The fourth lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 featured Professor Daniel Fiorino, a leading expert on environmental policy at American University. Professor Fiorino examined how right-wing populism—characterized by distrust of expertise, nationalism, and hostility to multilateralism—combined with entrenched fossil fuel interests to undermine climate mitigation efforts in the United States during the Trump administration. He highlighted the geographic and partisan divides that shape US climate politics and explained how Republican dominance in fossil fuel-dependent states reinforces skepticism toward climate action. Professor Fiorino’s lecture underscored the vulnerability of US climate policy to political polarization and partisan shifts, warning that right-wing populism poses an enduring challenge not only to American climate governance but to global efforts to address the climate crisis.
Reported by ECPS Staff
The fourth lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025, held online under the theme “Populism and Climate Change: Understanding What Is at Stake and Crafting Policy Suggestions for Stakeholders” (July 7–11, 2025), featured Professor Daniel Fiorino,one of the United States’ most respected scholars on environmental and energy policy. His lecture, titled “Ideology Meets Interest Group Politics: The Trump Administration and Climate Mitigation,” explored how right-wing populism and entrenched fossil fuel interests intersect to shape and undermine climate policy in the United States—a subject deeply relevant not only for US politics but for global climate governance more broadly.
Professor Fiorino is currently based at American University’s School of Public Affairs in Washington, DC, where he serves as the founding director of the Center for Environmental Policy. Prior to his academic appointment in 2009, he had a distinguished career at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where he worked in policy development and environmental governance. Professor Fiorino’s work is both theoretically rigorous and policy-relevant, addressing some of the most pressing governance challenges posed by the climate crisis.
His published books include Can Democracy Handle Climate Change? (Polity Press, 2018), which examines the compatibility of democratic systems with effective climate action; A Good Life on a Finite Earth: The Political Economy of Green Growth (Oxford, 2018), which explores pathways toward sustainable prosperity; and The Clean Energy Transition: Policies and Procedures for a Zero-Carbon World (Polity, 2022). Professor Fiorino is also currently writing a book on the evolution of the EPA, further cementing his authority on American environmental policy.
In this lecture, Professor Fiorino provided participants with a critical framework for understanding how the Trump administration became emblematic of the global rise of right-wing populism and its impact on climate policy. He contextualized his analysis by drawing attention to the defining characteristics of right-wing populism—namely, distrust of scientific expertise, skepticism of multilateralism, and nationalist economic priorities—and how these traits directly contradict the requirements for effective climate mitigation, which depends on science, international cooperation, and long-term policy consistency.
Through this lens, Professor Fiorino examined how the Republican Party’s longstanding relationship with the fossil fuel industry became fully aligned with right-wing populist ideology during the Trump years. His lecture traced not only the Trump administration’s concrete policy reversals—such as rolling back EPA regulations and undermining international climate agreements—but also the broader cultural and institutional dynamics that entrench resistance to climate action in the US.
Professor Fiorino’s contribution offered participants a nuanced and empirically grounded insight into one of the most acute cases of populism’s challenge to climate governance today, setting the stage for a wider discussion on how democratic societies can respond to these intersecting threats.
Trust in Government and Political Polarization
Participants in the Hands Off March in Silver City, New Mexico, on April 5, 2025. On this day, men, women, and children gathered at over 1,000 locations across the United States to protest the Trump administration. Photo: Arienne Davey.
In his lecture, Professor Fiorino offered an incisive introduction to the political landscape surrounding climate change in the United States, situating it within broader international patterns. Professor Fiorino framed his presentation with a candid declaration of his own critical stance toward Donald Trump, whose administration he described as emblematic of right-wing populist dynamics globally.
Professor Fiorino began by outlining the structure of his talk, which sought to explain how ideology and interest group politics intersect in the US context, particularly around climate mitigation policy. He distinguished between left-wing populism—which tends to emphasize protection of vulnerable groups and acknowledges climate threats—and right-wing populism, which he characterized as deeply skeptical of climate science and resistant to mitigation policies.
A core theme of Professor Fiorino’s lecture was the alignment of the Republican Party with the interests of the fossil fuel industry. He argued that while this alignment has long defined Republican political economy, it is now reinforced by a populist ideology marked by distrust of expertise, nationalism, and hostility to multilateralism. This convergence of interests and ideology, Fiorino suggested, has resulted in a Republican Party that is uniquely resistant to climate action among conservative parties worldwide.
To illustrate this context, Professor Fiorino presented data on declining trust in government, highlighting that confidence in the US federal government fell from over 50% in the early 1970s—when foundational environmental laws were enacted—to approximately 20% today. This erosion of trust reflects a broader trend in Western democracies but is especially acute in the United States.
Professor Fiorino underscored that climate change has become a highly polarized political issue, with public concern split sharply along partisan lines. He noted that while general surveys might suggest widespread concern about climate change among Americans, this concern is overwhelmingly concentrated among Democrats and those who lean Democratic. By contrast, Republican voters and leaders exhibit skepticism toward climate policy and its scientific foundations. He illustrated this divide with historical data showing that partisan gaps on climate issues, which stood at approximately 36% around 2009–2010, had widened to over 50% in recent years.
Professor Fiorino traced this widening divide back to the 1990s and highlighted that, unlike their conservative counterparts in many other countries who acknowledge the necessity of climate action, Republican leaders in the US have cultivated or tolerated a strong climate denial movement. He emphasized that even when some Republican figures concede that human activity contributes to climate change, they often reject mitigation efforts as too costly or harmful to other national interests.
Professor Fiorino’s analysis portrayed a political environment in which climate and environmental issues have become deeply entangled in cultural and partisan identity. He argued that this entrenched polarization represents a significant barrier to effective climate policy, reflecting not just interest group influence but a broader ideological shift that has positioned climate skepticism as a core feature of right-wing populism in the United States.
Geography, Economy, and Political Alignment
Moreover, during his lecture, Professor Fiorino examined the intricate relationship between US geography, economic structure, and political alignment, especially as it pertains to climate politics. He traced a geographic realignment of American political parties over recent decades, emphasizing how the Northeast and West Coast have become reliably Democratic, while much of the South—including states that were part of the Confederacy—along with the rural Midwest and interior West, have become Republican strongholds. This realignment has contributed to the sharp partisan polarization around issues such as climate policy.
Professor Fiorino noted that this polarization has coincided with a growing identification of the Republican Party with specific economic sectors, particularly mining, energy, and farming. Drawing on the work of political scientist David Carroll, Professor Fiorino highlighted that by 2015, Republican representation of these sectors had markedly increased, deepening party-aligned divisions around resource development and climate mitigation. While elite polarization on climate issues began first among policymakers, Professor Fiorino explained that these divisions quickly diffused to the broader electorate, making attitudes toward climate action increasingly partisan.
A key insight from Professor Fiorino’s analysis concerned the connection between a state’s economic dependence on fossil fuels and its political attitudes toward climate mitigation. Though definitive causal studies remain limited, Professor Fiorino observed a clear pattern: states with economies heavily reliant on oil, gas, or coal—such as Texas, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Louisiana, Wyoming, and Alaska—have tended to lean strongly Republican and exhibit skepticism or hostility toward climate mitigation policies. Even among the top nine mining-intensive state economies identified in a Brookings Institution study, most are Republican-dominated and resistant to aggressive climate action.
Exceptions to this pattern, such as New Mexico and Colorado, underscore the complexity of regional politics. New Mexico’s large Native American and Latino populations, Professor Fiorino noted, contribute to its Democratic leanings despite its extractive economy. Overall, Professor Fiorino concluded that states’ economic dependence on fossil fuels is a powerful predictor of their political alignment and climate policy stance, reinforcing the geographic and partisan divides shaping US climate politics today.
