are 20,000-plus children have been killed. So, it’s quantitatively at an altogether different magnitude, and so it’s qualitatively a different phenomenon. Now, what does that mean practically?
Practically, that means that Israel, in the past, has carried out what it calls “mowings of the lawn” in Gaza. That is to say, these are high-tech killing sprees, basically to remind the people in Gaza who is in charge. In this case, Israel. But after October 7th, the Israelis realized that they had not just a crisis, but they had an opportunity. The opportunity flowed from the crisis. The opportunity was to resolve the Gaza question once and for all. In effect, that meant implementing the final solution to the Gaza question. And the final solution to the Gaza question basically meant, one way or another, to empty out Gaza. It could be ethnic cleansing. It could be making Gaza uninhabitable, so the people of Gaza, by hook or by crook, would figure out a way to leave. Or it could also mean mass extermination.
The Israeli policy over the past two years has been a combination of those 3 things. Ethnic cleansing—that was the goal at the very beginning, to empty out the population into the northern Sinai. That didn’t work for various reasons. Then, the massive destruction of Gaza, to make it uninhabitable. What they’re doing right now in the last habitable spot of Gaza, which is Gaza City. They will reduce it to what they have reduced the north of Gaza and Rafah to; now they will do it in Gaza City, and there will be nothing left. It will just be a wasteland of rubble. In order to break the backs of the people of Gaza, in order to soften the target so that they will leave once and for all, they’re engaging in a policy of mass famine and mass extermination.
The second part of your question was: why have they been able to get away with it with impunity, despite the massive documentation? Well, during all of Israel’s previous operations, there was massive documentation. After Operation Cast Lead in 2008–9, there was the voluminous Goldstone Report, which was authored by a South African Jew who also called himself a Zionist, and it was a devastating report on what Israel had done to Gaza—just collected dust. That report was commissioned by the Human Rights Council. There was another report after Operation Protective Edge, commissioned by the Human Rights Council. It was also devastating. It also just ended up collecting dust. So, however much documentation is accumulated, turning these commissions of inquiry, or human rights documentation, into an actual implementation of a law is, as is pretty obvious at this point, not easy.
Engineered Famine Is Proof of Genocide
Besieged Gaza’s decades-long socio-economic collapse has tipped into famine—under what critics call genocidal Israeli policies. Photo: Mohamed Zarandah.
On the genocide claim, which probative elements (specific intent, patterns of destructive acts, official statements, engineered humanitarian deprivation) do you judge strongest or weakest, and how should advocates avoid both over- and under-pleading?
Professor Norman Finkelstein: That’s a very good question. In my view, the goal is to empty out Gaza. That, to me, is the central objective. They don’t care much where the people of Gaza end up—Tahiti, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Nauru, Tuvalu—it makes no difference, as long as the “Gaza question” is resolved. You should bear in mind that this was also Hitler’s view. Until the late 1930s, and perhaps even into the early 1940s, the plan was to transfer Europe’s Jews out of Europe, and there were all sorts of schemes underway in different parts of the world to relocate them. That goal, however, became unviable after World War II broke out, when the seas were no longer open for free travel. It was then that they shifted to the extermination plan.
Similarly, I believe Israel’s aim is to depopulate Gaza, and one way to achieve that is by making it unlivable. As Israeli officials have repeatedly stated: the people of Gaza will be given two choices—stay and starve or leave.
Secondly, the mass extermination is a component of the plan, because there are three aspects to the mass extermination. Aspect number one is pure bloodlust. The Israelis were outraged—and that’s really a euphemism. They were enraged by what happened on October 7th and were determined to exact blood: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Except, in the case of the Israelis, judging by what was recently said by a former senior Israeli official—I believe it was the former head of Israeli intelligence—the ratio was set far higher: for every Israeli killed, fifty Gazans must be killed. So, there was the bloodlust component. That, in significant part, explains not just the scale of the killing in Gaza but also the jubilation with which it is carried out, the fact that they broadcast it all over their social media, showing how they are wreaking death and destruction on Gaza. So, the extermination, in part, springs from bloodlust.
A second aspect of the extermination is what Israel calls restoring its deterrence capability after October 7th. The idea began circulating in parts of the Arab world: maybe there is a military option against Israel. If a ragtag guerrilla force assembled by Hamas could inflict so much damage, perhaps others could as well. Israel, therefore, felt compelled to send a message: if the thought crosses your mind that there is a military option against us, just look at Gaza. In this sense, the mass extermination was also intended to restore what Israel calls its deterrence capability—that is, the Arab world’s fear of Israel. That’s what they mean by deterrence capability.
The third aspect of the mass extermination is to break the will of the people of Gaza—and also that of the international community. While the international community speaks of ceasefires and rehabilitation, the goal of the mass extermination is to send a clear message: there will be no ceasefire, and there will be no rehabilitation. The people of Gaza must leave, and one way to convince them of that is to kill them en masse and deprive them of the basic necessities required to sustain life.
There is nothing left in Gaza now. I don’t know where people get these ideas about reconstruction. If you look at the official reports, they estimate it would take 50 years to rebuild Gaza. The place has been pulverized; there’s nothing left—it’s a vast wasteland.
So, I believe the extermination has been a means to the end of resolving the Gaza question. But even if it is a means to an end, it is still genocide. Using genocidal methods to achieve the goal of “resolving” the Gaza question does not make it any less so. The fact that extermination serves as a means, rather than an end in itself, does not negate its genocidal nature. They are employing genocidal means to achieve their objective.
The Record Is Voluminous; The Crime Is Clear
What standards of sourcing, chain-of-custody, and methodological transparency should scholars/NGOs adopt to pre-empt “disinformation” rebuttals while remaining legible to courts and broader publics?
Professor Norman Finkelstein: I don’t think, unlike others who seem to believe, that the key to gaining authoritative information about Gaza is admitting journalists. First of all, we have met much higher standards of proof than journalistic evidence. From the superfluity of human rights and humanitarian UN-affiliated organizations, they have been transmitting information on, literally, a daily basis, to prove that Gaza has crossed the threshold of famine.
There is this very subtle system of accounting by international humanitarian groups. There’s food deprivation, there’s starvation, and there’s famine — these are different degrees. In order to discern at which threshold you stand, it requires very precise information. When they came to the conclusion that about a million people in Gaza are now in famine conditions, they needed very precise accounting, because these are very rigorous, stringent organizations. They need very precise accounting to validate the claim of famine, or starvation, or extreme food deprivation.
There are so many organizations working in Gaza — Save the Children, the World Food Programme, UNICEF, UNESCO, Doctors Without Borders, UNCDA, the UN Commission on Trade and Development, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund — all of them are on the ground. We have a voluminous documentary record.
Just to give you one example: the South African delegation to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) submitted what’s called a memorial, which is its main documentation of the genocide in Gaza. It hasn’t yet been released to the public, but you know how long it is? It’s 700 pages with 4,000 pages of documentation. There’s no dearth of documentation. Frankly, as against the organizations I’ve listed, journalistic reportage is the least reliable. These are just people who fly in and fly out. They have very little knowledge of the situation in Gaza. The journalists are highly partisan. They basically have to report what their editors want them to report when it comes to Israel and Palestine.
So, in my opinion, we’ve already reached the highest threshold of accuracy in documentation when it comes to Gaza. We don’t need any more. As you know, all the major human rights organizations have reached the same conclusion: Amnesty International has concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza; Human Rights Watch has concluded that Israel is committing genocidal acts in Gaza; and the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B’Tselem, has likewise concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
The overwhelming majority of recognized experts on genocide agree as well. In a recent poll of an organization with about 500 scholars specializing in genocide studies, 28% responded, and of those, 86% stated that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
So, I don’t think the problem at this point is documentation. I believe that an imposed famine — a human-made famine — constitutes clear proof of genocide.
Mass at Rafah, Bomb Relentlessly, Force Egypt’s Hand
How do you assess the likelihood, modalities, and timelines of large-scale displacement from Gaza to Egypt (or beyond)? Which regional veto players (Egypt, Hezbollah, Gulf states) most credibly deter or enable such outcomes, and why?
Professor Norman Finkelstein: I don’t think it’s easy to predict where this will lead. Israel is trying to amass the entire population of Gaza on the southern border. At some point, President Trump has given them the green light, but he’s also signaled that they need to get this job done quickly, as pressure on the US is steadily increasing. My guess—and I must emphasize that I have no military knowledge whatsoever—is that they will gather as many people as possible at the southern border and then begin bombing it relentlessly.
The resulting pressure will inevitably fall on Egypt: you have to let them in. Because nobody is stopping Israel. How Egypt will respond to that remains an open question. There will be images broadcast worldwide of Israel relentlessly bombing two million people, with desperate civilians screaming to be allowed into Egypt. Whether Egypt will be able to resist that pressure, I’m not sure.
Not Law but Will Is the Chokepoint
United Nations Headquarters in New York, USA. Photo: Diego Grandi.
Which institutional pathways—US Security Council shielding, lawfare, diplomatic narrative management—most decisively sustain Israeli impunity, and where are the most realistic chokepoints for pressure?
Professor Norman Finkelstein: The US has been an obstacle, but it’s not entirely accurate to call it an insurmountable one. There are various UN mechanisms for bypassing the US veto in the Security Council, including what’s known as the “United for Peace” option in the General Assembly. I won’t go into the technical details, as they’re not particularly relevant, since it’s unlikely to happen.
Secondly, the Europeans can exert significant influence. Europe—not the US—is Israel’s main trading partner, through the EU. They have many potential avenues of leverage. The issue, however, is not institutional or bureaucratic obstructionism. The real problem is a lack of political will.
What could be done now? I don’t believe much can be done. I don’t like to be the bearer of bad news. On the other hand, I believe in treating adults like adults: if we’re at an impasse, we’re at an impasse. If people were willing to escalate their resistance, then I do believe there are options.
For example, there are possibilities to shut down the Israeli terminals at major airports if you can amass enough people willing to go there and be arrested. I think many people would be willing to get arrested. The problem, however, is organizational—I don’t want to use big words, but it really comes down to organizational vision.
There are potential avenues. For instance, there was an announcement by the dock workers in Genoa—they’re sending over a flotilla to Gaza. If the Israelis attack that flotilla, there will be a price to pay in terms of commerce on the seas. Whether that’s just talk or whether there’s an action plan behind it, I don’t know.
There are things that can be done, but they require both will and organization.
Corruption and Coercion Shape the Annex
The entrance sign of the International Criminal Court (ICC) at its headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands, on February 14, 2018. Photo: Robert Paul Van Beets.
You’ve criticized UN handling of conflict-related sexual violence. What does the Annex controversy (Israel/Hamas) reveal about the political economy of UN norm-setting, evidentiary thresholds, and great-power leverage?
Professor Norman Finkelstein: The UN, as anybody who works in it will tell you, is a profoundly corrupt organization. On the other hand, it does a lot of good things, and you have to balance both those factors. I think there’s a lot of corruption in the UN and affiliated bodies like the ICC.
I’ve just completed a new book called Gaza’s Gravediggers: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places, which speaks to specific individuals and specific events where, in my opinion, individuals are either being bribed or blackmailed by Israel.
I mentioned earlier in this conversation the Goldstone Report. The Goldstone Report was a devastating indictment of Israel’s conduct during Operation Cast Lead. Within a few months of its issuance, Goldstone retracted the report, and in my opinion, he retracted it because he was blackmailed. If you read the record, as I have, there’s no other explanation.
The former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, was responsible for handling the case of the Mavi Marmara, a flotilla of ships that went to Gaza on May 31, 2010, which came under attack by Israel, resulting in 10 passengers killed. There is no question in my mind that she was blackmailed into giving Israel a pass.
The former president of the ICJ, Joan Donoghue, was an American. As you know, in January 2024, the ICJ, the main legal arm of the United Nations, found that Israel was plausibly committing genocide. In April 2024, Joan Donoghue appeared on a BBC program called HardTalk and blatantly lied, claiming that the ICJ did not find Israel was plausibly committing genocide. It was the most flagrant, outrageous lie.
The current vice president of the ICJ, Judge Julia Sebutinde, is clearly a fanatic—I believe she’s a Christian evangelical fanatic—but beyond that, it’s my opinion that she is either being bribed or blackmailed by Israel and has been delivering outrageous dissents in ICJ jurisprudence. In my forthcoming book, I have a 100-page chapter documenting her lies and dissents.
And then there’s the most recent case. Without going into detail, which can’t be done over a broadcast, there is no evidence—in the traditional sense of evidence: medical, forensic, or digital—that Hamas weaponized rape on October 7th. There is none. They admit it. There isn’t an issue there. There is no digital evidence of rape. There is no medical-legal evidence of rape. The only thing there is consists of so-called “witnesses.” That’s it.
Whereas on the other side, there is voluminous evidence that Israel is committing rape, threatening rape of men, threatening rape of women, and engaging in massive sexual violence.
In the face of that, every year the UN puts out a report on sexual violence in conflict situations called Conflict-Related Sexual Violence (CRSV). There was a lot of pressure put on Guterres, the Secretary-General, to list Hamas in the appendix to the report as a perpetrator of sexual violence and to exclude Israel. That’s what Guterres did: he listed Hamas and excluded Israel. That was another blackmail.
Israel Acts As a Jewish Supremacist State, Not a Zionist One
Billboard reading “The Looting Government,” part of a protest campaign against the conservative coalition’s policies in Ra’anana, Israel, May 2023. Photo: Rene Van Den Berg
Does contemporary Zionism now shape Israeli military doctrine in Gaza toward openly eliminationist aims, marking a shift from settler-colonial control to population destruction, ethnic cleansing, or permanent incapacitation?
Professor Norman Finkelstein: I don’t think that’s true. I don’t believe it has much to do with Zionism. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Zionism, so I can claim a certain amount of expertise on the subject. This has little to do with Zionism. Israel is a Jewish supremacist state, and it is acting in a way not unlike apartheid-era South Africa.
Remember, South Africa, beyond its system of white supremacy, was engaged in a series of neighboring colonial wars with Mozambique and Angola. The South Africans killed around a million people during the 1970s and 1980s in the course of the anti-colonial wars along South Africa’s borders and, of course, in Namibia as well. They waged a colonial war against SWAPO, the Southwest African People’s Organization, and it resulted in a massive bloodletting. Literally, I believe it was more than a million people. You can check and correct me if I’m wrong.