Interest Groups and the Ideological Foundations of Right-Wing Populism
In his lecture, Professor Daniel Fiorino also examined how the intersection of interest group politics and right-wing populist ideology has shaped US climate policy, particularly during the Trump administration. Professor Fiorino began by noting that while scholars often overemphasize the role of campaign contributions in presidential politics, campaign finance remains a revealing indicator of partisan alliances. He pointed to data showing that during recent election cycles, approximately 92% of oil and gas industry contributions to US Senate campaigns and 85% to House campaigns went to Republican candidates, underscoring the fossil fuel sector’s deep alignment with the Republican Party.
Professor Fiorino then turned to the ideological features of right-wing populism and their relevance for climate politics. Drawing on his involvement in a special issue of Environmental Politics (2021–22), he identified three defining characteristics of right-wing populist movements: hostility toward elites and experts, skepticism of multilateral institutions, and a strong nationalist orientation emphasizing reliance on domestic resources. He explained that these attributes directly clash with the core requirements of effective climate action, which depend on scientific expertise and international cooperation to address a global challenge.
Professor Fiorino observed that the Trump administration embodied these populist traits, with President Trump declaring an “energy emergency” on his first day in office and promoting an aggressive policy of oil, gas, and coal development. Despite the irony that renewable resources such as wind and solar are also domestic, this nationalist framing ignored those alternatives in favor of traditional fossil fuels.
This ideological posture aligned seamlessly with the Republican Party’s long-standing alliance with the fossil fuel industry—a relationship further strengthened by geographic realities. Professor Fiorino explained that Republican political dominance is concentrated in states where fossil fuel extraction is economically significant, such as West Virginia and Wyoming (coal) and Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Alaska (oil and gas). These states have consistently resisted climate mitigation policies, reflecting both economic interests and the populist-nationalist narratives advanced by Republican leaders.
Finally, Professor Fiorino highlighted a key legal development shaping the regulatory framework for climate policy: the 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, which established that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide could be regulated under the Clean Air Act if found to endanger public health and welfare. Professor Fiorino warned that one priority of the Trump administration was reconsidering this “endangerment finding,” thereby undermining the scientific and legal basis for federal climate regulation—a testament to how deeply right-wing populist ideology and fossil fuel interests converged during this period.
The Trump Administration’s Climate Policy Record and Future Prospects
Professor Fiorino provided a critical overview of the Trump administration’s climate policy record, emphasizing its ideological and institutional efforts to roll back climate mitigation initiatives. Professor Fiorino began by highlighting the significance of the “endangerment finding”—a scientific determination under the US Clean Air Act that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. While the first Trump administration did not formally challenge this finding, Professor Fiorino noted that there is growing discussion within conservative circles about overturning it, a development that would severely undermine the federal government’s authority to regulate carbon emissions.
Professor Fiorino also discussed the social cost of carbon, a metric developed through interagency collaboration to quantify the economic harm of each additional ton of carbon dioxide emitted. Under Trump, this metric was effectively discarded: the interagency working group responsible for calculating it was disbanded, and agencies were directed to ignore it in decision-making processes. This represented a major departure from the approach of prior administrations, which had used the social cost of carbon as a benchmark for evaluating the benefits of climate regulations.
Another key policy reversal under Trump targeted the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which Professor Fiorino described as being under unprecedented assault, even more so than during the Reagan era. The Trump administration reconstituted the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, weakening the role of scientific expertise in policy evaluation, and sought to dismantle many components of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), despite the fact that more than 80% of the IRA’s benefits flowed to congressional districts represented by Republicans.
Professor Fiorino framed these developments within a broader pattern of policy oscillation, where President Obama had advanced climate action to the extent possible, only to see these efforts reversed by Trump, with Biden again reinstating them—illustrating a deeper challenge for US climate policy: the lack of consistency and durability.
Looking ahead, Professor Fiorino offered a sober assessment of prospects. He emphasized that while Donald Trump may eventually exit the political stage, the populist, anti-elite, and anti-science sentiments he amplified remain deeply embedded among American voters. This division is exacerbated by the United States’ closely balanced partisan coalitions and severe polarization, making sustained climate action difficult.
Professor Fiorino also noted that state-level policies matter but reflect this national divide: progressive states like California and New York continue to advance mitigation efforts, while roughly half of US states remain disengaged or actively opposed. He concluded by identifying the rise of right-wing populism as one of the principal threats to global climate action, warning that climate disruption itself could fuel political instability, including immigration pressures and social unrest, further complicating the path toward coherent climate governance.
Conclusion
Professor Daniel Fiorino’s lecture at the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025 offered participants an incisive and comprehensive analysis of the intersections between populist ideology, interest group politics, and climate policy in the United States. His examination of the Trump administration revealed how right-wing populism—characterized by distrust of expertise, nationalist rhetoric, and hostility toward multilateral governance—has compounded the Republican Party’s long-standing alignment with fossil fuel interests to obstruct meaningful climate action.
Professor Fiorino’s lecture illuminated the structural and ideological forces that have rendered climate change one of the most polarized issues in contemporary American politics. By contextualizing partisan divides within broader geographic and economic patterns—highlighting how fossil fuel-dependent states have become Republican strongholds skeptical of climate mitigation—he underscored that resistance to climate policy is not simply a matter of individual attitudes but is deeply embedded in economic structures and political identities.
A key takeaway from Professor Fiorino’s analysis is the vulnerability of US climate policy to abrupt reversals driven by partisan shifts. His account of the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle environmental regulations, challenge the scientific basis for climate action, and undermine institutions such as the EPA illustrated the fragility of policy gains in the face of ideological polarization and institutional instability. Even major legislative initiatives like the Inflation Reduction Act, Professor Fiorino warned, remain at risk due to the cyclical nature of US partisan politics.
Looking forward, Professor Fiorino’s concluding reflections pointed to enduring challenges: while Donald Trump himself may eventually leave the political stage, the populist sentiments he amplified—skepticism of expertise, resentment of elites, and climate denial—remain entrenched among significant segments of the US electorate. This dynamic, coupled with a deeply divided federal landscape and uneven state-level engagement, poses significant obstacles to sustained and effective climate mitigation efforts.
In closing, Professor Fiorino emphasized that the rise of right-wing populism constitutes not only a domestic American challenge but also a global threat to coherent climate governance. His lecture provided participants with a sobering but necessary understanding of these intersecting forces, encouraging critical reflection on how democratic societies might navigate these headwinds to craft resilient and effective climate policy.
Dr. Sandra Ricart delivered a timely and insightful lecture on the intersection of climate change, agriculture, and populism in Europe. She explored how structural and demographic challenges, including a declining farming population and economic precarity, have fueled widespread farmer protests across the continent. Dr. Ricart emphasized how these grievances, while rooted in genuine hardship, have increasingly been exploited by far-right populist movements eager to position themselves as defenders of rural interests against European institutions. Her analysis highlighted the pressures created by climate change, policy reforms, and global market dynamics, and she called for more inclusive, responsive, and sustainable agricultural policies. Dr. Ricart’s lecture provided participants with a critical understanding of rural Europe’s evolving political and environmental landscape.
The session was moderated by Dr. Vlad Surdea-Hernea, postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Forest, Environmental and Natural Resource Policy at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna. Dr. Surdea-Hernea’s research on the intersection of populism, climate, and democracy provided a fitting context for introducing Dr. Ricart’s work.
Dr. Sandra Ricart is Assistant Professor at the Environmental Intelligence for Global Change Lab within the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. A geographer by training, she holds a PhD in Geography – Experimental Sciences and Sustainability from the University of Girona (2014) and has held research positions in Spain, Italy, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United States. Her research focuses on climate change narratives, farmers’ perceptions, adaptive capacity, and participatory environmental governance. She is also Assistant Editor for the International Journal of Water Resources Development and PLOS One, and serves as an expert evaluator for the European Commission.
At the outset of her lecture, Dr. Ricart emphasized that her presentation was grounded in a collective, collaborative research tradition—a reflection of shared knowledge developed through interdisciplinary and cross-national scholarly networks. Acknowledging the diversity of her audience’s expertise, she framed her lecture as both a conceptual overview and an empirical analysis, blending theory with practical illustrations drawn from recent European developments.