That’s Israel. Israel is a Jewish supremacist state determined to maintain a Jewish supremacist state within its borders and to crush any resistance on its periphery. It’s similar to what South Africa did. But in South Africa, there was Mozambique, where FRELIMO, led by Samora Machel, was in power. Machel was probably assassinated by the South Africans; it’s not known for sure, but he was killed in a plane crash. Then there was FRELIMO in Mozambique and, in Angola, the MPLA—the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola.
In the same way that South Africa fought to preserve its regional dominance, Israel faces Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria on its periphery and has periodically carried out mass death and destruction to maintain its regional hegemony. Like South Africa, Israel has committed similar kinds of massacres to uphold what I would describe as a system of Jewish supremacy and regional dominance.
This has something to do with Zionism, but not as much as some might think. Zionism’s goal was to create a Jewish state, just as South Africa’s white nationalists sought to create a white state. However, invoking ideologies like Zionism can confuse the reality of the current situation, especially for people who haven’t, like myself, spent several years studying every detail of Zionism to write a dissertation.
If you frame it more plainly—as a Jewish supremacist state determined to maintain a population that is more or less purely Jewish while preserving its hegemony and dominance in the region, much like apartheid-era South Africa—the picture becomes much clearer.
Democrats Support Israel in Single Digits; GOP Split by Age
And lastly, Professor Finkelstein, how do right-wing and liberal US populisms intersect to normalize Gaza’s suffering—e.g., via identity-based mobilization, security mythologies, and the bipartisan “fortress democracy” frame?
Professor Norman Finkelstein: The Democratic Party, at its base, is composed of people belonging to minorities and those who are generally liberal in their persuasions. These two constituencies are not going to support a genocide in Gaza. Right now, support for Israel within the Democratic Party may already be in the single digits—I believe it’s around 9%—and it has dropped drastically.
In the Republican Party, support for Israel has also declined significantly among younger Republicans, but among older Republicans, particularly supporters of Trump, it remains considerably high.
I think it’s very difficult right now to defend Israel. To do so, you’d have to come across as either a psychopath or a moron; otherwise, it’s impossible to defend.
Please cite as: ECPS Staff. (2025). “Virtual Workshop Series — Session 1: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism around the World.” European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). September 6, 2025. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00113
The ECPS, in collaboration with Oxford University, launched its Virtual Workshop Series on “The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism around the World” on September 4, 2025. Spanning 16 sessions through April 2026, the series examines how populist strategies reshape democracy across diverse contexts. Chaired by Professor Oscar Mazzoleni, the opening session featured Professor David Sanders’ keynote on six structural drivers fueling populism and its growing threats to liberal democracy. Case studies explored populist dynamics in the US, India, Greece, Thailand, and Argentina, highlighting intersections of dynasties, corporate power, elite cues, and economic crises. Discussant Dr. João Ferreira Dias emphasized three takeaways: populism as performance, polarization over persuasion, and the enduring impact of national political cultures.
Reported by ECPS Staff
The European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), in collaboration with Oxford University, inaugurated its Virtual Workshop Series with the opening session, “The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism around the World,” held on Thursday, September 4, 2025. Spanning 16 sessions from September 2025 to April 2026, the programme brings together leading scholars to examine the contested meanings of “the people” and their pivotal role in shaping the trajectory of democracy across diverse political, cultural, and institutional settings. Designed as a continuation of the successful three-day in-person conference at St. Cross College, Oxford University (July 1–3, 2025) — “‘We, the People’ and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches,”— the series deepens and extends those debates, fostering comparative, cross-disciplinary dialogue on democratic backsliding, resilience, and transformation in a rapidly shifting global landscape.
Opening on behalf of ECPS, Stella Schade outlined the series’ comparative and cross-disciplinary ambition: to move beyond regional silos and examine how populist projects travel, adapt, and entrench themselves within distinct political and media ecologies.
Chaired by Professor Oscar Mazzoleni (University of Lausanne), a leading authority on populism and party systems, the session framed populist authoritarianism not as a single doctrine but as a repertoire of strategies—discursive, organizational, and institutional—deployed under diverse conditions.
Professor David Sanders (University of Essex, Emeritus) set the analytical agenda with a wide-ranging keynote that argued populism poses greater risks to liberal democracy today than in earlier cycles, owing to transnational diffusion of tactics and the erosion of shared standards of truth. He identified six structural drivers—declining left–right anchors, post-truth dynamics, politicized immigration, identity fragmentation, globalization’s discontents, and norm subversion through strategic learning—and outlined five fronts for democratic response, from inclusive immigration policy and rebalanced rights discourse to retooled economic governance, renewed state capacity, and robust platform regulation.
The panel that followed translated these themes into concrete case studies. Dr. Dinesh Sharma and Shoshana Baraschi-Ehrlich (Fordham University) traced the entanglement of family dynasties, corporate finance, and “outsider” populist narratives in India and the United States, highlighting the paradox whereby leaders mobilize anti-elite sentiment while constructing elite power networks of their own.
Professor Gregory W. Streich and Dr. Michael Makara (University of Central Missouri) examined how elite cues and out-group framing shape opinion formation, showing that populist endorsements polarize more than they persuade and exert greatest influence on low-salience issues where prior beliefs are weak.
Professor Akis Kalaitzidis (University of Central Missouri) offered a comparative analysis of Thailand, Argentina, Greece, and the United States to argue that economic dislocations catalyze distinct populist trajectories, each filtered through national political cultures and institutional constraints.
Professor Elizabeth Kosmetatou (University of Illinois Springfield), in joint work with Kalaitzidis, revisited the Papandreou era to illuminate how charismatic leadership, clientelism, and European integration jointly reconfigured Greece’s political economy, leaving a durable imprint on state capacity and party competition.
Serving as discussant, Dr. João Ferreira Dias synthesized the contributions around three cross-cutting claims: populism functions as performance more than program; polarization, not persuasion, is its primary mass effect; and national political cultures mediate how populist styles are institutionalized. His commentary linked micro-level mechanics (elite cues, media incentives) to macro-level outcomes (executive aggrandizement, clientelist normalization), underscoring the session’s central lesson: understanding populist authoritarianism requires attention to both the technologies of mobilization and the structures that enable their entrenchment.
As the series unfolds, ECPS and its partners will continue to probe these dynamics comparatively, asking not only how democracies backslide, but also how they can be renewed.
Prof. Oscar Mazzoleni, Prof. David J. Sanders, Dr. Dinesh Sharma, Shoshana Baraschi-Ehrlich, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Michael Makara, Prof. Gregory W. Streich, Prof. Akis Kalaitzidis, Prof. Elizabeth Kosmetatou, and Dr. João Ferreira Dias are seen on the workshop’s Zoom screen.
Introductory Speech by Professor David J. Sanders: From Post-Truth to Power—Risks and Remedies
The session began with a keynote intervention by Professor David Sanders(Regius Professor of Political Science, University of Essex, Emeritus), a renowned scholar of political behavior and public opinion. Framing the discussion for the subsequent panel presentations, Professor Sanders delivered a wide-ranging and analytically rich lecture on the global rise of populist authoritarianism, examining its causes, dangers, and potential counterstrategies. Speaking in an urgent yet measured tone, Professor Sanders argued that populism has always posed risks to democratic stability, but it is “more dangerous now than ever before.” He attributed this heightened threat to the increasing transnational interconnectedness of populist actors, who share strategies, rhetoric, and institutional models across borders, accelerating the erosion of democratic norms. His lecture was structured around three central questions: Why has support for populism grown so dramatically? Why is populism especially dangerous for contemporary democracies? What can be done to contain its advance?
Explaining the Rise of Populism: Six Structural Drivers
Professor Sanders identified six interrelated drivers behind the global surge of populism, focusing primarily on Europe and North America but emphasizing broader international patterns.
The Decline of Left-Right Political Anchors: Professor Sanders argued that traditional left-right ideological cleavages have eroded, especially since the collapse of Soviet communism in 1990. With voters less able to situate themselves within stable ideological frameworks, political affiliations have become fluid, creating fertile ground for populist appeals. “Without these anchors,” Professor Sanders noted, “voters are far more susceptible to movements promising simple answers to complex problems.”
The Rise of Post-Truth Politics: The fragmentation of epistemic authority has, in Professor Sanders’ view, created a “post-truth environment” where empirical evidence is devalued and “multiple truths” proliferate. This shift, exacerbated by social media platforms, has empowered “liars, conspiracists, and fantasists” while weakening evidence-based policymaking. Populists thrive in this environment by framing facts as opinions and dismissing scientific consensus as “elitist bias.”
Immigration and Political Avoidance: ProfessorSanders highlighted immigration as a critical yet mishandled political issue in Western democracies. For decades, mainstream parties feared being perceived as illiberal, leading to a reluctance to engage substantively with public concerns. Populists, by contrast, capitalize on voter frustrations, using immigration narratives to construct “us vs. them” dichotomies and mobilize distrust toward elites.
Identity Fragmentation and Social Cohesion: The digital era has amplified group-based identity politics, reducing the sense of common national belonging. As shared civic identities weaken, Professor Sanders warned, populists exploit social fragmentation, scapegoating out-groups and deepening polarization.
Globalization and Economic Discontent: Populism has also gained traction from the failures of mainstream economic discourse to address the negative externalities of globalization. While global integration benefited elites, many communities experienced declining living standards and job precarity. Populists seize on these grievances, positioning themselves as defenders of “ordinary people” against globalist elites.
Norm Subversion and Strategic Learning: Finally, Professor Sanders underscored the willingness of populist leaders to bend or break constitutional norms, often learning from one another across contexts. He cited Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine US democratic institutions and Boris Johnson’s efforts to sidestep parliamentary constraints, framing these as part of a “global playbook of democratic erosion.”
Why Populism Is Uniquely Dangerous Today
Professor Sanders then turned to the three main dangers posed by contemporary populism:
Erosion of Social Cohesion: By demonizing minorities, populists heighten intergroup conflict and weaken the foundations of inclusive citizenship.
Authoritarian Drift: Populist leaders often centralize power, eroding judicial independence and institutional checks, leading to counterproductive repression against dissent.
Policy Failure and Disillusionment: Populists typically offer simplistic solutions to complex problems. When these fail, public disillusionment deepens, further undermining confidence in democratic governance.
“Populists,” Professor Sanders warned, “rarely solve the problems they promise to address, but they succeed in leaving democracies weaker than they found them.”
Countering Populist Authoritarianism: Five Strategic Priorities
In the final part of his lecture, Professor Sanders outlined five strategic pathways for safeguarding democratic resilience:
Addressing Immigration Through Inclusive Policy: Mainstream parties must reclaim the immigration debate with evidence-based, humane policies that both uphold human rights and ensure adequate state support for newcomers. Failing to do so, Professor Sanders cautioned, “hands the narrative to populists by default.”
Reframing Human Rights Discourses: Professor Sanders advocated a shift from purely individualistic frameworks toward a balance that also emphasizes collective and community rights, countering populist narratives that depict liberal values as detached from social realities.
Reforming Globalization and Economic Governance: To undercut populist grievances, governments should restructure trade and investment rules to prioritize domestic employment and social protections, using multilateral cooperation rather than unilateral disruption.
Restoring Trust in State Capacity: Democracies, Professor Sanders argued, must “talk up the role of the state” in solving collective problems — from infrastructure and education to social security and environmental resilience — demonstrating the state’s relevance to everyday wellbeing.
Regulating Social Media and Combating Disinformation: Finally, Professor Sanders called for draconian reforms to social media governance, including penalties for platforms that facilitate misinformation. Without systemic regulation, he warned, populists will continue to weaponize digital ecosystems to bypass accountability.
Conclusion: A Call for Interdisciplinary Action
Professor Sanders closed by emphasizing the urgency of collective scholarly engagement. Combating populist authoritarianism, he argued, requires interdisciplinary collaboration across political science, sociology, communication studies, and law. The ECPS Virtual Workshop Series, he noted, offers an ideal platform to generate context-specific solutions, enabling comparative insights into how different democracies resist or succumb to populist pressures.“Populism,” Professor Sanders concluded, “is not merely a passing disruption but an existential challenge. Our intellectual and civic responsibility is to confront it directly — with evidence, clarity, and democratic resolve.”
Donald Trump delivers a victory speech after his big win in the Nevada caucus at Treasure Island Hotel & Casino, flanked by his sons Eric (right) and Donald Jr. (left) in Las Vegas, NV. Photo: oe Sohm.
Dr. Dinesh Sharma and Ms. Shoshana Baraschi-Ehrlich: “The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism in India and the US: Do Family Dynasties and Big Businesses Really Control Democracy?”
The session featured a joint presentation by Dr. Dinesh Sharma and Shoshana Baraschi-Ehrlich (Fordham University, NYC), of a work done with contributions from Britt Romagna, Ms. Ayako Kiyota, and Amartya Sharma. Their talk, titled “The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism in India and the US: Do Family Dynasties and Big Businesses Really Control Democracy?” examined the interplay between political dynasties, corporate power, and populist narratives in shaping democratic governance across two of the world’s largest democracies.
Drawing on material from Dr. Sharma’s forthcoming book The Orphan Paradox (Bloomsbury, forthcoming), the presentation explored the historical weight of inherited political capital, the growing influence of corporate financing, and the paradoxical rise of populist “outsiders” who simultaneously mobilize anti-elite sentiment while forging their own elite power structures.
Dynastic Politics and Democratic Capture
Dr. Sharma began by situating India and the United States within a comparative framework, emphasizing both convergences and divergences in their democratic trajectories. In India, dynastic politics remains deeply entrenched. Since independence, the Nehru-Gandhi family has dominated national electoral politics, holding power for more than half of the country’s post-1950 history. Beyond the national level, numerous regional dynasties — such as the Yadav family in Uttar Pradesh, the Thackerays in Maharashtra, and the DMK in Tamil Nadu — wield significant influence over state and local politics, shaping party structures and patronage networks.
In the United States, Dr. Sharma noted, dynastic influence has historically been less centralized but nonetheless persistent. Families like the Kennedys, Roosevelts, Bushes, Clintons, and, more recently, the Trumps, have leveraged name recognition, financial networks, and inherited legitimacy to secure enduring political influence. While American political culture celebrates self-made leaders, Dr. Sharma observed that brand recognition and elite networks remain powerful assets in electoral politics.