Her talk was organized around several key themes: an overview of the structural and demographic features of European agriculture, public and farmer perceptions of climate change and agricultural policy, the socioeconomic challenges farmers face, and the role of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) as Europe’s primary agricultural governance framework. She explained how these structural factors intersect with climate change impacts, shaping both agricultural livelihoods and political discourses.
A central theme of Dr. Ricart’s lecture was how recent farmer protests across Europe reflect not only deep-seated socioeconomic grievances but also how these grievances have been increasingly co-opted by far-right populist movements. She raised the critical question of whether this emerging nexus between agricultural discontent and populism represents a transient political episode or the early stages of a deeper realignment in European rural politics.
Throughout the session, Dr. Ricart’s analysis provided participants with a nuanced, multi-scalar understanding of how climate change, policy pressures, and populist narratives are converging on European farming communities, offering a timely foundation for further reflection and debate on rural Europe’s evolving political landscape.
Structural and Demographic Features of European Agriculture
In this section of her lecture, Dr. Sandra Ricart provided a thorough examination of the structural and demographic characteristics of European agriculture, establishing a foundation for understanding the current crisis in the farming sector and its relationship with populist politics. She began by presenting an overarching picture of European agriculture today, emphasizing that while European farms continue to supply the essential public good of food production, their demographic base is in decline. One of the key concerns, Dr. Ricart explained, is the significant reduction in the number of young people entering the farming profession—a worrying trend that raises doubts about the future viability of agriculture across the continent.
This demographic challenge is not only contributing to the fragility of the sector but has also become a recurring theme in farmer protests and critiques of policy frameworks like the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Dr. Ricart highlighted that farming is no longer as attractive as other sectors to younger generations, who are drawn instead to professions perceived as more innovative or economically viable. The absence of generational renewal within farming communities threatens to exacerbate the structural weaknesses of European agriculture, an issue that populist movements have readily exploited.
Turning to structural characteristics, Dr. Ricart observed a striking duality in European agriculture: on the one hand, very small farms, and on the other, large-scale agribusinesses. This dual structure shapes debates around policy and representation. Small farmers, who often feel excluded from decision-making processes and inadequately represented in policy outcomes, have become increasingly vocal in their grievances—grievances that, as Dr. Ricart noted, form fertile ground for far-right political movements seeking to mobilize rural discontent.
Land ownership patterns further complicate this picture. Dr. Ricart emphasized that ownership versus tenancy is a critical determinant of farmers’ capacity to plan for the future and adapt to challenges such as climate change. Farmers who own their land generally have more autonomy to invest in sustainable practices or infrastructure, while tenant farmers must navigate complex relationships with landlords, making long-term planning and adaptation more difficult. Access to land, and the sense of security it brings, is thus a central theme in both farmer protests and wider rural political discourse.
Geographically, Dr. Ricart provided a comparative overview of farming’s importance across European countries, noting that countries such as France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Poland dominate agricultural production. Unsurprisingly, it is in these countries that farmers’ protests have been most intense and visible. However, she also noted that smaller agricultural producers such as Belgium have played outsized roles in protest dynamics, in part because of their political significance as hosts of EU institutions—a symbolically powerful site for expressing Europe-wide grievances.
Dr. Ricart drew attention to the uneven distribution of farming activity in both crop production and livestock rearing, noting that this structural diversity partly explains national differences in protest intensity and focus. For instance, she pointed out that livestock farming has been particularly vulnerable to recent regulatory pressures concerning animal welfare, further fueling discontent in sectors already under demographic and economic strain.
Another central theme in Dr. Ricart’s analysis was the economic precariousness of the farming sector. While agricultural productivity in some areas remains high, farm incomes across the EU have stagnated or declined over the past 15 years, despite increasing demands on farmers to comply with new environmental, health, and quality standards. This trend, she argued, is pushing many farmers toward poverty and fueling the perception that the sector is in structural crisis. Dr. Ricart noted that this growing economic pressure is also a focal point for populist messaging, with far-right parties seeking to position themselves as champions of “forgotten” rural communities whose economic contributions are undervalued and whose livelihoods are threatened.
Dr. Ricart then turned to a discussion of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) itself, providing participants with a succinct history of this keystone of European agricultural governance. The CAP, she noted, is over sixty years old and reflects an evolving set of priorities, including ensuring fair incomes for farmers, guaranteeing food quality and security, and increasingly, delivering environmental public goods such as biodiversity protection and landscape conservation. Yet, despite this broadening policy remit, she emphasized that much of the farming community continues to view the CAP as insufficiently responsive to their day-to-day struggles and future uncertainties.
She detailed how the CAP operates through three principal instruments: direct payments to farmers, market regulation mechanisms to stabilize prices and ensure quality standards, and rural development measures aimed at supporting sustainable and resilient agricultural practices. While these instruments theoretically provide a safety net for farmers and a policy framework to navigate market volatility and environmental pressures, Dr. Ricart noted that many farmers feel excluded from the design of these instruments and find them too bureaucratic or insufficiently tailored to their realities.
Finally, Dr. Ricart encouraged participants to reflect on the broader societal role of agriculture. Beyond producing food, she argued, farmers maintain landscapes, provide ecosystem services, and sustain rural ways of life that are part of Europe’s cultural heritage. Yet these broader contributions, while rhetorically valued, are not always matched by policy support or financial compensation.
In sum, this section of Dr. Ricart’s lecture painted a complex portrait of European agriculture as a sector at once economically vital, socially significant, and deeply troubled. Demographic decline, structural dualities, insecure land tenure, uneven income trends, and rising regulatory demands all combine to create a sense of existential threat among farmers—a sentiment that far-right and populist movements have been quick to harness. Dr. Ricart’s analysis offered participants a critical foundation for understanding how these material and structural conditions form the backdrop against which agricultural grievances are expressed and politicized in contemporary Europe.
Climate Change Impacts and Farmer Perceptions
After discussing the demographic and structural features of the agricultural sector, Dr. Ricart shifted focus to how climate-related concerns, perceptions of fairness, and economic pressures are shaping farmer reactions across Europe—culminating in recent protests and increasing alignment with far-right narratives.
Dr. Ricart began by highlighting key findings from the latest Eurobarometer survey, which collects European citizens’ perceptions of agriculture and the CAP. She emphasized that across Europe, there is broad recognition among the public that farmers play a vital role in providing a common good: safe, reliable, and sustainable food production. Yet this recognition comes with expectations. Citizens increasingly call for farming that is not just productive but also healthy, safe, and environmentally sustainable. Dr. Ricart explained how this demand for responsibility intersects with the pressures farmers face today. While the farming sector remains foundational for European societies, farmers increasingly feel they are being asked to meet high standards without receiving sufficient support or understanding from policymakers and consumers.
This dynamic, Dr. Ricart noted, feeds directly into the tensions underlying farmer protests and far-right mobilization. The narrative of an “us versus them” divide—between farmers and urban consumers, between national farming sectors and EU-level regulators—has become central to both farmer grievances and far-right political messaging. Farmers are not only demanding fairer prices or simpler regulations; they are questioning the fairness of a system that expects sustainability but struggles to compensate the costs associated with these demands.
One critical source of tension has been the perceived destabilization of agricultural markets due to imports from outside the European Union. Dr. Ricart observed that many European farmers feel exposed to unfair competition from imports that may not meet the EU’s rigorous environmental, safety, or labor standards. Coupled with broader concerns over food security and living standards, these anxieties have animated recent protests and provided fertile ground for far-right groups eager to position themselves as defenders of national farming communities.
Dr. Ricart then introduced the European Green Deal (EGD) as a policy framework that, while ambitious, has intensified these debates. The Green Deal, launched in 2020, aims to make Europe climate-neutral by 2050, setting interim targets for 2030. Its requirements have direct implications for agriculture, from reducing pesticide and fertilizer use to expanding organic farming and ensuring sustainability throughout supply chains. Dr. Ricart acknowledged the policy’s laudable goals but underscored the dilemma it creates for farmers: many feel that the timeframes imposed are too short, the costs too high, and the support mechanisms insufficient.
For example, Dr. Ricart pointed out that transitioning to organic farming entails fundamental changes to farm structures and practices, requiring new equipment, training, and often a reorientation of entire business models. Likewise, reducing pesticide and fertilizer use demands investment in new technologies or methods, which smaller farms especially may struggle to afford. These requirements arrive amid other pressures such as fluctuating commodity prices, demographic decline within the farming population, and challenges related to land tenure, which collectively threaten the long-term viability of small and medium-scale farms.
The core of Dr. Ricart’s analysis centered on how climate change itself magnifies these difficulties. Drawing on survey data from research directly engaging with farmers, she illustrated how climate impacts—such as rising temperatures, more frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves, and increasingly erratic rainfall—are already deeply felt by farmers across Europe. These environmental stresses compound the pressures from policy reforms, making adaptation both urgent and costly.
Notably, farmers’ perceptions of climate change reflect a mix of acknowledgment and anxiety. Most farmers accept that climate change is happening and that it is affecting their livelihoods. However, their capacity to respond is constrained by the intersection of environmental change with market conditions, regulatory burdens, and infrastructural limitations. This complexity explains why climate-related grievances have become entangled with broader frustrations about agricultural policy and governance.
In concluding this section, Dr. Ricart emphasized that climate change acts as an overarching factor, reshaping every challenge farmers face and intensifying old grievances while generating new ones. While environmental sustainability is an essential goal, the pathways toward that goal must recognize the diversity and vulnerability of agricultural systems across Europe. For many farmers, the question is not whether to pursue sustainability but how to do so while maintaining livelihoods and ensuring intergenerational continuity in farming communities.
Dr. Ricart made clear that understanding farmer protests and far-right populist responses requires attention to this nexus of environmental pressures, policy demands, and lived economic realities. Climate change is not an abstract concern for European farmers; it is a daily challenge that intersects with perceptions of fairness, justice, and recognition—making it a central terrain on which political struggles over the future of European agriculture will continue to unfold.
Examining the Widespread Farmers’ Protests
View of the A15 motorway near Paris, where the demonstration of farmers in tractors, are blocked by the police on January 29, 2024. Photo: Franck Legros.
Dr. Ricart also examined how the farmer protests that erupted across Europe in late 2023 and early 2024 reflected a deeper and widespread crisis in agricultural policy and governance. These protests, Dr. Ricart noted, were not isolated or confined to any single country or grievance; rather, they represented a growing pan-European tendency where farmers across national contexts expressed similar frustrations and demands. The protests became an important transnational phenomenon, with farmers mobilizing around shared grievances and converging symbolically in Belgium, home to European Union institutions, to amplify their voices at the continental level.
Dr. Ricart highlighted three core drivers motivating the protests: falling food prices, increasingly stringent environmental regulations, and a growing perception that European agricultural policy was failing to address national specificities. Low food prices, often a result of global market pressures and import competition, squeezed farm incomes, exacerbating rural economic insecurity. Simultaneously, farmers faced new and challenging environmental regulations associated with the EGD and climate action objectives. These regulations demanded significant changes in production methods, often imposing costs that smaller farmers in particular struggled to meet.
The third factor, Dr. Ricart emphasized, was a nationalist framing of grievances that far-right populist movements readily exploited. By portraying European Union policy as a detached elite imposition and emphasizing the loss of national sovereignty, populist actors framed the discontent in binary terms: a struggle between “us,” the farmers and citizens, and “them,” the distant European policymakers and foreign competitors. The far right’s message was that only national governments—not European-level institutions—could defend farmers’ interests, a rhetoric that found resonance among frustrated agricultural communities.
Dr. Ricart also pointed to widespread farmer criticism of the CAP, which has been revised repeatedly since its inception in 1962. Many protesters argued that successive CAP reforms had failed to resolve longstanding issues while introducing additional bureaucratic burdens. Farmers felt caught between contradictory pressures: on one hand, to modernize and adapt to environmental goals; on the other, to survive in a competitive market that undermined their income and livelihoods.
In countries like France, where agriculture has historically been a politically privileged sector, Dr. Ricart noted that many farmers nevertheless felt marginalized at the European level. This perceived disconnect between national pride in agriculture and EU-wide agricultural governance became a further source of frustration and mobilization. The protests, Dr. Ricart concluded, reflected not just sectoral discontent but broader tensions between rural communities and European integration, exacerbated by the politics of populism.
Farmers’ Protests and the Rise of Far-Right Populist Actors Across Europe
Tractors with posters of farmers protesting against the government’s measures at the Ludwig Street in Munich, Germany on January 8, 2024. Photo: Shutterstock.
In her lecture, Dr. Ricart also explored how recent farmers’ protests across Europe intersect with the rise of far-right populist actors, revealing complex political dynamics. Dr. Ricart underscored that while farmers’ grievances are rooted in real economic, environmental, and policy challenges, the far right has increasingly sought to instrumentalize these frustrations to expand its influence.
She began by highlighting how the farmers’ protests that erupted across the continent in late 2023 and early 2024 were not isolated events, but part of a transnational pattern. Farmers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and other countries took to the streets, expressing concerns over falling food prices, rising costs, burdensome environmental regulations, and trade competition. While these protests expressed legitimate anxieties about livelihoods and rural futures, Dr. Ricart pointed out that they have become fertile ground for far-right populist narratives.
One key theme Dr. Ricart identified was the way far-right actors strategically differentiated between national and supranational representations of farmers. In France, for instance, far-right politicians emphasized that while the French state historically recognized and honored its farmers, European-level governance failed to acknowledge their unique role and plight. This narrative enabled far-right movements to portray themselves as defenders of national agricultural traditions against what they framed as an out-of-touch European elite.
Dr. Ricart emphasized that this trend was not confined to France. In Germany, while farmers’ unions and associations initially led protests with non-partisan messages, far-right parties quickly appropriated these discourses, tailoring them to appeal to rural voters. These actors often moved faster than traditional political parties, repackaging farmers’ demands into simplified, emotive slogans, aimed at mobilizing disaffected segments of the rural population.
In Italy, Dr. Ricart observed similar patterns, citing protest slogans such as “We are farmers, not slaves” as emblematic of the populist rhetoric. Such messages resonated with farmers’ sense of marginalization, but also opened the door for far-right narratives that positioned themselves as authentic champions of “the people” against technocratic elites. Across these contexts, Dr. Ricart noted how the far right’s involvement blurred the boundaries between farmers’ legitimate protests and politicized mobilizations aimed at electoral gain.
A notable point in Dr. Ricart’s analysis was how far-right actors framed these protests as the “beginning” of a broader rural revolt. Farmers’ actions were reinterpreted as symbolic of a wider societal struggle, fueling a narrative of grievance that transcended agricultural policy and encompassed broader themes of national sovereignty, identity, and distrust of transnational governance structures. Dr. Ricart emphasized that this framing intensified the division between “us” (the nation’s people) and “them” (European bureaucrats and elites), reinforcing nationalist populist logics.
Dr. Ricart also addressed how environmental and climate change policies—particularly those associated with the EGD—became a focal point for far-right mobilization. She explained that climate-related regulations, such as pesticide and fertilizer restrictions or the promotion of organic farming, were recast by populist actors as evidence of elite detachment from the material realities of rural life. In this context, far-right rhetoric constructed a powerful image of embattled farmers struggling to comply with costly, unrealistic demands imposed from Brussels, appealing to a broad coalition of discontented rural and peri-urban voters.