Corporate Power, Campaign Financing, and Policy Capture
A key theme of the presentation concerned the growing role of big business and corporate lobbying in shaping democratic outcomes. Dr. Sharma highlighted the landmark US Supreme Court ruling Citizens United v. FEC (2010), which effectively removed limits on corporate spending in political campaigns, institutionalizing the dominance of corporate financing. In India, similar trends emerged under the now-invalidated electoral bond scheme, which allowed opaque funding streams that disproportionately benefited ruling parties backed by large corporations.
According to Dr. Sharma, these developments represent a global convergence in which wealthy donors, multinational corporations, and media conglomerates exert outsized influence on electoral agendas, policy priorities, and political narratives. Media ownership — from the Ambani empire in India to the Murdoch network across the US, UK, and Australia — amplifies populist messaging, channels public anger, and fosters resentment toward elites while simultaneously serving elite interests.
The Populist Outsider Paradox
Perhaps the most striking insight in Dr. Sharma’s presentation concerned what he termed the “orphan paradox”: the tendency of voters to support leaders who position themselves as political outsiders or underdogs, even when they later consolidate their own elite power bases.
In India, Narendra Modi has long fashioned his public image as a “self-made son of the soil,” rising from modest beginnings outside the Nehru-Gandhi establishment to challenge entrenched dynastic power. In the United States, figures like Donald Trump similarly leveraged outsider narratives — despite being deeply embedded within elite business and political networks.
Dr. Sharma argued that this paradox reveals a deep tension in democratic psychology: voters oscillate between skepticism toward entrenched elites and admiration for disruptive figures who claim authenticity and independence from the system. Yet, as Dr. Sharma noted, many of these “outsiders” eventually replicate the same patterns of institutional capture they campaign against.
Resistance, Institutions, and the Future of Democracy
While dynasties and corporations exert significant influence, Dr. Sharma emphasized that democratic capture is not inevitable. Countervailing forces — from civil society movements and grassroots protests to independent courts, election commissions, and free media — remain critical in constraining elite dominance. Historical examples such as India’s anti-corruption mobilizations and the US civil rights movement demonstrate that organized citizen activism can challenge concentrated power, though sustaining such momentum remains difficult.
Dr. Sharma concluded by underscoring the fragility of democratic institutions in both contexts. In India, the Supreme Court and Election Commission face mounting pressures, while in the United States, corporate lobbying, partisan polarization, and media fragmentation undermine public trust. Populist leaders like Modi and Trump amplify this institutional strain, mobilizing resentment against “elites” while consolidating their own networks of influence.
A Psychodynamic Drama of Rivalry, Mourning, and Repetition
In her contribution, Ms. Shoshana Baraschi-Ehrlich (Fordham University) offered a distinctive literary-theoretical and psychoanalytic perspective on political succession, exploring how leadership transitions in authoritarian and revolutionary contexts can be interpreted through Freud’s Oedipus complex and trauma theory. Her analysis framed political power as a psychodynamic drama marked by rivalry, mourning, and repetition.
Ms. Baraschi-Ehrlich argued that succession crises often involve a form of symbolic “patricide,” where the paternal figure — whether a dynastic leader, revolutionary founder, or state authority — must be displaced or replaced. Yet paradoxically, successors frequently reproduce the very structures they sought to dismantle, perpetuating cycles of control. Drawing on trauma theory, particularly the work of Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra, she explained that unresolved historical wounds resurface belatedly and repetitively, shaping patterns of political instability and repression.
Her analysis was grounded in three illustrative cases. First, revolutionary movements — such as the Cuban Revolution — often enact an Oedipal rupture against paternal authority, only to reconstruct new patriarchal orders, as seen under Castro. Second, in North Korea, dynastic succession is framed as filial devotion, yet marked by anxiety over legitimacy and loss, with citizens participating in rituals of mourning that sustain authority. Third, leaders like Lenin and Mao cultivated images of rupture while demanding absolute loyalty, embodying the ambivalence of rejecting and replicating paternal power.
Contrastingly, Ms. Baraschi-Ehrlich highlighted that democratic systems can mitigate these dynamics, enabling peaceful transitions that transform rivalry into continuity rather than trauma. Concluding, she underscored that political authority is haunted by unresolved loss — revolutions often reproduce the structures they oppose, dynasties rely on filial rituals, and democracies, at their best, offer pathways to healing through institutional stability.
Conclusion
Dr. Dinesh Sharma and Shoshana Baraschi-Ehrlich’s presentation offered a multifaceted exploration of the forces reshaping democratic governance in India and the United States, highlighting the intertwined roles of political dynasties, corporate power, and populist narratives. Sharma demonstrated how inherited political capital and opaque corporate financing create structural advantages that enable elites to shape policy agendas and electoral dynamics, even as populist leaders mobilize resentment against these very systems. Yet, as he underscored, the “outsider” paradox reveals a deeper democratic tension: figures like Narendra Modi and Donald Trump ascend by presenting themselves as authentic disruptors, but frequently replicate the same networks of influence they claim to oppose.
Baraschi-Ehrlich’s psychoanalytic lens added a distinct theoretical depth, framing leadership transitions as a “psychodynamic drama” marked by rivalry, mourning, and repetition. By invoking Freud’s Oedipus complex and trauma theory, she illuminated how unresolved historical wounds shape cycles of rebellion and restoration, particularly within authoritarian and revolutionary contexts. Her comparative insights revealed why revolutions often reproduce hierarchical structures and why dynasties rely on rituals of loyalty to sustain authority, contrasting these patterns with democracy’s potential to transform rivalry into institutional continuity.
Together, their analysis situates the rise of populist authoritarianism within a broader global challenge: resisting elite capture while navigating voter ambivalence toward power, authenticity, and belonging. The question, they concluded, is whether democratic institutions and civic movements can still provide pathways to resilience in an era where populism both contests and consolidates authority.
Donald Trump’s supporters wearing “In God We Trump” shirts at a rally in Bojangles’ Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina, on March 2, 2020. Photo: Jeffrey Edwards.
Professor Gregory W. Streich and Dr. Michael Makara: “Out-Groups, Elite Cues, and Populist Persuasion: How Populists Shape Public Opinion”
In their joint presentation, Professors Gregory W. Streich(Professor of Political Science and Chair of the School of Social Sciences and Languages, University of Central Missouri) andDr. Michael Makara (Associate Professor of Comparative Politics and International Relations, University of Central Missouri) explored the mechanisms through which populist leaders influence public opinion, focusing on the interaction between elite cues, perceptions of out-groups, and the salience of policy issues. Their research, presented under the title “Out-groups and Elite Cues: How Populists Shape Public Opinion,” forms part of a broader project examining how voters reconcile competing influences when forming political attitudes, especially in the context of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Competing Theories of Public Opinion Formation
Professor Streich started presentation by framing the research within two dominant theories of opinion formation:
Social Attributes Theory — Individuals’ policy preferences are shaped by their demographic identity and attitudes toward specific groups. For example, support or opposition to immigration policy often depends on whether voters perceive certain ethnic, religious, or socio-economic groups as beneficiaries or threats.
Elite Cues Theory — Also called the “follow-the-leader effect,” this perspective argues that voters align their policy preferences with cues from political leaders or parties they trust. When elites endorse a policy, their supporters are more likely to back it, even when it contradicts long-standing ideological positions.
The research seeks to understand what happens when these forces pull voters in opposite directions. Do citizens defer to elite endorsements, or do their social identities dominate? This question becomes especially salient under populist leadership, where leaders like Donald Trump often adopt positions that diverge sharply from traditional party orthodoxy.
Populism, Partisan Realignment, and Donald Trump’s Role
Professor Streich highlighted Trump’s ability to reorient Republican priorities, often in ways that defy the party’s historical platforms. For example:
Trade Policy: Trump’s tariffs represented a stark departure from Republican free-trade orthodoxy.
Immigration: Whereas Ronald Reagan framed America as a “shining city on a hill” and signed limited amnesty measures in 1986, Trump’s rhetoric emphasized exclusion and restriction.
According to Professor Streich, Trump’s deviations highlight his populist strategy: positioning himself as the authentic voice of “the people” against “corrupt elites,” while simultaneously forging new ideological coalitions. The study aimed to test empirically how persuasive this strategy has been across different issues.
High-Salience vs. Low-Salience Issues
Dr. Michael Makara expanded on the theoretical framework by introducing the concept of issue salience — the degree to which voters already hold well-formed, emotionally charged opinions on a topic.
High-Salience Issues — Highly visible, polarizing debates such as immigration evoke strong ideological divides.
Low-Salience Issues — Less publicly debated policies, such as trade, generate weaker prior attitudes and are thus more open to elite influence.
Their central hypothesis predicted that elite cues — in this case, endorsements by Donald Trump — would exert greater influence on low-salience issues (e.g., trade) than on high-salience issues (e.g., immigration), where voters’ views are already entrenched.
Research Design and Methodology
The researchers conducted a national survey in September 2025, using two factorial experiments. Respondents read short policy vignettes describing fictional immigration and trade proposals and were randomly assigned different conditions:
Endorsement Cues: Some were told Donald Trump supported the policy, while others received no elite cue or were told it was backed by generic officials.
Framing Effects: In the immigration vignette, immigrants were alternately described as “illegal aliens” or “undocumented immigrants” to test whether language influenced responses.
Respondents indicated whether they supported or opposed each policy. Logistic regression analyses measured the interaction between ideology, Trump’s endorsement, and issue salience.
Key Findings
Strong Elite Cues Effect
Trump’s endorsement significantly shaped conservative opinion across both policy areas:
Immigration Policy: Conservatives informed that Trump supported a proposal were four times more likely to support it compared to those receiving no cue.
Trade Policy: Trump’s endorsement similarly increased conservative support, demonstrating the persuasive power of elite cues even when policies contradict traditional Republican priorities.
Elite Cues and Polarization
While Trump mobilized conservatives, his endorsements also intensified liberal opposition. In both vignettes, liberals exposed to Trump’s support were significantly less likely to back the policy.
Salience Moderates Influence
Consistent with the authors’ hypothesis, elite cues proved more influential on low-salience issues like trade: On immigration, voters’ pre-existing ideological commitments dominated, limiting Trump’s persuasive reach. On trade, where voters lacked strong priors, Trump’s endorsement created substantial opinion shifts.
The Role of Information Gaps
Dr. Makara emphasized that voters with limited knowledge about trade policy were especially susceptible to elite influence. This finding suggests that populists thrive in policy domains where uncertainty is high and narratives can be shaped more freely.
Implications for Populist Mobilization
The study highlights how populist leaders leverage elite cues and out-group framing to reshape political landscapes:
Redefining Party Orthodoxy — By combining contradictory policy stances, populists like Trump create hybrid ideological platforms that mobilize cross-cutting constituencies.
Targeting Out-Groups — Populists amplify fears around immigration and cultural threats, using emotionally charged narratives to reinforce group identity and deepen divides.
Exploiting Low-Salience Issues — Populists strategically mobilize opinion on less familiar policy domains where facts are contested, and leaders’ cues carry disproportionate weight.
Future Directions
Professor Streich and Dr. Makara noted several areas for ongoing research:
Cross-Leader Comparisons: Testing whether similar elite cue effects emerge when policies are endorsed by other figures, such as Joe Biden or state-level leaders.
Media Ecosystems: Examining how different information sources shape susceptibility to elite cues.
Out-Group Framing: Integrating more detailed measures of identity-based threat perceptions.
Conclusion
Professor Streich and Dr. Makara’s findings illuminate the psychological and informational mechanisms through which populist leaders mobilize public opinion. While elite cues strongly shape attitudes, their influence is conditional: populists are most persuasive when voters lack strong priors, allowing leaders to frame issues and define narratives unchallenged.
In high-salience contexts, such as immigration, polarization constrains persuasion, reinforcing existing divides rather than shifting positions. By contrast, in low-salience policy domains like trade, populists wield significant power to shape voter attitudes and reconfigure partisan alignments.
The broader implication is sobering: populist influence thrives where knowledge gaps are greatest and where leaders exploit identity-based divisions alongside uncertainty. As the authors concluded, understanding these dynamics is critical for explaining not only Trump’s continued hold over Republican politics but also the global rise of populist-authoritarian movements.
Fans wave flags during Alexis Tsipras’s final public speech before the elections in Athens, Greece on September 18, 2015: Photo: Vassilis Anastasiou.
Professor Akis Kalaitzidis: “From Economic to Political Catastrophe: Four Case Studies in Populism”
In his insightful presentation, Professor Akis Kalaitzidis, a political scientist from the University of Central Missouri, analyzed how economic crises in Thailand, Argentina, Greece, and the United States catalyzed the rise of distinct forms of populism. Drawing on comparative analysis, he argued that financial dislocations—from collapsing currencies to sovereign debt defaults—create fertile ground for populist movements, but the resulting forms of populism diverge significantly depending on cultural values, institutional structures, and historical trajectories.
Professor Kalaitzidis’s central thesis is that economic catastrophe often triggers political catastrophe, dismantling established political orders and reshaping governance models. Across the four cases, populist leaders capitalized on social grievances, deploying a mixture of policy populism, rhetorical populism, organizational strategies, charismatic leadership styles, and media mobilization techniques. Yet, despite their contextual differences, these cases reveal a common pattern: populism thrives by framing “the people” against entrenched elites while promising rapid relief to the most vulnerable sectors of society.
Thailand: Rural Populism and the Thaksin Model
Professor Kalaitzidis began with Thailand, which he described as the most challenging case due to language barriers and limited direct research. Following the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the collapse of the baht, Thaksin Shinawatra, a billionaire businessman, rose to power by forging a coalition between rural farmers and urban working classes.
Thaksin’s policy populism centered on concrete economic benefits: Universal healthcare via a symbolic “30 baht” ($1) hospital fee, direct cash transfers of one million baht per rural village, and debt relief for farmers, enabling significant poverty alleviation. His rhetorical populism framed the struggle as “rural masses versus Bangkok elites,” positioning himself as the defender of marginalized communities against urban dominance. Institutionally, he created the Thai Rak Thai Party, a personal political vehicle, consolidating control through charismatic CEO-style leadership and media dominance.