Further, Dr. Ricart noted that the far right’s engagement with farmers’ protests coincided with the European Parliament elections, a crucial opportunity for these actors to expand their electoral base. By framing themselves as responsive to farmers’ frustrations—while traditional parties appeared slow or ambivalent—the far right strengthened its foothold in rural regions. In countries such as France, Italy, and parts of Eastern Europe, this alignment translated into electoral gains and a consolidation of populist influence over rural political discourse.
Toward the conclusion of this section, Dr. Ricart reflected on the broader implications of this intersection between protest and populism. She warned that while far-right parties appropriated farmers’ grievances to gain visibility and votes, their actual policy platforms offered few substantive solutions to address the underlying economic and environmental challenges facing agriculture. In contrast, she emphasized that farmers themselves were primarily concerned with ensuring the sustainability of their livelihoods and agricultural traditions, rather than endorsing a particular ideological agenda.
Ultimately, Dr. Ricart argued that this dynamic illustrates how populist politics can exploit genuine socio-economic discontent while offering simplistic narratives that obscure the structural complexities of agricultural transformation in an era of climate crisis and globalized markets. As farmers continue to grapple with these pressures, the interplay between their protests and far-right populist strategies will remain a critical area for further analysis and political reflection.
Conclusion
Dr. Sandra Ricart offered participants of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025,a nuanced analysis of the evolving relationship between climate change, agriculture, and populist politics in Europe. Her presentation revealed that European farming communities today face a convergence of pressures: demographic decline, economic precarity, regulatory demands, and intensifying climate-related challenges. These stresses have not only shaped farmer perceptions and protests but have also provided fertile ground for far-right populist actors who seek to frame rural discontent in nationalist and anti-European terms.
Dr. Ricart emphasized that while farmers’ grievances are real and rooted in structural inequalities and policy shortcomings, the appropriation of these grievances by far-right movements raises important questions about the politicization of rural discontent. She underscored that populist narratives tend to simplify complex agricultural challenges, presenting an “us versus them” logic that pits national farmers and citizens against distant European elites and external competitors, while offering few substantive solutions for the sector’s long-term sustainability.
At the same time, Dr. Ricart acknowledged the legitimacy of farmers’ frustrations, particularly their concerns over falling incomes, generational decline, and a perceived disconnect between European policy frameworks and the lived realities of rural communities. Her analysis called for a more inclusive and responsive agricultural policy that better reflects farmers’ needs, supports adaptation to climate change, and ensures economic viability while promoting environmental sustainability.
Ultimately, Dr. Ricart concluded that the future of European agriculture will depend on addressing these multifaceted challenges without allowing populist actors to monopolize the narrative. Her lecture encouraged participants to think critically about how governance frameworks, political discourse, and climate adaptation strategies must evolve in tandem to protect both Europe’s rural communities and the democratic structures that underpin them.
In his lecture at the ECPS Summer School 2025, Professor John M. Meyer offered a compelling exploration of the relationship between populism and climate politics. He critiqued authoritarian populism as a threat to equitable climate action while also questioning mainstream climate governance’s elitist, technocratic tendencies. Rather than viewing populism solely as an obstacle, Professor Meyer argued that climate justice movements themselves embody a form of inclusive, democratic populism—centered on equity, participation, and solidarity. Drawing on examples from grassroots activism and Naomi Klein’s concept of “eco-populism,” Professor Meyer proposed that climate action must address material injustices and engage people where they are. His lecture encouraged participants to rethink populism as a political form that, when inclusive and justice-oriented, can help build legitimate, durable, and democratic climate solutions.
Reported by ECPS Staff
Climate change intersects with numerous issues, transforming it into more than just an environmental challenge; it has developed into a complex and multifaceted political issue with socio-economic and cultural dimensions. This intersection makes it an appealing topic for populist politicians to exploit in polarizing societies. With the global rise of populist politics, climate change has increasingly become part of populist discourse—whether as a scapegoat for economic grievances, a symbol of globalist overreach, or an arena for nationalist contestation.
Populist politics present additional barriers to equitable climate solutions, often framing global climate initiatives as elitist or detrimental to local autonomy. As a result, populism in recent years has profoundly impacted climate policy worldwide, encompassing a wide spectrum—from the climate skepticism and deregulation of leaders like Donald Trump to the often ambiguous and contradictory stances of left-wing populist movements.
We are convinced that this pressing issue not only requires an in-depth understanding but also demands our combined effort to seek innovative and just solutions. Against this backdrop, the ECPS Academy Summer School on “Populism and Climate Change: Understanding What Is at Stake and Crafting Policy Suggestions for Stakeholders,” held online from 7 to 11 July 2025, aims to critically examine these themes. The program sought to foster a deeper understanding of the tension between economic, political, and environmental interests in populist ideologies, with a particular emphasis on the key conclusions from the Baku Conference on climate justice and populism (2024), which foregrounded the impact of authoritarian and populist politics in shaping global climate governance.
In this context, the second lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025, titled “Climate Justice and Populism,”represented a major conceptual pivot. It was masterfully moderated by Dr. Manuela Caiani, Associate Professor of Political Science at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Italy, whose own scholarship on right- and left-wing populism, new authoritarianism in Europe, and the politics of emotions provided an ideal framing. Dr. Caiani’s introduction emphasized how populism, climate justice, and ecological transition intersect in her ongoing research projects. She underscored that these issues occupy overlapping analytical terrains and encouraged participants to re-examine prevailing assumptions about the relationship between populism and environmental politics.
The lecture was delivered by Dr. John M. Meyer, Professor in the Departments of Politics and Environmental Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. Professor Meyer’s work as a political theorist seeks to illuminate how social and political values and institutions shape—and are shaped by—our relationship to the environment. His scholarship includes influential contributions such as Engaging the Everyday: Environmental Social Criticism and the Resonance Dilemma (MIT Press, 2015) and The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory (Oxford University Press, 2016), both regarded as foundational texts in environmental political theory.
Between 2020 and 2024, Professor Meyer served as editor-in-chief of the prestigious journal Environmental Politics, where he promoted interdisciplinary dialogue on environmental governance, justice, and democracy. In this lecture, Professor Meyer foregrounded theoretical and normative questions over empirical case studies, inviting participants to rethink fundamental assumptions about populism, climate change narratives, and policy frameworks. His intervention challenged the view that populism is inherently an obstacle to climate action, instead offering a nuanced analysis of how climate justice movements themselves may embody a form of progressive, democratic populism.
This lecture not only set an intellectual benchmark for the ECPS Summer School but also provided a critical lens through which to engage with the central themes of populism and climate governance for the remainder of the program.
Structure of the Lecture
Professor Meyer organized his presentation into three interrelated thematic strands:
Authoritarian Populism as a Threat to Climate Justice
Mainstream Climate Action as Anti‑Populist
Climate Justice as a Manifestation of Inclusive Populism
These three themes, Professor Meyer argued, should be understood sequentially and relationally, with each offering a reframing of the politics of climate change in contemporary democracies.
Authoritarian Populism as a Threat
In the opening analytical section of his lecture, Professor Meyer turned his attention to what he termed authoritarian populism as a threat to climate policy and action. Speaking from a conceptual standpoint, Professor Meyer carefully clarified that while he sought to illuminate the ways in which authoritarian populism undermines climate governance, he did not intend to suggest that populism itself is the core problem. Rather, he argued, authoritarian populism should be understood as a significant manifestation of a broader political challenge to climate justice, while populism as a mode of politics might also contain emancipatory potential.
Professor Meyer outlined key characteristics of this authoritarian populist threat, situating it primarily among right-wing and, in some cases, explicitly fascistic parties and leaders. These actors, he observed, routinely frame climate policy as an elite-driven and globalist project, leveraging this framing to claim that they are defending “the people” against perceived external impositions. Yet, Professor Meyer noted that the conception of “the people” advanced by authoritarian populists is deeply homogenizing—constructed in a way that deliberately excludes as many as it purports to represent, marginalizing pluralism and dissent.