Despite repeated military coups and Thaksin’s exile, his political network remains influential. As Professor Kalaitzidis noted, “the populist version of the Thai Rak Thai Party continues unabated,” reflecting the enduring power of rural-based populism in Thailand.
Argentina: Kirchnerism and Anti-IMF Populism
In Argentina, the 2001 economic collapse—marked by sovereign default and skyrocketing unemployment—triggered another form of populism. Néstor Kirchner and, later, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner led Kirchnerismo, a political project combining expansive welfare policies with defiant anti-IMF rhetoric. Their policy populism included: Increased social spending on pensions and welfare, subsidies for energy and public transportation, and aggressive debt renegotiations with international creditors.
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s leadership style was symbolically confrontational, presenting herself as the “defender of Argentina against foreign exploitation.” Professor Kalaitzidis highlighted a revealing interview with her former economics minister, who told him directly: “Don’t believe the IMF—they’re lying.”
Media strategy further amplified their narrative: while state-controlled outlets promoted Kirchnerism, opponents were framed as neoliberal agents undermining Argentine sovereignty. Even as Argentina later elected Javier Milei, an exclusionary populist, Kirchnerism remains deeply entrenched, reflecting the enduring centrality of anti-IMF populism in Argentina’s political identity.
Greece: Syriza and the Anti-Austerity Movement
Professor Kalaitzidis next turned to Greece, where the 2008 global financial crisis and EU-imposed austerity created fertile ground for Syriza’s left-wing populism. Led by Alexis Tsipras, Syriza built a broad anti-austerity coalition of pensioners, students, and social movements demanding relief from EU-imposed fiscal constraints. Key policy populism measures included: Promising debt relief and pension restoration, halting privatizations mandated by the “Troika” (IMF, EU, and ECB), and holding a national referendum on whether Greece should remain in the Eurozone.
Tsipras cultivated an anti-establishment image, symbolized by his refusal to wear a tie, signaling resistance to EU norms and domestic elites. His rhetorical populism framed the conflict as “Greeks versus the Troika,” appealing to national sovereignty amid external economic pressures.
However, Syriza’s eventual concessions to EU demands fractured its base and weakened its populist momentum. Today, Greece hosts a fragmented populist landscape, where multiple exclusionary and inclusionary movements—from the far left to the far right—compete for influence, illustrating populism’s institutional diffusion even after Syriza’s decline.
United States: Trumpism and Permanent Campaign Politics
The final case focused on the United States, where Donald Trump’s presidency (2017–2021) redefined populism in a highly polarized democracy. Professor Kalaitzidis characterized Trumpism as a right-wing, exclusionary populism rooted in white working-class, rural, and disaffected conservative constituencies. Trump’s policy populism emphasized: Tax cuts and deregulation, protectionist tariffs under “America First” trade policy, and restrictive immigration measures framed as defending “real Americans.”
His rhetorical populism weaponized the narrative of “real Americans versus corrupt Washington elites,” encapsulated in the slogan “Drain the Swamp.” Meanwhile, his organizational strategy involved capturing the Republican Party via the MAGA movement, transforming it from Reagan-era conservatism into a personalist political vehicle.
Trump leveraged social media mastery to bypass traditional gatekeepers, embracing a “permanent campaign” style based on real-time polling, online mobilization, and conspiratorial counter-narratives. Professor Kalaitzidis stressed that Trumpism’s influence extends beyond Trump himself, reshaping electoral rules, redistricting strategies, and policymaking for the foreseeable future.
Populism’s Legacy: Structural Shifts and Unresolved Tensions
Professor Kalaitzidis concluded by emphasizing that populism is not merely rhetorical performance but a structural response to globalization’s disruptions. In all four cases, populists emerged as mediators between national sovereignty and global economic pressures, but their methods and outcomes diverged: In Thailand, rural-based populism survives despite elite pushback; in Argentina, populism remains central to political identity, whether inclusive or exclusionary; in Greece, Syriza’s decline fragmented but did not extinguish populist forces; in the United States, Trumpism has permanently reshaped party politics and electoral norms.
Yet, across these contexts, populism’s strategies—mobilizing “the people,” rejecting establishment elites, and exploiting economic dislocation—share a common DNA. As Professor Kalaitzidis observed, “Economic crises highlight the tensions between national democracy and global markets, and populism thrives in this gap.”
Greek postage stamp depicting Andreas G. Papandreou, circa 1997. Photo: Sergei Nezhinskii.
Proefessor Elizabeth Kosmetatou:“Populism, Clientelism, and the Greek State under Papandreou”
In her detailed and engaging presentation, Professor Elizabeth Kosmetatou(Professor of History, University of Illinois Springfield) examined the political trajectory, leadership style, and enduring legacy of Andreas Papandreou — one of Greece’s most charismatic yet polarizing leaders. Drawing from archival research, declassified CIA documents, and historical accounts, she explored how Papandreou’s populism and clientelist practices reshaped Greek politics during his premierships (1981–1989, 1993–1996) and left a lasting imprint on Greece’s democratic institutions, political culture, and economic trajectory.
Professor Kosmetatou framed Papandreou as a transformative yet controversial figure, whose governance combined populist mobilization with entrenched patronage networks. His leadership marked a critical juncture in Greece’s modern history, defined by democratization after the fall of the junta, accession to the European Economic Community (EEC), and struggles over modernization and European integration. Yet, she argued, Papandreou’s blend of charismatic authority, populist narratives, and systemic clientelism simultaneously empowered marginalized groups while deepening structural vulnerabilities that still shape Greek politics today.
Early Life, Political Formation, and Exile
Born in 1919 into a prominent political family, Andreas Papandreou was the son of George Papandreou, one of Greece’s most influential liberal statesmen, nicknamed “the Old Man of Democracy.” Despite growing up under his father’s towering shadow, Andreas forged his own path, first as a Harvard-trained economist and later as a professor at elite US universities including Minnesota, Northwestern, and Berkeley, where he chaired the economics department.
Papandreou’s early political experiences were shaped by Greece’s turbulent mid-20th century history: authoritarianism under Metaxas (1936–1941), the Greek Civil War (1946–1949), and the deep polarization between left and right. Arrested in 1939 for links to a Trotskyist group, he fled to the US and reinvented himself academically before returning to Greece in 1963 to enter politics under his father’s Center Union Party.
By the mid-1960s, Papandreou had already cultivated an image as a radical reformer within the establishment. However, the 1967 military coup disrupted his rise: he was arrested, imprisoned, and later exiled to Sweden and Canada. It was during this exile that he founded PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) in 1974, marking a decisive ideological break from his father’s centrist tradition. Six years later, in the 1981 elections, PASOK surged from 13% to 48% of the vote — an unprecedented transformation in Greek political history.
Charismatic Leadership and Populist Narrative
Professor Kosmetatou emphasized Papandreou’s mastery of charismatic authority, placing him within the Weberian framework of “extraordinary leaders” who derive legitimacy not from institutions but from personal magnetism. His style combined academic intellect with performative populism, making him both an elite economist and a fiery nationalist orator.
His political discourse blended anti-elitism, social justice, and sovereignty. Papandreou portrayed Greece as a “dependent country” shackled by foreign powers, casting “the people” against corrupt domestic elites and imperialist outsiders — first the United States (blamed for supporting the junta and mishandling Cyprus) and later Germany (associated with austerity and economic conditionality).
One of Papandreou’s slogans, “Η Ελλάδα στους Έλληνες” (“Greece belongs to the Greeks”), became emblematic of his populist framing. He called for “change” (αλλαγή), promising to restore national dignity, expand welfare protections, and empower ordinary citizens. His rallies drew hundreds of thousands — sometimes over a million attendees — turning politics into mass performance. His speeches, delivered in simple, emotive language infused with slang, created a sense of collective ownership over history, epitomized by PASOK’s iconic slogan: “Ραντεβού με την Ιστορία” (“Appointment with History”).
Professor Kosmetatou argued that Papandreou’s charisma and mobilization techniques placed him within a global tradition of populist leadership, comparable to Perón in Argentina, Chávez in Venezuela, or Narendra Modi in India. However, his brand of populism was distinctly Greek, rooted in historical grievances, cultural narratives, and the lingering trauma of civil conflict.
Clientelism, Patronage, and Institutional Transformation
A central theme of the presentation was Papandreou’s use of clientelism — the exchange of public resources for political loyalty — as both a tool of governance and a mechanism of populist inclusion.
Papandreou’s governments expanded the public sector dramatically, appointing thousands of loyalists to state jobs, often bypassing competitive exams. Subsidies, pensions, and direct resource allocations were distributed along patronage networks spanning unions, rural constituencies, and marginalized groups historically excluded from power.
While this empowered underrepresented communities, Professor Kosmetatou stressed, it also entrenched dependence on the state and weakened institutional autonomy. Ministries became politicized, bureaucratic turnover soared, and policymaking increasingly relied on informal personal networks rather than transparent procedures. Papandreou frequently handpicked ministers and dismissed them abruptly — most famously firing Deputy Foreign Minister Asimakis Fotilas in 1982 for diverging from his directives at a European Community meeting.
Over time, clientelist governance blurred into systemic corruption. Major scandals, such as the Koskotas affair, implicated senior officials and eroded public trust. By normalizing patronage, Papandreou reshaped Greek political culture: all major parties adopted similar practices, embedding clientelism as a defining feature of the Greek state well beyond his premiership.
Economic Policy, European Integration, and Fiscal Vulnerability
Professor Kosmetatou situated Papandreou’s populism within Greece’s shifting economic and European context. After joining the European Economic Community in 1981, Greece received massive inflows of EU structural funds with minimal oversight. Papandreou used these resources to expand welfare spending, subsidize key sectors, and support clientelist distribution — while maintaining low taxation levels. Public debt, however, escalated sharply: In 1981, debt was 23% of GDP, by 1991, it had risen to 71%, and by 2002, when Greece entered the Eurozone, it stood at 117%.
Professor Kosmetatou highlighted how populist fiscal policies, combined with persistent trade deficits and weak administrative controls, laid the groundwork for Greece’s 2010 sovereign debt crisis. Declassified CIA reports from the 1980s had already warned of structural vulnerabilities, citing unsustainable populist spending and limited regulatory oversight.
Despite his anti-European rhetoric, Papandreou pragmatically kept Greece within the EEC and NATO, using nationalist themes to negotiate aid and favorable military balances, especially vis-à-vis Turkey. This dual strategy — radical discourse paired with pragmatic diplomacy — epitomized Papandreou’s political adaptability.
Reforms and Contradictions
Papandreou’s governments were not solely defined by patronage and debt; they also enacted significant social reforms that reshaped Greek society: Establishing a National Health Service to expand hospital access; liberalizing family law, strengthening women’s rights in marriage and divorce; introducing student participation in university governance, transforming academic culture; and officially recognizing the Greek Resistance during the German occupation, granting symbolic justice to excluded generations. Yet these reforms coexisted with instability and scandals. Between 1981 and 1989, his cabinets reshuffled 13 times, reflecting the fragility of decision-making within an intensely personalized political system.
Professor Kosmetatou argued that Papandreou’s contradictory legacy—progressive reforms alongside deepened clientelism and fiscal imbalances—continues to shape Greece’s governance and economic trajectory today.
Legacy and Polarization
Nearly three decades after his death in 1996, Papandreou remains one of Greece’s most polarizing figures. To admirers, he was the liberator who brought αλλαγή (“change”), consolidated democracy after the junta, and gave voice to marginalized groups. To critics, he was the architect of systemic corruption, unsustainable debt, and institutional decay.
Nevertheless, Professor Kosmetatou stressed, Papandreou’s mastery of populist charisma fundamentally transformed Greek political culture. His ability to mobilize mass enthusiasm, personalize governance, and redefine national identity created a template for subsequent Greek leaders, including Alexis Tsipras of Syriza, who consciously modeled aspects of his style on Papandreou’s performative populism.
PASOK’s decline after Papandreou’s death underscores the personalized nature of his power. Without his leadership, the party fragmented, highlighting the structural risks of politics built on charismatic authority rather than institutional strength.
Conclusion
Professor Kosmetatou concluded that Andreas Papandreou’s legacy embodies the paradox of populism: it can simultaneously democratize and destabilize. Through charisma, clientelism, and mass mobilization, Papandreou transformed Greek politics, empowered excluded constituencies, and reoriented the nation’s relationship with Europe and the global order. Yet, his fiscal policies, personalized governance, and embedded patronage systems created enduring vulnerabilities — economic, institutional, and cultural — that continue to shape Greece’s trajectory well into the 21st century.
Papandreou’s story illustrates a broader lesson about populism’s dual edge: while it can energize democratic participation, it often weakens institutional capacity, leaving states exposed to future crises. As Professor Kosmetatou concluded, understanding Papandreou’s era is essential not only to explaining Greece’s recent past but also to grappling with the long-term consequences of charismatic populism in contemporary democracies.
BJP supporters celebrate Narendra Modi’s victory during the 2019 assembly elections in Bhopal, India. Photo: Dreamstime.
Discussant Dr. João Ferreira Dias: Is Populism Offspring of Crisis—or Accelerant?
Dr. João Ferreira Dias offered a brisk, conceptually grounded set of remarks that stitched the panel’s papers into a broader argument about what populism is and how it works. He opened by defining populism less as a doctrine than as a discourse and performance that can be grafted onto multiple ideologies. In his view, it thrives amid social and political polarization and is frequently entangled with ethno-nationalism, his own area of research. Populist drama, he suggested, often promises a kind of psychological or spiritual renewal for the nation.
On Dynasties, Big Business, and Outsider Rhetoric
Responding to the first paper, Dr. Dias praised the conceptual pairings—“orphans,” “patricians,” and “entrenched elites”—as analytically fertile. The “orphan” posture lets leaders claim proximity to “the people,” while elite lineage can be reframed as stability, experience, and success. He urged the authors to sharpen the paradox of Trump and Modi: both channel anti-elite narratives while forging tactical alliances with powerful political and economic actors (e.g., tech and corporate lobbies). Historically, dynasties are part of the democratic “furniture”; what is new, he argued, is the coincidencia oppositorum—the coupling of oligarchic networks, family power, and anti-establishment populism—that uses national drama to claim, and then consolidate, power.