An important distinction Professor Meyer drew was between authoritarian populists’ selective embrace of environmental concerns: many such actors profess to defend local or national environments—protecting land, waterways, or rural communities within their conception of the “homeland”—while simultaneously attacking global climate change mitigation efforts. This selective environmentalism serves to bolster nationalist narratives while rejecting multilateral climate agreements and policies.
Professor Meyer further emphasized that authoritarian populist parties and movements often deny or express skepticism about the very existence, causes, or urgency of climate change. This skepticism politicizes climate change itself, framing it as a contested, ideologically loaded topic rather than a shared global challenge grounded in scientific consensus.
While acknowledging these dangers, Professor Meyer stressed that authoritarian populism’s climate denialism and obstructionism should be understood in context—not as an indictment of all populist politics, but as one specific configuration that climate justice advocates must confront. This framing set the stage for his subsequent analysis of mainstream climate policy and the potential for democratic populist alternatives.
Mainstream Climate Action as Anti‑Populist
In this significant portion of his lecture, Professor Meyer offered a penetrating critique of what he characterized as the mainstream climate action framework, which he argued functions as a form of anti-populism. Beginning with an overview of the institutional landscape—anchored by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its annual Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings— Professor Meyer drew attention to the global policy architecture and its regional manifestations, notably the European Green Deal and the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
Professor Meyer suggested that this mainstream approach, despite institutional diversity, shares a common political imaginary steeped in technocratic elitism. It is dominated by establishment actors—mainstream parties, legacy media, global NGOs—who are routinely cast as “elites” in populist discourse. He suggested that this framework is shaped by a nostalgic vision of politics, one that emphasizes civility, pluralism, respect for scientific expertise, and globalist ethics, typified by UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ oft-cited appeal that “we are all in this together.” While these values have guided international climate discourse, Professor Meyer argued that they also drive a political culture that instinctively rejects populist critiques as dangerous politicization.
This elitist imaginary, Professor Meyer contended, is reflected in the dominant policy instruments. For over three decades, mainstream climate policy has revolved around carbon pricing mechanisms, including cap-and-trade schemes and carbon taxes. More recently, policies such as the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the European Green Deal have moved toward industrial policy approaches centered on state incentives and partnerships with private industries to foster green innovation. Yet Professor Meyer highlighted a key limitation: the political invisibility of these policies. The IRA, for instance, delivered substantial subsidies and jobs to economically disadvantaged, Republican-leaning regions in the US, yet beneficiaries were largely unaware of the policy’s role due to its technocratic and opaque design. This invisibility, Professor Meyer suggested, made these reforms politically vulnerable to rollback efforts such as Donald Trump’s successful campaign to dismantle key elements of the IRA.
Turning to the discursive landscape, Professor Meyer cited recent commentary—including from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change—which emphasized that mainstream actors must reclaim climate debate from “campaigners” and instead promote pragmatic, outcome-driven solutions. Tony Blair’s framing, Professor Meyer noted, epitomizes an explicit anti-populist stance, doubling down on elite-driven governance while treating public skepticism and populist critique as obstacles to be neutralized rather than symptoms to be understood. Similarly, scholars like Eduardo Campanella and Robert Lawrence, while encouraging better climate storytelling, advocated narratives rooted in entrepreneurial genius and open trade—further exemplifying the technocratic ethos of the mainstream.
Professor Meyer argued that this anti-populist orientation constitutes a political trap. Rather than defusing populist critique, it reinforces the binary at the heart of populist discourse: a moral division between elites and “the people.” By implicitly casting technocratic expertise as virtuous and popular sentiment as irrational, mainstream climate governance aligns itself with elite politics and alienates the very publics whose support it requires. Citing Jonathan White’s distinction between a politics of necessity and a politics of volition, Professor Meyer noted that mainstream discourse tends to present climate action as an imperative dictated by science—a domain where policy options are viewed as objectively correct and public deliberation as an impediment.
However, this technocratic framing, Professor Meyer observed, fails on two critical fronts. First, it overlooks the deep injustices inherent in both the causes and impacts of climate change. Marginalized and impoverished communities—whether in the Global South or within advanced economies—bear the brunt of climate harms despite having contributed the least to global emissions. Second, mainstream climate policy often exacerbates these injustices, imposing disproportionate burdens on precisely those least equipped to bear them while offering inadequate mechanisms for redress or participation.
Professor Meyer further noted that this anti-populist imaginary tends to misconstrue populism itself as inherently exclusionary, skeptical of climate science, and therefore an existential threat to climate action. While authoritarian populists often engage in climate denialism and evidence skepticism—ranging from rejection of warming trends to downplaying human causation and impacts— Professor Meyer emphasized that skepticism can take other forms as well. Drawing on von Rensburg’s typology, he distinguished between evidence skepticism and process skepticism. Notably, while many climate justice movements accept the scientific consensus on climate change, they remain deeply critical of the processes by which climate knowledge is produced, who gets included or excluded in decision-making, and the equity of proposed policy responses.
Professor Meyer observed that some right-wing populist movements in Europe and North America have increasingly adopted critiques of climate policy process and response—not to advance climate justice but as part of their broader assault on liberal governance. This convergence of critique from vastly different ideological poles underscores the complexity of the political terrain.
Ultimately, Professor Meyer’s analysis warned that mainstream climate policy’s anti-populist reflex may undermine its own legitimacy by failing to engage with these deeper political, social, and ethical concerns. Instead of depoliticizing climate action, Professor Meyer suggested that a more inclusive, participatory approach attentive to justice and popular grievances is essential for achieving both legitimacy and effectiveness in climate governance.
Climate Justice as Inclusive Populism
In the final—and most innovative—section of his lecture, Professor Meyer turned his attention to a theme that he framed as pivotal to rethinking climate politics: climate justice as a manifestation of populism. This focus represented both a conceptual intervention and an effort to challenge dominant narratives that either marginalize or misunderstand climate justice movements. Professor Meyer argued that climate justice movements represent an alternative, democratic populism. If populism is understood simply as a political form that pits “the people” against “the elites,” then climate justice activists, indigenous movements, and youth-led campaigns embody a progressive populism rooted in solidarity, justice, and inclusivity.
Professor Meyer began by clarifying a key distinction: climate justice movements should not be conflated with climate policy writ large, nor should they be treated as an add-on or afterthought to conventional policy mechanisms. He warned that policymakers often make the mistake of assuming that technocratic tools—such as carbon taxes or cap-and-trade systems—can be implemented first, and then some portion of the resulting revenues can be redistributed to marginalized communities to compensate for inequitable impacts. This “compensatory” logic, Professor Meyer emphasized, misreads what climate justice movements themselves seek to achieve. Rather than viewing justice as a supplemental objective, climate justice movements embed questions of equity, inclusion, and systemic critique at the very core of their agenda.
Professor Meyer identified five defining features of climate justice movements that, in his view, mark them as distinctively populist. First was their inclusive conception of “the people.” Unlike the exclusionary and homogenizing populist rhetoric characteristic of many authoritarian right-wing movements, climate justice movements articulate a broad, pluralistic vision of “the people.” This vision centers on those most directly affected by environmental harms: marginalized communities in both the Global South and Global North, Indigenous populations, youth activists, and other groups on the frontline of ecological disruption. Drawing on examples such as the Climate Justice Now coalition in Brazil—organizing a “People’s Summit” ahead of COP30—Professor Meyer illustrated how this inclusive populist imaginary juxtaposes “the people” against polluters, corporations, and political elites.
A second core feature is the rejection of “false solutions.” Professor Meyer noted that climate justice activists frequently deploy this language to critique policies that may appear progressive but fail to address root causes or distribute benefits equitably. He referenced prominent critiques from activist networks and figures like Greta Thunberg, whose characterization of empty climate promises as mere “blah blah blah” captured the impatience of youth-led movements with elite foot-dragging and performative commitments.