On Out-groups and Elite Cues
Turning to the second paper, Dr. Dias underscored the centrality of in-group/out-group framing in populist strategy, noting how leaders in the US and Europe defend a supposed “biocultural identity” against migrants and minorities. He welcomed the distinction between “follow-the-leader” (elite cues) and “social attributes” effects, but argued they often operate together. Drawing on Portugal, he described how André Ventura is portrayed as a “weather vane,” echoing bottom-up talk from taxis, taverns, and social media, even as top-down moral panics about migration are manufactured by elites and amplified by media competition for audience share. He found the study’s results striking: Trump’s cues polarize rather than persuade—conservatives rally, liberals recoil—implying that the real mechanism is mobilization and polarization, not cross-cutting persuasion. A qualitative agenda, he added, should test whether “follow-the-leader” is the DNA of MAGA, a coordinated reaction to social change, economic anxiety, and migration pressures that Trump effectively orchestrated.
On Economic Crisis and Divergent Populisms
Addressing the comparative paper on Thailand, Argentina, Greece, and the US, Dr. Dias lauded its robust design, showing how economic dislocation yields different populist species: military intervention in Thailand, Kirchnerismo in Argentina, left-nationalist forms in Greece, and Trumpism in the US. He suggested extending the arc to Milei’s libertarian populism in Argentina, which flips the economic script (anti-state, radical market) while retaining the populist grammar of “the people” vs. “the caste.” Populism, he argued, is reshaped by successive crises rather than produced once and for all. Likewise, the post-2008 surge of Europe’s radical left often subsided as party systems re-sorted (he cited Portugal’s sharp contraction from a 19-seat bloc to a single deputy). He floated Brazilian parallels (Collor’s campaigning among the “shirtless” and urban poor) to show how stylistic outreach can reposition populist appeals. The larger theoretical question he posed: Does populism require economic crisis, or do crises simply accelerate latent cultural and socioeconomic grievances that populists voice and mobilize?
On Papandreou: Charisma, Clientelism, and Executive Populism
Dr. Dias called the historical reconstruction excellent and asked whether charisma mainly legitimized clientelism or constituted an independent source of appeal. He proposed reading Andreas Papandreou as an instance of “cabinet” or “executive” populism: not merely oppositional rhetoric, but a mode of governing—concentrating power, distributing state resources, and embedding patronage. Comparing Portugal, he noted how the Socialist Party lost voters amid perceptions of clientelism and corruption, illustrating how left populisms that once represented “the people” can later cede ground to the right. His key questions for Greece were pointed: To what extent did Papandreou strengthen democracy while simultaneously entrenching clientelist practices? And how did European integration and EU funds help mask or magnify the paradox of populism plus clientelism?
Cross-cutting themes and closing provocations. Across the papers, Dr. Dias returned to three through-lines:
Performance over program: Populism is stylistic and strategic, injected into left, right, or libertarian projects as needed.
Polarization over persuasion: Elite cues rarely convert opponents; they harden camps and energize bases.
National political cultures matter: Populism travels, but local institutions, histories, and media ecosystems shape its form, targets, and durability.
He encouraged further work on media logics (how competition and virality make charismatic leaders “fashionable”), on the feedback loop between grassroots talk and elite cue-setting, and on the institutional afterlives of populist governance—especially where clientelist distribution becomes routine statecraft. His final challenge to the panel distilled his critique: Is populism the offspring of crisis, or the accelerant that turns smoldering cleavages into open fire?
Overall Conclusion
Session 1 underscored a clear, sobering consensus: populist authoritarianism is less a fixed ideology than a flexible toolkit that exploits uncertainty, identity conflict, and institutional weakness. Across cases—from India and the US to Greece, Thailand, and Argentina—speakers showed how leaders fuse outsider performances with insider alliances (dynasties, corporate finance), mobilize elite cues to polarize rather than persuade, and convert economic shocks into durable political change. Professor Sanders’ structural diagnosis (eroded left–right anchors, post-truth dynamics, migration politics, identity fragmentation, globalization’s losers, and strategic norm-bending) aligned with panel evidence that national political cultures filter these pressures into distinct, yet rhyming, trajectories.
The session also pointed toward remedies. Reclaiming immigration with humane, evidence-based policy; rebalancing rights discourse to include community goods; rewiring globalization to protect social contracts; rebuilding state capacity; and enforcing platform accountability emerged as mutually reinforcing priorities. Methodologically, participants called for comparative, mixed-methods research that links micro-level opinion formation and media incentives to macro-level patterns of executive aggrandizement and clientelist governance.
As the series proceeds, ECPS will move from diagnosis to design: testing what institutional guardrails, civic coalitions, and communicative strategies actually bend polarization downward and restore democratic problem-solving. The challenge is long-term, but the session showed a path—empirical, interdisciplinary, and resolutely comparative.
In a wide-ranging ECPS interview, Ben-Gurion University scholar Halleli Pinson argues that Israel’s Gaza policy is intertwined with an illiberal turn at home. “The polarization we saw before October 7 around judicial reform,” she notes, “is now translated into how people understand the war and the hostages,” adding that “the continuation of the war serves this broader agenda… to reconstruct the Israeli regime into an illiberal one.”Dr. Pinson details how curricula sideline liberal democracy while NGOs and academics face a shrinking space for dissent. Media framings and social media echo chambers deepen an “epistemic polarization.” Though anti-war discourse is growing, she warns that animosities are hardening: “It may take a generation to shift the discourse toward a more liberal, mainstream orientation.”
The ongoing Gaza war has not only reshaped regional geopolitics but has also profoundly transformed Israel’s political culture, educational discourse, and democratic institutions. In this exclusive interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Associate Professor Halleli Pinson, a political sociologist of education at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, provides a compelling analysis of the interplay between right-wing populism, illiberalism, and knowledge production in Israel, revealing how the conflict intersects with broader ideological projects.
At the heart of her argument lies a critical assessment of the government’s use of the war to advance structural political changes. As Dr. Pinson observes, “The polarization that we experienced in the year and a half before October 7th around the judicial reform is, in a sense, translated into how people understand the government’s policy regarding the war and the hostages.” She highlights a direct link between the government’s attacks on democratic institutions — such as the Supreme Court and the Attorney General — and its broader populist strategy: “The continuation of the war serves this broader agenda, attempting, in a way, to reconstruct the Israeli regime into an illiberal one.”
For Dr. Pinson, this illiberal turn is deeply embedded in Israel’s educational and discursive transformation. Over the past decade and a half, she argues, populist discourse has profoundly reshaped curricula, civic education, and public understanding of democracy. Discussions of liberal values, multiculturalism, and human rights are increasingly sidelined, while “illiberal democratic models” are emphasized. As she explains, Israel is being redefined “as primarily Jewish first and democratic only when it aligns with that identity,” a shift that has normalized the erasure of the Green Line and reframed settlements as integral parts of Israel.
The interview also delves into the shrinking space for dissent in both schools and universities. NGOs like Breaking the Silence and other human rights groups are excluded from classrooms, while academics face growing pressures under proposed legislation that would allow universities to dismiss professors “accused of supporting terrorism” — a definition so vague, Dr. Pinson warns, that “saying that there is starvation in Gaza or standing with photographs of children who lost their lives could be considered as support for terrorism.”
Finally, Dr. Pinson reflects on Israel’s fractured society and the growing epistemic polarization intensified by the war. While public criticism of the government has increased, she is concerned about entrenched animosities: “The level of hatred being cultivated between camps is deeply concerning… I’m not very optimistic, and I believe it’s going to take a generation to shift the discourse toward a more liberal, mainstream orientation.”
This conversation offers an essential lens for understanding how the Gaza war intersects with Israel’s democratic backsliding, populist rhetoric, and societal divides.
Here is the transcript of our interview with Associate Professor Halleli Pinson, edited lightly for readability.
Populist Discourse Is Reshaping Education and Normalizing the Occupation
Professor Pinson, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: How has the rise of right-wing populism in Israel shaped curriculum design, educational policy, and civic education? In what ways does this curricular engineering affect how younger generations understand Gaza, Palestinian society, and the broader conflict?
Associate Professor Halleli Pinson: Let me start by saying that populist discourse over the past decade, or even longer, has significantly influenced curriculum and educational discourse — not only in high schools and schools in general but also within higher education institutions. While it is somewhat speculative to assess precisely how this shapes views of Gaza, I can offer a few examples of how such populist discourse has manifested in the field of education. For instance, just this week we learned that the civic education curriculum — specifically the matriculation exam for next year — will exclude discussions of liberal democracy, human rights, and related topics. Although it does not explicitly state that these subjects are being removed from the curriculum, the Ministry of Education sets annual focus areas, and this year, these topics have simply been omitted from that focus.
On the other hand, when it comes to defining Israel as a Jewish state, its commitment to the Jewish people, and other models of democracy referenced in textbooks or the curriculum — what I would term “illiberal democratic models” — these are increasingly emphasized at the expense of discussions on liberal democracy, multiculturalism, civil rights, and human rights. This reflects the particular type of populism characteristic of Israel, which prioritizes defining Israel as a Jewish state rather than as a democratic one, effectively reducing its democratic nature to a very thin model of democracy. These changes are consistently reflected in school curricula.
I would argue that this shift — from understanding Israel as both Jewish and democratic, or democratic and Jewish, to viewing it as primarily Jewish first and democratic only when it aligns with that identity — has, over the past decade and a half, become fully normalized within educational discourse and the production of knowledge in education. It began with significant changes to the civic curriculum but extended further, such as the complete erasure of the Green Line from geography and history textbooks, effectively normalizing settlements in the West Bank as integral parts of Israel.
I am quite certain that if you asked the average high school student in Israel, or even an undergraduate, many would neither know where the Green Line is nor recognize that places like Ariel are located in occupied territory. They are unlikely to use the language of “occupied territories” or acknowledge that understanding at all. In my generation, people debated whether Israel should continue the occupation or not, but it was at least understood as an open question. Today, however, the occupation has been so normalized that most people no longer perceive it as occupation. This, without doubt, has significant ramifications for how the conflict in Gaza — and the ongoing war there — is understood and discussed, if at all, in education today.
Shrinking Space for Dissent: Populism Redraws the Boundaries of Legitimate Discourse
The exclusion of NGOs such as Breaking the Silence and growing pressures on left-leaning academics point to shrinking intellectual pluralism. To what extent do these measures reflect a broader populist strategy to control knowledge production and suppress dissent?
Associate Professor Halleli Pinson: I want to broaden the discussion beyond knowledge production to consider how actions such as the exclusion of NGOs like Breaking the Silence, the Forum for Grieving Families, and other left-wing or human rights organizations from schools reflect a broader process. I see this as part of a deliberate redrawing of the boundaries of legitimate discourse within the Israeli education system. It is not only about knowledge production itself, which primarily occurs through curriculum design, but also about the types of discourse and political perspectives to which students are exposed. In this regard, the boundaries have been significantly reshaped — a process that began before October 7th but has deepened even more profoundly over the past two years.
Several practices are being employed by right-wing populist organizations and politicians. The first is portraying groups like Breaking the Silence as “traitors.” Especially during wartime, they are framed as supporters or enablers of terrorism. In such an environment, if you do not want to be associated with terrorism, you are compelled to distance yourself from these discourses. This is not only about shifting the boundaries of discourse but also about redefining what is considered legitimate political conversation within schools — what you are allowed to question and what you are not.
To illustrate, I’ll give an example from the last two weeks. A group of school principals and high school teachers published a video calling for an end to the war, criticizing the government’s policies, and expressing concern over the humanitarian crisis and death toll in Gaza, as well as demanding the release of hostages. Following the video, about 20 principals were summoned to the Ministry of Education for what was essentially a disciplinary warning, even though it was not an official hearing. They were cautioned that they had crossed the boundaries of what is considered permissible for educators to say. The same applied to teachers.
Then, on September 1st — the first day of the school year in Israel — students at several schools organized a strike calling for an end to the war, the release of hostages, and an end to the suffering in Gaza. The response from Education Minister Yoav Kish was twofold. First, he instructed schools to mark these students as absent in their personal files, introducing a punitive element. Second, he publicly addressed the striking students, accusing them of jeopardizing national unity and being divisive.
From my perspective, as someone who studies the effects of populism on both schools and higher education, this demonstrates how the space for criticism and democratic discourse is constantly shrinking. A year ago, it was more mainstream to discuss the hostages openly. Now, combining discussions about hostages with calls to end the war is framed as crossing the boundaries of legitimate discourse established by the Ministry of Education.
This extends beyond schools to higher education institutions. Less than two weeks ago, during a nationwide strike organized by the campaign to end the war and release the hostages, many university professors — including heads of major Israeli universities — declared they would personally participate. The Minister of Education responded by instructing the Ministry of Finance to dock their pay for the day of the strike.
These measures, especially when directed at principals and teachers who are more vulnerable than university professors, create a powerful chilling effect on critical discourse and dissent within Israel’s educational system.
Public Opinion Shifts, but Denial and Division Persist
Israelis protest at Tel Aviv against Netanyahu’s anti-democratic coup on April 1, 2023. Photo: Avivi Aharon.
How has Israeli public opinion evolved throughout the Gaza war, and to what extent do these shifts reflect deeper sociopolitical cleavages within Israeli society—such as ethnic, ideological, or generational divides?
Associate Professor Halleli Pinson: This is a very good question, and there has indeed been some evolution in how the Israeli public responds to the war. To some extent, there is a change, and I’ll try to explain what I mean by that. The war itself is now more heavily criticized. A large part of the Israeli Jewish population, according to public polls, seems to understand that the continuation of the war is political, serving the interests of the current government, and particularly Benjamin Netanyahu. In this sense, there has been an evolution.
A year ago, or even right after October 7th, the majority of the Israeli public believed the war was justified — that it was the only solution and what needed to be done. Now, however, there is a more critical understanding of the continuation of the war. People are increasingly critical of the burden that many reserve soldiers are paying as the price of sustaining it, and there is a deep concern about the fate of the hostages as the conflict drags on. In that sense, there has been a significant shift in public opinion.
But what hasn’t changed much, or not to the same extent, is the ability of the Israeli public to actually understand, acknowledge, or be critical of what’s happening in Gaza. I think Jewish-Israeli public opinion can be divided into groups — setting aside those on the far right who openly support the continuation of Gaza’s destruction and even talk about plans such as building a Riviera there once they “get rid of everyone.” For the majority, however, there is either complete denial of what’s happening in Gaza or apathy toward it.
In that respect, I’m not sure how much public opinion has truly changed. There are cracks, yes — more attempts by left-wing activists and organizations to bring the issues of starvation, rising death tolls, and widespread destruction into the public sphere. But there is also widespread disbelief, with some dismissing reports about starvation as “AI-generated” or fake, while others say, “Yes, it’s regrettable, but it’s their fault because of October 7th.” Some express even harsher views, saying, “After October 7th, I lost all ability to be compassionate about the other side.”
For me, this is extremely difficult to hear and accept, but I think it reflects ongoing processes in Israeli society that began long before October 7th and whose consequences we are now witnessing.
I would also say there’s a strong correlation between the people who, before October 7th, were out on the streets protesting the judicial overhaul and the actions of the current government against the Supreme Court and other democratic gatekeepers, and those who are now protesting the continuation of the war. But it’s important to note that many of these protesters are not necessarily motivated by concern for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza; rather, they oppose the war because they believe it harms Israel’s own interests, undermines its security, and jeopardizes its democracy.
Competing Truths and Growing Epistemic Polarization
Israeli newspapers and magazines on display in the streets of Tel Aviv, December 12, 2018. Photo: Jose Hernandez.
To what degree has the Israeli media ecosystem—spanning state-controlled outlets, private mainstream channels, and social media—contributed to the construction of competing “truth regimes” around the Gaza war? Are we witnessing a process of epistemic polarization that reshapes how different publics understand the conflict?
Associate Professor Halleli Pinson: Let’s start with the mainstream media. The mainstream media has completely failed in its role of exposing the Israeli public to the full picture of what’s going on, including the costs for everyone. For the better part of at least the first year and a half, there were very rarely any reports about what was happening in Gaza. And, when there were reports from Gaza, they were almost always from the perspective of the soldiers. You’d have a reporter or reporters joining one of the units serving in Gaza — Israeli journalists — and all of this was always coordinated by the IDF spokesperson unit. As a result, the majority of the Israeli public was not really exposed to what was actually happening in Gaza. Even now, when there is a bit more discussion and slightly greater exposure, it is still presented in a very limited way and within a very specific narrative that avoids placing any blame on the actions of Israel.
So, just to give you an example — I don’t remember the exact phrasing, but when the international reports about starvation in Gaza started to appear, one of the Israeli channels — I think it was Channel 13 — reported, kind of “revealing” that the majority of the children who died of starvation had pre-medical conditions that probably contributed to them dying from starvation. The way it was framed, it was like, “Hey, here we reveal the big lie. There is no starvation; people are not dying of starvation in Gaza. Actually, those who died from starvation were dying because they had pre-medical conditions.” And that was, in a way, saying to the Israeli public, “Hey, look, it’s not our fault.”
When it comes to social media, I sometimes feel almost like I’m in my own bubble because this is the way social media works. So, I see reports of the destruction in Gaza — and I’m exposed to this sort of information, and the majority of my social media friends, followers, or the people I follow are in agreement with me. But when you look a bit outside, you’ll see — and I’ve heard it from people at the university whom I would consider smart, critical people — they’ll say, “This is fake news; this is AI. The whole starvation photographs are all AI-generated. There’s no real starvation.”
There’s great disbelief in the reports coming from Gaza and a lack of critical questioning, like, “How come we don’t get independent reports from Gaza, for instance?” This is a question I’d like my students to ask — why we don’t know. And so, this is something where we see a great epistemic crisis, in a sense, or polarization between those who are 100% aware and exposed to what’s going on in Gaza and what’s going on in the rest of the world, and, on the other hand, those who are kind of completely blind or in denial about what’s going on.
I’ll just give you an example. This polarization is also visible in political activism in the streets. In the past several months, there’s been an initiative in Tel Aviv during the big weekly demonstration — the one for the release of the hostages and against the continuation of the war. There’s a growing group of people who stand with photographs of children who were killed in Gaza. And this is amidst a crowd that’s there to say they’re against the war. In that instance, I think it made people think and reflect, like, “Okay, maybe it’s not just our suffering.”
But when this sort of vigil went to other parts of the city — not during the weekly demonstration — and I stood in those vigils, the level of contempt and hatred it attracted was intense because it put a mirror in front of people in Israel. We were standing with photographs of children, and the responses would be either disbelief or accusations: “You’re Hamas supporters.” Or, “Well, even if they are children, they’ll grow up to be Nukhba (the special forces unit of Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas)and they’ll do the next massacre.”
So, again, there’s this movement between denial and justification, for lack of a better word. And I’ll give you another example. There’s also a campaign against starvation, which is, again, a vigil where we stand holding empty pots and pans in the street. There was a video released two days ago of about 15 chefs and restaurateurs standing with empty pots and pans and calling for an end to starvation. This was just two days ago. The chefs of these restaurants have been under attack for the last two or three days. Their Google rankings dropped because people are condemning them. Again, anything you say that expresses concern and empathy is immediately — in the public discourse, even among those who object to the war — seen as coming at the expense of caring for the hostages or “our own kind.” It is immediately framed as, “You support the other side.” So, again, there’s this sense that you cannot be compassionate toward both.
From Judicial Reform to Gaza: Populism Driving Israel’s Illiberal Turn
Massive protests against Netanyahu’s government predated the Gaza war but have intersected with it in complex ways. How do these demonstrations reveal competing conceptions of democracy in Israel, and do they indicate a growing rift between state policy and societal norms?
Associate Professor Halleli Pinson: The short answer is definitely yes. You can clearly see the polarization — and I mentioned it before — that we experienced in the year and a half before October 7th around the judicial reform being, in a sense, translated into how people understand the government’s policy regarding the war and the hostages. There are also many connections being made between the government’s attacks on the Supreme Court, the Attorney General, and other democratic institutions, and how the continuation of the war serves this broader agenda, attempting, in a way, to reconstruct the Israeli regime into an illiberal one.
Going back to populism and the first question you asked me, we can see that many of the justifications the government uses draw directly on this populist discourse of “us against them,” “the will of the people,” “the true people,” and identifying those who are singled out as the “enemy within” or the “objective enemy,” and so on. These sorts of practices are used both in the context of the judicial reform and in justifying the continuation of the war.
The Catch-22 of International Boycotts
Pro-Palestinian protesters hold signs. Photo: Oliver Perez.
How does international criticism—including accusations of genocide by prominent scholars and institutions—shape Israeli public opinion and elite discourse? Do external pressures generate defensive consolidation around government narratives, or do they stimulate critical reflexivity among Israeli publics?
Associate Professor Halleli Pinson: This is something that I find very difficult to respond to. First, I would focus even more on the calls for an academic boycott of Israel. And let me say, to begin with, that I understand why people — my colleagues in other places around the world, university students, or academic associations — feel that they need to do something about what’s going on in Gaza. Whatever label we put on it, genocide or not, what’s going on in Gaza is on a scale that is unimaginable, and I wouldn’t like to see people being silenced globally in the face of what’s happening there.
But then, when I look at how this sort of criticism is being perceived in Israel, it’s more complex than that, and the political effectiveness of such measures is problematic. Just to explain, there’s a sort of Catch-22. I spoke about how Israeli media and the Israeli public perceive what’s going on in Gaza and about the movement of the majority of the public between denial, apathy, and justification — but with little, if any, self-reflection or sense of responsibility.
When this narrative is so strong — and it is a very strong narrative, even among those who oppose the continuation of the war — then, when people, organizations, or states call for sanctioning or boycotting Israel, the way it’s interpreted is: “Okay, here again, this is another proof that the world is against us.”
I had numerous conversations with people whom I greatly respect, and they would say things like, “Israel is being held to higher standards, and this is why we are attacked,” and, of course, they argue that this is no more than another expression of anti-Semitism. So, these are the sorts of ways this is perceived among the Israeli public. I’m not necessarily saying that people who oppose the government or Netanyahu will rally around him, but it is definitely not perceived as something helpful in terms of shaping public opinion or making people in Israel more aware or more reflective about their role or responsibility.
When it comes to the academic boycott — and this is, again, something I feel uneasy saying because, obviously, I am directly affected as an Israeli academic — I can only reflect on my own experience. I would say that, in a way, Israeli universities, and especially professors in the social sciences and humanities, have been targeted by the government for at least the past decade and a half. We’re being portrayed either as “the enemy within” or directly targeted through legislative measures intended to narrow or restrict the boundaries of legitimate discourse and sanction academics.
There is one very important piece of legislation currently under discussion — it has already passed its first reading in the Knesset — which states that universities will have to fire, without any due process, any professor accused of supporting terrorism. On the face of it, it sounds like, “Okay, of course, no country can allow anyone who supports terrorism to teach in a university.” But the way it’s framed in this legislation is problematic. First, it’s important to note that it essentially seeks to change the legislation around the autonomy of the Council of Higher Education, which is, in itself, a very problematic and populist move, taking a page out of Orbán’s book in Hungary. But basically, it doesn’t define what “supporting terrorism” means. And in the eyes of the government, as I explained before, saying that there is starvation in Gaza or standing with photographs of children who lost their lives in Gaza is considered support for terrorism. So, if this legislation passes, someone from a right-wing organization could accuse me — Halleli Pinson — of supporting terrorism, and the university would be obliged to fire me without compensation, without my pension. And if the university refuses to fire me, the government would cut its funding.
This legislation hasn’t fully passed yet, and it probably won’t pass in its harshest form, but even in its current form, it has a chilling effect. And again, right-wing organizations like Im Tirtzu and others are actively targeting university professors — not just for what we teach or don’t teach in the classroom, but also, not in my case personally, for what we post on our Facebook pages, demanding that universities fire professors who “don’t say the right thing.”
There’s also similar legislation being discussed to restrict student activities, which, of course, puts Palestinian professors and students at even greater risk than people like me who are identified as left-wing. So, I’m saying all this to explain that, in a way, it feels like, in the past year, we are being attacked by our colleagues abroad for not taking enough action or responsibility, and the calls for boycotting are growing stronger and stronger. But at the same time, I’m not sure the international community fully understands that we are also being attacked from within for speaking out about what’s going on in Gaza.
I’m not sure that boycotting us will actually make a difference in terms of policy because this government already has its vendetta against universities to begin with. And definitely, if I have less power within Israel and also have to worry about my collaborations outside Israel, then my ability to influence change becomes questionable — whether it grows or is, in fact, reduced. And I think that’s the Catch-22 here, which is problematic when it comes to calls for boycotting and sanctioning Israel. The real question is whether it’s effective — and I’m not sure that it is.
Gaza War Deepens Divides, A Generation Needed for Democratic Renewal
And lastly, Professor Pinson, looking beyond the immediate conflict, how might the Gaza war transform Israeli political culture, intergroup relations, and trust in democratic institutions? Do you foresee the entrenchment of a security-oriented populist paradigm, or is there potential for societal reimagining and reconciliation?
Associate Professor Halleli Pinson: I would say that I’m very much encouraged by the growing discourse in Israel against the war, and this is something that has been evolving over the past six months, or even more, over the past year. But I’m quite certain that, at some point, the war will end, as wars tend to. However, the damage being done to Israeli society internally is profound — both in terms of what has already happened and what is yet to come. Will people actually realize what has been going on in Gaza, come to terms with it, or will denial no longer be possible?
There is also the deepening rift that has been created, which is becoming even more pronounced, between those who support the continuation of the war and those who don’t — between the heads of the right-wing parties and their supporters, on the one hand, and segments of the more mainstream public on the other. The level of animosity and hatred that is, in a sense, being cultivated between these two camps is deeply concerning.
So, I’m not very optimistic, and I believe it’s going to take a generation to shift the discourse toward a more liberal, mainstream orientation.
In this incisive conversation, Brookings scholar Professor William A. Galston argues that America’s decentralized system remains a crucial brake on executive overreach. While warning of real risks, he maintains, “We’re not there yet,” distinguishing the US from harder cases of institutional capture abroad. Professor Galston spotlights federalism and the courts as the decisive arena of resistance—urging institutions to defend their prerogatives through litigation, “not street protests but the law.” He assesses the influence of Project 2025, redistricting fights in Texas/California, and the politics of immigration, crime, and DEI, noting potential backlash among centrist voters. The result is a clear-eyed appraisal of democratic resilience—and the legal contests that will shape whether the US moves toward or away from competitive authoritarianism.
Giving an in-depth interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS),Professor William A. Galston — senior fellow and the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Governance Studies program at Brookings Institution and a leading authority on American governance, populism, and institutional resilience — provides a comprehensive analysis of the evolving dynamics of US democracy under President Donald Trump’s second administration. Drawing on his deep expertise in political institutions and constitutional law, Professor Galston examines how federalism, legal contestation, and civil society remain central to safeguarding checks and balances amid mounting executive centralization.
As the title emphasizes, “US. Federalism Slows the Shift Toward Competitive Authoritarianism,” Professor Galston underscores that America’s decentralized political structure continues to serve as a buffer against executive overreach. He stresses that, despite concerns about democratic backsliding, the US is not yet on par with countries such as Hungary, Turkey, or India, where institutional capture has been far more extensive. “We’re not there yet,” Professor Galston explains, “and I am hopeful that we’ll never get there.”
A recurring theme throughout the interview is the growing role of law as the principal arena of political struggle. Professor Galston argues that the resilience of US democracy increasingly depends on institutions defending their legal prerogatives: “Pushing back, using not street protests but the law, will be the most important venue of contestation.”
This dynamic is vividly illustrated in his discussion of a recent legal battle involving Harvard University, which challenged the Trump administration’s attempt to withhold federal research funds. A federal judge sided with the university, ruling that the administration’s actions were unconstitutional. For Professor Galston, this episode demonstrates that institutions “with the will to defend their legal rights can push back — and push back effectively.”
The interview also delves into the strategic influence of Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation in shaping Trump’s second-term agenda. Professor Galston notes that the initiative has successfully translated its ideas into both institutional frameworks and personnel appointments, allowing the administration to pursue expansive interpretations of executive authority while testing the limits of constitutional constraints.
Additionally, Professor Galston examines redistricting battles, such as those in Texas and California, highlighting how federalism enables both parties to counterbalance each other’s maneuvers, thereby slowing the concentration of power at the national level.
Finally, Galston reflects on the broader trajectory of US democracy, warning that the coming years will be decisive in determining whether constitutional norms can withstand mounting pressures. Yet he remains cautiously optimistic, noting that state governments, universities, professional associations, and civil society are “waking up” to the importance of defending democratic principles.