The third characteristic Professor Meyer discussed was a distinctive understanding of expertise. Climate justice movements elevate Indigenous, local, and community-based knowledge systems, particularly in the realm of climate adaptation. Professor Meyer stressed that this should not be misunderstood as a wholesale rejection of scientific knowledge but rather as a critique of how dominant climate science and policymaking processes have historically marginalized or ignored situated expertise. By foregrounding these alternative epistemologies, climate justice actors contest the monopoly of elites over what counts as legitimate knowledge and authority.
The fourth feature is a commitment to meeting people “where they are,” recognizing and engaging with their immediate material conditions and everyday struggles. Rather than demanding that communities subordinate their pressing concerns to abstract climate imperatives, climate justice movements insist that effective and just climate action must be grounded in, and responsive to, those lived realities.
Finally, Professor Meyer highlighted the movements’ investment in building cooperative and institutional structures that can sustain long-term commitments to justice and equity. This organizational orientation reflects an ambition to institutionalize solidarity and embed democratic accountability into the very fabric of climate governance.
Throughout this section of his lecture, Professor Meyer implicitly challenged prevailing academic frameworks that define populism narrowly as a phenomenon of electoral politics or demagoguery. Referencing scholars such as Nadia Urbinati, who tend to disregard social movements as “not unusual” and therefore outside the purview of populism studies, Professor Meyer argued that climate justice movements reveal a more complex, inclusive, and potentially emancipatory form of populist politics—one that foregrounds horizontal solidarity, material justice, and epistemic pluralism. In sum, Professor Meyer’s analysis offered a powerful reconceptualization of climate justice not as a peripheral adjunct to mainstream climate action but as an alternative paradigm rooted in participatory populism, critical of elite-driven processes, and attentive to social and environmental equity at every level.
‘Fascist Flip’ in Post‑Disaster Communities
In the final section of his lecture, Professor John Meyer turned to what he identified as a crucial focus of climate justice movements: engaging people where they are now and constructing durable, cooperative structures to sustain solidarity over time. To illustrate this principle, Professor Meyer invoked the recent work of Naomi Klein, highlighting her concept of eco-populism as an alternative political approach capable of countering the dynamics that foster exclusion and reactionary backlash.
Professor Meyer drew on Klein’s 2025 lecture titled “Fascism or Eco-Populism: Our Stark Choice,” in which she revisited the tragic aftermath of the 2018 Camp Fire—the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. The fire had devastated the town of Paradise, destroying more than 18,000 structures and leaving over 30,000 people homeless. Many of these displaced residents sought refuge in nearby Chico, California—a city of approximately 100,000 people—which initially greeted them with warmth and compassion. Early on, Klein reported, there was a collective spirit of welcome, described by some as a “blanket of love and comfort” extended to these climate refugees.
But as Professor Meyer recounted, Chico’s initial solidarity eroded over time. The city’s limited housing stock, strained schools, and overwhelmed social services could not sustainably absorb such a sudden population increase. This material strain gave way to a political backlash: new conservative officials were elected, and crackdowns on homelessness followed. What was especially notable, Professor Meyer emphasized, was that these refugees were neither immigrants from distant countries nor culturally alien populations—they were displaced residents from a neighboring town. Their rejection underscored how even solidarity rooted in geographic proximity can fracture under economic and infrastructural pressure.
Klein, Professor Meyer noted, described this shift as a “fascist flip”—the transformation from empathy to hostility when societies fail to build the material and institutional foundations necessary to sustain care over time. According to Klein, only eco-populism can counteract this dynamic: a politics rooted in universalism, material equity, and the creation of cooperative structures that ensure no group is scapegoated or left behind.
Professor Meyer highlighted Klein’s praise for figures like Zohran Mamdani, a New York City politician who exemplifies this approach. Mamdani, representing a racially diverse and economically marginalized community where many residents paradoxically supported Donald Trump, did not dismiss or condescend to his constituents. Instead, he listened to their material grievances—stories about broken elevators in public housing and perceived inequalities in the treatment of immigrants. Rather than responding by retreating from migrant solidarity, Mamdani concluded that the left must “raise the floor” for everyone, fighting for universal access to housing, transportation, food, and healthcare.
This vision of eco-populism, Professor Meyer observed, embodies a politics of meeting people where they are—politically, economically, and emotionally. It does not ask individuals to overcome their immediate material insecurities in the name of an abstract climate imperative. Instead, it insists that justice-oriented climate action must address those insecurities as an integral part of building an equitable and sustainable future.
For Professor Meyer, this example crystallized the core lesson: without institutions and structures that can translate compassion into durable material support, solidarity remains fleeting. But with such structures, there exists the possibility—though never the guarantee—of sustaining care, fostering democratic participation, and bridging divides that reactionary forces seek to widen.
Professor Meyer closed this section by emphasizing that climate justice as populism offers an alternative political logic to both authoritarian populism and elite technocracy. It politicizes climate action not through denialism or obstruction, but by challenging whose knowledge counts, whose voices are heard, and whose needs are prioritized. It calls for participatory, bottom-up governance that reinforces solidarity and delivers concrete improvements to people’s everyday lives.
Ultimately, Professor Meyer’s analysis invited his audience to rethink not only climate policy but also their understanding of populism itself. In this reimagining, populism need not be defined solely by exclusion, demagoguery, or authoritarianism. Instead, climate justice movements reveal the potential of an inclusive, egalitarian, and democratic populism—one rooted in solidarity, dignity, and sustainability. As Professor Meyer concluded, this vision does not offer easy guarantees but opens up crucial possibilities for the future of both democracy and the planet.
Conclusion: Toward Eco‑Democratic Renewal
Professor Meyer’s lecture, “Climate Justice and Populism,” delivered as part of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025, provided a profound conceptual intervention into the nexus between populism and climate politics. By critically interrogating both the exclusionary tendencies of authoritarian populism and the elitist reflexes of mainstream climate governance, Professor Meyer advanced a compelling alternative: understanding climate justice movements as a form of inclusive, democratic populism.
Professor Meyer’s analysis cautioned against simplistic binaries that frame populism as inherently antagonistic to climate action or that valorize technocratic expertise while marginalizing public concerns. He argued that mainstream climate policies, deeply shaped by anti-populist sensibilities, often fail to address the disproportionate burdens faced by marginalized communities. Their tendency to depoliticize climate action by presenting it as a matter of technical necessity, grounded solely in scientific expertise, not only alienates segments of the public but also risks exacerbating the very injustices that climate policies should redress.
In contrast, Professor Meyer’s portrayal of climate justice movements illuminated their emancipatory potential. These movements do not treat justice as an afterthought or compensatory gesture but embed demands for equity, solidarity, and participatory governance at the heart of climate politics. Their inclusive notion of “the people,” attention to material conditions, valorization of indigenous and local knowledge, and critique of “false solutions” all point toward a populism that is pluralist, democratic, and responsive.
Importantly, Professor Meyer’s lecture underscored that climate justice as populism offers a path forward: one that politicizes climate policy not to obstruct but to democratize it, ensuring that climate action is socially just, politically legitimate, and broadly supported. As climate change intensifies and populist pressures grow, this reframing may prove indispensable—not only for advancing climate goals but also for renewing democratic life itself.
Please cite as: ECPS Staff. (2025). “ECPS Conference 2025 / Roundtable III — When the Social Contract is Broken: How to Put the Genie Back.” European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). July 9, 2025. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00107
At the ECPS International Conference 2025, Roundtable 3 explored how broken social contracts have fueled populism and democratic disillusionment. Held at St Cross College, University of Oxford, the panel featured Selçuk Gültaşlı’s summary of Eric Beinhocker’s fairness-based model of democratic collapse, Dr. Aviezer Tucker’s critique of elite entrenchment, Lord Alderdice’s focus on emotional wounds like humiliation and disillusionment, and Professor Julian F. Müller’s call for conceptual clarity around populism. Concluding the session, Irina von Wiese grounded abstract theory in lived inequality and called for renewed trust, dignity, and participation. The panel made clear: rebuilding democracy requires more than policy—it demands empathy, fairness, and respect for those left behind.