This interview offers a nuanced, scholarly perspective on the complex interplay between institutional resilience and executive ambition, providing crucial insights into America’s democratic future.
Professor William A. Galston is a senior fellow and the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Governance Studies program at Brookings Institution and a leading authority on American governance, populism, and institutional resilience.
Here is the transcript of our interview with Professor William A. Galston, edited lightly for readability.
Executive Power Expands, but the Rule of Law Faces Its Test
Professor Galston, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: How has Trump’s second-term agenda accelerated the concentration of executive power relative to his first term? Do you see evidence of a shift from ad hoc populist mobilization toward more institutionalized mechanisms of executive aggrandizement?
Professor William A. Galston: I certainly do. There has been a dramatic shift from President Trump’s first term to his second, largely because those around him who share his general worldview used those four years to craft a highly detailed agenda — not only a policy agenda but also an institutional and legal one — aimed at expanding the perimeter of executive power. They are pursuing this through the strategic use of existing laws and mechanisms. They are not coming in and declaring the Constitution invalid or claiming that the laws do not count. Rather, they are saying, “Here’s how we interpret the law,” in order to give the president the authority to do things that previous presidents did not attempt. This has created a legal struggle, which I believe lies at the heart of the current divisions in American politics.
In your statement to the NYT, you argue that Trump has pushed the role of the president far beyond what his predecessors would have ever tried. There are already respected scholars who call Trump ‘a dictator.’ Would you agree with this characterization?
Professor William A. Galston: No, I would not — at least not yet. The president has said that if the Supreme Court rules against him in a particular matter, he will respect that ruling and will no longer do what he is forbidden to do. That promise has not yet been tested. But the moment of truth will come sometime in the next 12 months. The Supreme Court, I believe, is very likely — and I can’t tell you which rulings it’s going to be — to rule against the president in some areas of his assertion of presidential authority. And if that happens, and I think the odds are very high that it will come sometime in the next 12 months, we will see whether President Trump intends to keep his word and respect the holding of the court. If he does keep his word, then I would have to say that, like some presidents before him, he has used every device to try to expand his power, but in the end, he recognizes that he is constrained by the rule of law. If he says, “The Supreme Court has made its decision, but I disagree with it, and I’m not going to obey it,” at that point, he will be asserting non-constitutional powers. And if he gets away with it, at that point, I would be willing to call him — if not a dictator — an authoritarian ruler who is ruling outside the law. That hasn’t happened yet.
Trump Moves to Institutionalize Power and Reshape Electoral Rules
To what extent does Trump’s governance illustrate a transition from charismatic populism to incipient authoritarianism, and which institutional indicators best capture this trajectory?
Professor William A. Galston: Well, this, in a way, extends the first question you posed to me, namely the difference between the first Trump term and the second. There is certainly an effort to institutionalize not only a more powerful presidency but also a stronger Republican Party that has been reshaped in the president’s image. The efforts to change the electoral rules of the game between now and the midterm elections through state-based redistricting represent an attempt to institutionalize an advantage for his party.
Similarly, the president is seeking to reshape the laws that govern elections — who can vote, how they can vote, and what the requirements are for voting — all with the aim of securing an edge over the Democratic Party. These are clear attempts to institutionalize not only his authority as chief executive but also the power of his party. Some of these efforts may succeed, while others will fail. It’s hard to predict.
Certainly, the president has the right to ask a particular state to engage in redistricting, and many, though not all, states will be able to respond to that in one way or another. So that’s certainly within existing political bounds. President Franklin Roosevelt, for example, tried to use an election to purge members of his party with whom he disagreed. His party fought back, and he was rebuffed. So this is not the first time a president has tried to institutionalize greater power and authority for himself and his party. Previous efforts have not succeeded, at least not entirely. For example, Roosevelt attempted in 1935 to do what President Trump is trying to do in 2025 — eliminate independent agencies whose leaders are exempt from firing simply because the president dislikes them or disagrees with some of their decisions. The Supreme Court said no to Roosevelt in 1935, and he respected that. He wasn’t happy about it, he grumbled, but he respected the decision. We’ll see what happens this time. Those of us with some knowledge of American political history recognize aspects of what’s going on now — not all of it, but some of it.
Culture Wars and Power Plays Redefine US Political Fault Lines
A Trump flag waves at a pier on Coden Beach in Coden, Alabama, on June 9, 2024. The flag bears the slogan, “Jesus is my Savior. Trump is my President.” Photo: Carmen K. Sisson.
Trump has repeatedly sought to limit congressional oversight and weaken checks and balances. Do these efforts signal a temporary partisan strategy or a structural erosion of US democratic institutions?
Professor William A. Galston: The erosion of congressional oversight has occurred through political processes rather than institutional changes and, therefore, could be reversed by a president with a different attitude. Just this week, for example, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, was scheduled to conduct oversight at one of the intelligence facilities under the aegis of the Department of Defense, and reportedly, the Secretary of Defense intervened and canceled the site visit that Senator Warner was going to make. That was a clear effort to reduce congressional oversight. However, there was nothing institutional about it.
By the way, I misstated earlier: Senator Warner used to be the chairman of the Intelligence Committee and is now the leading Democrat on a committee chaired by a Republican colleague, with whom he has worked very well. So, I don’t think that the reduction of Congress’s oversight capacity has been institutionalized. I do think it reflects the will of the current president and the unwillingness of members of his own party in Congress to challenge his will. For a very simple reason: they’re afraid of him. They’re afraid of what he can do to them—to damage their political careers—and perhaps for other reasons as well. That’s not an institution; that’s an individual set of relationships.
How do you assess the strategic deployment of culture wars in Trump’s political agenda? Are they primarily an ideological project, or do they function as a power-consolidation tool to reshape voter alignments and institutional priorities?
Professor William A. Galston: Both. And certainly, President Trump, as a candidate and as a president, has been very good at discerning the fundamental fault lines or cleavages in American political culture and defining those fault lines in a way that maximizes the number of people who will be on his side of the line. Part of effective leadership is to define controversies that work to your advantage. In the cultural arena, President Trump has an instinct for those conflicts. I don’t think all of them that he’s picked have worked to his advantage, but certainly, the three that he emphasized in the 2024 presidential election, and again in the early months of his administration—namely immigration, crime, and so-called DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives—have all worked to his advantage so far.
Having said that, there are signs that voters in the middle of our political spectrum—and yes, there are still many of them—are beginning to conclude that the president may be going too far in the tactics he’s using. That’s demonstrably the case in immigration, where there is widespread disapproval not of the president’s objectives but of the means he’s using to achieve those objectives, which many citizens in the middle of the political spectrum view as unnecessarily cruel and as failing to provide potential candidates for deportation with sufficient legal rights to challenge the grounds of their deportations. And while Americans, generally speaking, align with the president’s goals on crime and some of the measures he’s used to reduce it, there isn’t the kind of mass support for the use of federal troops in American cities that the president imagines. At this point, I would say that probably a narrow majority of Americans believe that’s not the right long-term approach to fighting crime.
Project 2025 Drives Trump’s Institutional Power Agenda
How do you evaluate the role of Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation’s allied networks in shaping Trump’s second-term policy framework? Are these actors contributing to the institutionalization of authoritarian governance through ideologically driven restructuring of federal institutions?
Professor William A. Galston: I believe the Heritage Foundation, through Project 2025, has been enormously successful in shaping the second Trump administration. If you listen to current Heritage leaders — as well as former leaders who now hold senior positions in the administration — their argument isn’t that they’re overturning the Constitution, but rather that they’re correcting what they see as improper interpretations of it.
For example, more than half a century ago, Congress passed a law preventing the president from withholding funds appropriated for specific purposes. In my view, the president has acted in ways inconsistent with that law. Yet his leading budget advisor — the head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) — has stated flatly that this law is unconstitutional. They are determined to use this controversy to take the matter to the Supreme Court, arguing that the statute improperly restricts presidential authority.
All of this was carefully planned in advance by senior members of the Heritage Foundation. In fact, the current head of OMB was one of the architects of Project 2025. There has been a direct translation of Project 2025’s core ideas into both the institutions and the personnel of Trump’s second term. The Heritage effort has effectively served as a recruitment mechanism: identifying individuals aligned with the president’s agenda, testing their loyalty, and placing them in key policymaking and policy-executing roles.
It has been a tremendous success — we’ve rarely seen anything like this. And speaking as a member of a rival think tank, the Brookings Institution, I must admit: although I disagree with much of what the Heritage Foundation proposed in Project 2025, I have to tip my hat to them. They’ve been enormously effective and have played their cards extremely well.
Comparing Trump with Orbán, Erdoğan, and Modi: Similar Rhetoric, Weaker Grip
Matryoshka dolls featuring images of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump displayed at a souvenir counter in Moscow on March 16, 2019. Photo: Shutterstock.
In comparative perspective, how does Trump’s reliance on identity-based polarization and his governing style align with global populist-authoritarian trajectories — such as those of Orbán in Hungary, Erdoğan in Turkey, and Modi in India — particularly regarding institutional capture, media control, and judicial weakening?
Professor William A. Galston: I would say that, in his use of identitarian and nationalist policy themes, he is very similar to them. He has not yet, however, achieved the degree of control over the institutions that you just listed that we see in places like Hungary and Turkey, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, but still considerable, in India.
The press right now is not under Trump’s control to the extent that it is in Hungary. You do not have the state owning, either directly or indirectly, the share of the media landscape that Mr. Orbán has been able to create through docile intermediaries.
Nor has Mr. Trump been able to achieve the mastery of the judiciary that, certainly, Orbán and Erdoğan have achieved. The judiciary remains independent, and you can see that that’s the case because of the number of court decisions that have gone against President Trump just in the past few weeks.
Now, it is quite possible that the Supreme Court will end up ratifying the President’s position in some of those cases. Still, it has not been a complete takeover.
If you look at the direction in which the United States is heading, certainly down a very long road yet to be traveled lies the kind of political systems that we now see in the three countries that you listed. But there are many miles to go before this president enjoys that kind of authority, and, frankly, I personally believe that he is unlikely to get to the end of the road. I don’t think the American people or the American legal system will permit him to do so.
Having said that, I think, at the end of his second term — and I’m making the optimistic assumption that he will not violate the Constitution and try to run for a third term — he will leave behind him an enlarged presidency with much more robust executive powers.
Then his successor will have to decide whether to use that expanded authority for purposes of his own or recommend reforms that would create new legal limits on executive authority. So, that issue will be determined by the outcome of the 2028 election, and I expect it to be one of the major debates in that election.
Federalism Acts as a Guardrail Against Competitive Authoritarianism
Given your analysis of the 2026 midterms, how pivotal is the Texas redistricting battle in shaping Republican prospects, and what does it reveal about the role of electoral engineering in sustaining partisan dominance? To what extent might such aggressive gerrymandering strategies erode democratic legitimacy and push the US toward a ‘competitive authoritarian’ model?
Professor William A. Galston: Once again, and I feel I’m giving you versions of the same answer to all of your questions, I am distinguishing between the direction of change that we can discern, on the one hand, and its proximity to full competitive authoritarianism on the other. I don’t think we’re there. One reason we’re not there yet, and I expect won’t get there, is, as you know, the United States has a very strong federal system — unlike, say, countries at the other extreme, like France, where almost all power flows from the center. In the United States, the 50 states have robust powers of their own, and there are constitutional and legal limits on the ability of the national government to direct the states to do things that they don’t want to do. If I had an hour, I could explain all of the details, but the headline is that federalism serves as a check on presidential authority and on the power of the president’s party. So, to take a simple example, Texas, responding to President Trump’s suggestion, has undertaken and has just enacted a redrawing of legislative boundaries that will probably, but not necessarily, lead to a gain of up to five Republican seats in the House of Representatives.
That would make it harder for Democrats to regain the majority because the Republican majority would expand from three seats to eight seats. On the other hand, and in response, the governor of California, a state that’s heavily dominated by Democrats, has said, “Well, if you’re gonna do that, then we’re going to counter with our own redistricting plan that will increase the number of Democratic seats in the state of California going to the House of Representatives by five.”
Okay, so if that effort to counterbalance Texas succeeds in November in California — and the new maps are being submitted directly to the voters for their approval or disapproval — if they’re approved, then California will have nullified what Texas did, and there would be no net gain. Now, the Republicans are trying to expand this redistricting effort to other states, but there the potential gains are smaller. Perhaps one seat or two seats.
But here again, Democrats are countering with outreach to states where they control the governorship and the legislature, such as my home state of Maryland. Right now, Maryland has eight seats in the US House of Representatives, seven of them occupied by Democrats, and one lonely seat occupied by a Republican. Now, it is probably the case that Maryland could redraw its boundaries to eliminate that eighth seat and bring it under Democratic control.
For all sorts of reasons, I’m not sure that the governor of Maryland or the state Democratic Party really wants to go down that road, but they may feel, in a month or two, or three, that they have no choice. So, I think it’s important to see how, at the very least, our system of federalism slows the movement towards competitive authoritarianism.
And let me add one other thing. If you look at the language of the Constitution, who gets to control the time, the place, and the manner of elections, it’s the Congress of the United States and the state governments. The President of the United States has no role whatsoever to play in that.
And so, if President Trump says, “I’m going to issue an executive order forbidding the use of voting machines, forbidding the use of mail-in ballots, or requiring every citizen to show certain kinds of identification before voting,” well, that’s fine — he’s issued that order — but he has no legal authority to enforce it because the Constitution doesn’t give him that power.
So, you know, I read all of the same journals that I suspect you do, and the issue of competitive authoritarianism is very much in the air, and it’s a very real issue. And there are real and important examples of it around the world. But I want the people who will listen to (or read) this interview to understand that, although there are real constitutional risks in the United States today, and many things are drifting in the wrong direction, I don’t think we are as far away from constitutional government or as close to competitive authoritarianism as many people think we are, and as the other nations, like Hungary, Turkey, India, and others, already are.
Economic Pressures Overshadow Trump’s Cultural Appeals
With rising opposition to Trump’s tariffs, even among his base, do you foresee economic discontent weakening his political legitimacy, or will identity cleavages continue to override economic self-interest in voting behavior?
Professor William A. Galston: The single most important issue in the 2024 presidential election was inflation and high prices. I monitor public opinion surveys on a daily basis, and that has not changed. If President Trump thinks that he can use identitarian issues or cultural issues to neutralize public concern about high and rising prices, he’s fooling himself. That won’t happen. He’ll try to make it happen unless prices come down over the next year, in which case he’ll brag about bringing prices down, and the American people will, if those price reductions are real, give him a lot of credit, and they’ll give him their vote. But the economy — the affordability of basic things like housing, transportation, energy, and food — still looms over the entire political landscape.
Defending Democracy Requires Law, Not Street Protests
Frontal view of the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C., on February 10, 2024. Photo: Gualberto Becerra P.
And lastly, Professor Galston, what strategies should democratic institutions, civil society actors, and the media adopt to safeguard checks and balances and reinforce democratic resilience in the face of rising executive centralization?
Professor William A. Galston: All of those institutions should use their cultural power and their legal power to defend their integrity and their independence, which goes all the way back to my answer to your first question. I think that the principal venue of contestation in America today is the law. It is the law, ultimately, and the willingness of institutions to use their legal power to contest expansions of executive power that they don’t like. That will make the difference between the preservation of constitutional checks and balances and their erosion.
I’ll give you a very recent example from Wednesday’s newspaper. I think most people in Europe are aware of Harvard University, which is probably America’s most famous and prestigious university, and Harvard, a few months ago, decided that the Trump administration was making some demands that they could not yield to without forfeiting their institutional independence and their raison d’être as an academic institution. So they drew a line and said, “This far and no farther,” and they went to court to try to get legal reinforcement for where they’d drawn the line, and on Wednesday, a federal judge gave it to them and said that most of what President Trump was doing to Harvard was unconstitutional.
The administration was ordered to restore the $2.2 billion in research money that the judge said was arbitrarily and unconstitutionally withheld from them. Now, is that the last word? Absolutely not. Donald Trump believes in litigating everything as high as he can go in the hopes of achieving a more favorable verdict someplace. But that’s an example of how an institution that has the will to defend its legal prerogatives can push back — and push back effectively.
And I think that pushing back, using not street protests but the law, will be the most important venue of contestation. The extent to which the law is used to reinforce constitutional norms will determine the extent to which the United States goes down the road towards competitive authoritarianism. But, to repeat, we’re not there yet. We’re not even close to a decline into competitive authoritarianism. And I am hopeful that we’ll never get there. I can’t promise anybody that we won’t, but I do know that institutions in America outside the federal government — the states, universities, professional associations, civil society — are waking up.
And they are beginning to understand that unless they are willing to assert their legal rights, nobody else is going to protect them. They must act firmly, but legally, for themselves, and if they do, I think the outcome will be a very challenging situation for the adherents of liberal democracy in the United States. Don’t get me wrong. I won’t say it’s an emergency. It’s not quite an emergency, but it is a moment that challenges citizens who’ve taken liberal democracy for granted to realize that it’s not been handed down like the tablets to Moses on Mount Sinai. It’s a human creation, and all human creations are subject to human erosion and human destruction.
We know one of the few lessons from history that I think is impossible to deny and very clear to all who care to read it. And so, the quote that everybody is using, when Benjamin Franklin was asked after the Constitutional Convention, “What form of government have you created, Mr. Franklin?” — and his answer was, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Well, those words now are a challenge to citizens of the United States today. Can we keep what we inherited? Sometime in the next decade, we’ll find out the answer to that question.
Indonesia is witnessing its largest wave of protests since Reformasi, sparked by the death of Affan Kurniawan during Jakarta’s labor demonstrations. Demands range from fair wages and job security to dismantling elite privileges and revising the controversial Omnibus Law. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populist reason, the article analyzes how heterogeneous grievances converged into a collective identity of “the people” against “the elites,” fueled by widening inequality, institutional distrust, and elite arrogance. It further examines government securitization, social media narratives, and intra-elite rivalries, situating the unrest within Indonesia’s democratic backsliding. Hasnan Bachtiar argues this moment marks a potential turning point — either toward renewed progressive populism or deeper authoritarian entrenchment.
Affan Kurniawan (21) was still wearing the green jacket from his app-based food-delivery job as he stepped out to earn a living. The family’s breadwinner, he was expected to bring home a small bag of rice for everyone to share when he returned from work. But in the middle of a labor protest in Jakarta, he was struck and crushed by a nearly five-ton police armored vehicle.
On the night of August 28, 2025, he died. But his death unleashed a larger, unstoppable wave of populist anger, like a boil about to burst. The protests that day were not limited to Jakarta, they also broke out in cities such as Surabaya, Bandung, Semarang, Yogyakarta, Medan, Banda Aceh, Batam, Palembang, Lampung, Banjarmasin, Pontianak, Samarinda, Makassar, Gorontalo, Ambon, Ternate, and Jayapura, among others, spreading across all 38 provinces of Indonesia.
The protests demanded an end to outsourcing and poverty wages, a halt to layoffs, a higher minimum wage, a higher non-taxable income threshold, the removal of taxes on holiday bonuses and severance pay, limits on contract employment and on foreign labor, and the repeal of the Omnibus Law in favor of a new labor code.
It turned out this wave of protests was the twelfth in a series, preceded by eleven demonstrations throughout 2025, including one organized under the hashtag #IndonesiaGelap. The following day, and continuing to the present, the protests have carried on with even more serious demands. For the record, several others died after Affan, they are Septinus Sesa (West Papua), Iko Juliant Junior (Semarang), Andika Luthfi Falah (Jakarta), Syaiful Akbar (Makassar), Muhammad Akbar Basri (Makassar), Sarinawati (Makassar), Rusmadiansyah (Makassar), and Reza Sendy Pratama (Yogyakarta).
Populis Logics
What is happening appears to align with Ernesto Laclau’s thinking in his work On Populist Reason (2005). He sees populism as a political logic that constructs a collective identity of “the people” in antagonism to the elite by using broad, flexible, and recognizable symbols and discourses to unite disparate demands.
Initially, a scatter of heterogeneous demands kept surfacing. Because the authorities failed to respond adequately, people came to feel they shared a common enemy. They then experienced a shared fate and burden as “marginalized subjects.” This spread, solidifying public sentiment and spurring the formation of “equivalential chains.” They arrived at a collective claim that “the people demand justice,” to be pursued through a movement of resistance as a hegemonic articulation. From a more ontological perspective of “the people,” as suggested by Yilmaz et al. (2025), if the elite prove incapable of governing the country, they should be replaced or even dismantled.
On the surface, it began with reports circulating about pay and benefit increases for officials, especially members of parliament. This came at a time when the public was facing severe economic hardship. On one side, the executive branch was rolling out “efficiency” measures that led to layoffs, service cuts, and heavier tax burdens. On the other, the elite were enjoying higher salaries and perks, access to lucrative projects, and economic rents. For comparison, while officials were set to receive 100 million rupiah (USD 6,092) per month, about 3 million rupiah (USD 184) a day, 68 percent of the population was getting by on less than 50,000 rupiah (USD 3). With incomes roughly sixty times higher than most people’s, this was seen as elite indifference toward the public and the imposition of a harsh double standard.
Moreover, some of those officials even danced in the parliament building when they heard about the pay raise. Others, like Uya Kuya (National Mandate Party/PAN), said that three million a day was a small amount compared to his salary. When the public flooded social media with criticism, lawmaker Eko Patrio (PAN) put out a DJ parody, blasting loud music, dancing, then covering his ears with headphones. This came across not only as a sign that they did not care about the criticism, but as an insult. They were dancing on the public’s suffering. When people grew furious and called for parliament (the DPR) to be dissolved, Ahmad Sahroni (National Democratic Party/NasDem) responded by calling them “the dumbest people in the world.”
The combination of economic hardship (crisis), a deficit of trust in the government, and widespread psychological pressure, especially a collective sense of humiliation, led the public to feel a shared grievance and to move together against a common enemy, the corrupt elite. All of this then manifested in collective protest movements filled with popular anger and even accompanied by violence that seemed inevitable.
Hijacking the Reformasi
Rather than engaging with the substance of public anger, the government responded with a hardline narrative with unproven claims of foreign infiltration. This seemed to be the point when the distance between the state and its citizens felt widest. The public demanded accountability, the state answered by criminalizing dissent. These dueling narratives hardened for a basic reason, that the people no longer believed that their representatives, whether in the executive or the legislature, would take their side, while the state treated criticism as a danger to be crushed. To confront the protesters, the government deployed not only the police but also military troops.
The public’s collective anger is clearly directed at the ruling regime. People see signs of recentralization as a replay of what happened for more than three decades under the military general Suharto. There is now symbolic militarization, increasingly entrenched political coalitions, and the concentration of state assets within a narrow circle, especially among those close to President Prabowo. All of this is viewed as the culmination of the post-1998 Reformasi trajectory. Reformasi, which was expected to open civic space, now seems instead to be in the process of being brutally dismantled.
More ironically, the rhetoric of fiscal efficiency is being wielded downward, squarely at ordinary people. Budgets for the regions have been cut, and the social safety net has shrunk, while luxury perks for parliament (the DPR) and defense spending have ballooned. For the record, the national defense budget rose from 139.27 trillion rupiah in 2024 to 247.5 trillion rupiah. At the start of 2025, the value-added tax (PPN) was raised to 12%, which many fears will significantly weaken purchasing power. Other issues seen as worsening the public’s socio-economic situation include the circulation of adulterated “premium” fuel, shortages of LPG canisters on the market, the nickel case in Raja Ampat, the transfer of four islands from Aceh to North Sumatra, the freezing of 120 million bank accounts by Indonesia’s Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Center (PPATK), and a rule under which idle land and houses would be seized by the state, among others.
So, for the public, “efficiency” has become a pretext for tightening their own belts, not for reining in elite appetites. Because budget “efficiency” is centralized, local governments that would normally receive transfers from the center have been left scrambling, with little choice but to raise local revenues. On August 13, 2025, residents protested in the city of Pati, Central Java, after the Pati regent, Sudewo (from Gerindra Party), raised the Land and Building Tax (PBB, essentially the property tax) by 250%. Other local governments that faced public backlash included Jombang (a 1,202% tax hike), Cirebon (1,000%), Semarang (441%), Bone (300%), and Lhokseumawe (248%).
In this context, the reform agenda appears to have been hijacked. An alliance of politicians, bureaucrats, and big business interests has deepened the private accumulation of public resources through seemingly democratic institutions. Meanwhile, political parties show almost no real ideological differentiation, they appear to speak with one voice in service of an oligarchic logic. At the same time, freedom of speech exists, and social media teems with criticism, but the distribution of economic and political power remains skewed. When the public pressed its case during the #IndonesiaGelap protests on February 17-20, 2025, the Chair of the National Economic Council and Special Presidential Advisor for Investment, Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, replied: “Darkness lies in you, not Indonesia.”
The People’s Articulation
President-elect Prabowo Subianto with the 7th President of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, at the 79th Indonesian National Armed Forces Anniversary in Jakarta, Indonesia, on October 5, 2024. Photo: Donny Hery.
It cannot be doubted that the spread of protests was the result of many triggers converging at once. Tension in the streets created space for a populist mood to take hold, reinforced by narratives circulating on social media, kitchen-table anxieties, and political symbols that ignited collective emotion. The picture was further muddied by orchestrated messaging from anonymous “buzzers” (paid online amplifiers), making it hard for the public to see who was really behind the unrest.
On the ground, the crowd was heterogeneous (workers, students, online ride-hailing driver communities (ojek), and civil society organizations) pursuing overlapping aims that were not always identical, which often slowed coordination. Under that pressure, crowd psychology amplified emotions. Each new casualty triggered broader solidarity while also opening space for infiltration and provocation. At the same time, intra-elite conflicts (especially Prabowo-military vis-à-visJokowi-police) fueled the escalation. Factions within the ruling bloc competed, some ratcheted up tensions, while others capitalized on the moment for political gain.
The crowd’s anger in these protests was aimed at four main targets they saw as sources of injustice. First, the DPR (parliament) was perceived as a symbol of privilege and a legislature that often produces policies that betray the popular will. Then, the security forces (the police) because repeated violence and impunity have eroded the public’s sense of safety. Political parties were viewed as lacking real ideological differences and serving mainly to reinforce an oligarchic logic. The ruling faction (Prabowo) was criticized for pushing recentralization and was feared to be further narrowing the civic space that should belong to citizens.
From the streets, two tiers of demands rang out loud and clear. First came the urgent demands to be met by September 5, 2025, an independent investigation into cases of police violence against protest victims, an end to the involvement of the Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI) in civilian affairs, the release of all detained protesters, accountability for security forces, a moratorium on increases to benefits for DPR members (parliament), full budget transparency, ethics sanctions for officials who displayed arrogance, an open public dialogue with the DPR, and comprehensive protections for workers.
Second, there were structural demands to clean up the parliament (DPR) of corruptions, to reform political parties and the system of executive oversight, to build a fairer tax system, to strengthen the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) through an asset-forfeiture law, to make the police professional, to ensure the military returns to the barracks without exception, to bolster the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) and other independent bodies, and to review economic and labor policies so they favor the public.
The demonstrations are not just seasonal “riots.” They are a serious sign that the state’s legitimacy is eroding. Indonesia learned in 1998 that when an economic crisis collides with a political crisis and injustice, the result is a multidimensional crisis. Those symptoms are back now, only with a new face, the public is more informed, more digitally connected, and more willing to test the state’s narrative against everyday experience.
Democracy rarely collapses overnight. It usually erodes slowly under the pretext of maintaining order. That is why this moment can be understood as an inflection point, will Indonesia slip back into a new form of authoritarianism hiding behind procedural democracy, or use it as a chance to repair a fractured social contract?
This is where progressive populism becomes relevant. The popular movement, now articulated through anger and concrete demands, opens the door to building a new political bloc committed to economic and social justice, transparency, and accountability. Rather than merely mobilizing emotion, progressive populism can serve as a platform to knit scattered demands into a coherent, measurable collective agenda.
Affan’s death has come to symbolize how a single life from the poor can speak louder than a thousand official speeches. If the establishment chooses to turn a deaf ear, whatever legitimacy remains will only grow more fragile. But if it dares to listen and channel the people’s energy toward a fairer transformation, this tragedy could mark the beginning of renewal.