Reported by ECPS Staff
Held on the final day of the ECPS International Conference 2025, the third roundtable—“When the Social Contract is Broken: How to Put the Genie Back”—offered a rich culmination to three days of interdisciplinary reflection under the theme: “We, the People” and the Future of Democracy.” Taking place at the historic St Cross College, University of Oxford on July 3, 2025, the roundtable brought together scholars and practitioners to diagnose the breakdown of democratic legitimacy and consider pathways for renewal.
As co-chair of the roundtable, Selçuk Gültaşlı, Chairperson of the ECPS Executive Board, offered a conceptual framework drawn from Professor Eric Beinhocker’s work on the moral foundations of democratic cooperation. Though Beinhocker could not attend, Gültaşlı summarized his argument: that liberal democracies have violated key fairness dimensions—agency, inclusion, opportunity, and reciprocity—since the 1970s, generating widespread moral outrage and legitimizing the populist backlash.
The roundtable’s academic debate opened with Dr. Aviezer Tucker (University of Ostrava), who challenged the assumption that social contract theory is globally applicable. Instead, he traced the rise of populism to elite self-preservation, blocked mobility, and institutional failures, and proposed bold reforms in education, housing, and digital media regulation.
Lord John Alderdice, drawing on his leadership in the Northern Ireland peace process, emphasized the emotional roots of democratic crisis: humiliation, perceived injustice, and disillusionment with democratic outcomes. “People forget arguments,” he said, “but they don’t forget how you made them feel.”
Professor Julian F. Müller (University of Graz) closed the panel with a philosophical plea for conceptual precision. Warning against the moral and political costs of conflating populism with conservatism or racism, he argued that mislabeling people with real grievances risks reinforcing the very alienation populists exploit.
In her concluding reflections, Irina von Wiese, Honorary President of ECPS, drew on both personal memory and political experience to emphasize the human stakes of a fractured social contract. Recalling her upbringing in postwar Germany and her current role as a councillor in Southwark—one of London’s most starkly unequal boroughs—she illustrated the lived realities of inequality where extreme wealth and deep deprivation exist side by side. Echoing Eric Beinhocker’s core arguments, von Wiese noted that the mix of anger and resignation she encounters daily requires no academic training to interpret. For her, the path to renewal lies in restoring public trust by upholding dignity, enabling agency, and demonstrating that democracy can still deliver for all.
Together, these contributions reflected von Wiese’s closing message: that “populists are not the disillusioned masses but the exploiters,” and that rebuilding democracy begins with respect, representation, and honest engagement.
Opening Remarks by Irina von Wiese and Selçuk Gültaşlı
The final roundtable of the ECPS International Conference 2025 opened with brief but meaningful remarks by Irina von Wiese, Honorary President of ECPS, and Selçuk Gültaşlı, Chairperson of the ECPS Executive Board. Von Wiese extended a warm welcome to attendees and expressed her honor in participating alongside such a distinguished panel. She emphasized the importance of the topic and graciously passed the floor to Gültaşlı to provide an intellectual framing for the discussion.
Selçuk Gültaşlı, stepping in for Professor Eric Beinhocker—whose scheduling conflict prevented his attendance—presented a comprehensive introduction to the conceptual foundation of the roundtable, grounded in Beinhocker’s recent research published in The Nature and Dynamics of Collaboration (MIT Press). Gültaşlı described his intervention not as a formal presentation but as a framework to guide the ensuing discussion, focusing on how fractured social contracts erode democratic collaboration and foster populist backlash.
The roundtable’s title—“When the Social Contract is Broken: How to Put the Genie Back”—was drawn directly from Beinhocker’s central thesis: that the perceived fairness of a social contract is critical to enabling large-scale collaboration in democratic societies. Gültaşlı summarized Beinhocker’s findings, which identify nine key dimensions of social contract fairness: agency, inclusion, dignity, rule-based processes, meritocratic opportunity, security, capabilities, reciprocity, and progress. These are further organized into three categories: relational, procedural, and distributional fairness. According to Beinhocker, from the mid-1970s to the 2010s, the United States—and by extension, other liberal democracies—systematically violated these dimensions, creating the conditions for deep public resentment, democratic disenchantment, and the rise of authoritarian populism.
Gültaşlı emphasized Beinhocker’s argument that feelings of moral outrage triggered by these violations are central to understanding political disengagement and radicalization. Populist leaders, particularly those on the political right—such as Trump, Bolsonaro, Erdoğan, and Orbán—have succeeded by validating this outrage, positioning themselves as champions of “the people” against corrupt, unresponsive elites. However, these emotions transcend ideological lines and can be activated across the political spectrum. Importantly, before reform can succeed, Gültaşlı underscored, leaders must acknowledge these grievances and empathize with the populations that feel betrayed by the current system.
Citing Beinhocker’s historical parallel with late 19th-century America—a period of acute inequality, political corruption, and populist upheaval followed by robust reform—Gültaşlı concluded on a cautiously optimistic note. He argued that today’s fractured democratic systems still hold the potential for renewal, but only through bold leadership, institutional reform, and a reconstructed social contract rooted in fairness, reciprocity, and inclusion.
These opening reflections set the intellectual tone for a high-level roundtable discussion that followed, exploring how democracies can respond to systemic breakdowns and re-establish trust, legitimacy, and collaboration.
Aviezer Tucker: Populism, Elites, and the Historical Limits of the Social Contract
Dr. Aviezer Tucker, Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Historiography and the Historical Sciences at the University of Ostrava, delivered a pointed critique of using social contract theory to explain the ascent of contemporary populism.
In a characteristically contrarian and historically grounded presentation, Dr. Aviezer Tucker, Director, Centre for Philosophy of Historiography and the Historical Sciences, University of Ostrava, offered a sharp critique of social contract theory as an explanatory framework for the rise of contemporary populism. Speaking during the third and final roundtable of the ECPS Conference 2025, Dr. Tucker challenged both the normative nostalgia underpinning many discussions of democratic decline and the analytical coherence of applying Anglo-American models—such as social contract theory—to non-Anglophone political cultures.
Dr. Tucker opened by interrogating the cultural and historical specificity of the social contract tradition, tracing its origins to the Puritan Revolution in England and its later elaboration by the American Founders. He asked whether this framework meaningfully applies to contexts such as Hungary or Turkey, where legitimacy has historically stemmed from monarchy, religion, nationalism, or ideological visions of the future—as with communism—rather than from liberal contractarian ideas. In these societies, he argued, the social contract exists, if at all, only in the academic imagination. Thus, narratives invoking a “broken social contract” may lack both analytical purchase and political relevance outside the Anglo-American world.
Turning to the oft-invoked nostalgia for the post-war decades, Dr. Tucker was equally skeptical. He rejected any romanticization of the 1970s as a golden age of democratic equilibrium. In his view, this period was rife with inequality, racial segregation, gender discrimination, authoritarian rule in much of the world, and lack of civil liberties in countries like Hungary and Turkey. The idealized past, he argued, was far from idyllic and not worth restoring. “I’d rather take today’s populist world than the world of 1970,” he remarked pointedly.
Rather than locating the roots of populism in a broken social contract, Dr. Tucker offered a tripartite explanation grounded in economic recession and lack of growth, elite behavior, and institutional decay. First, he identified the 2008 global financial crisis as a psychological and socio-political turning point. Many individuals, he argued, misinterpreted the economic downturn not as a cyclical recession but as an existential threat—an “evolutionary extinction event.” This perception activated deep, atavistic fears of survival, tribalism, and zero-sum competition. In such conditions, collective behavior often reverts to primitive instincts: blaming out-groups, scapegoating minorities, and supporting authoritarian figures who promise protection and retribution.
Second, Dr. Tucker spotlighted the role of what he termed the “populist elites”—members of existing elite structures who, facing a shrinking pie and rising pressures from below, have sought to block social mobility to preserve their status. Instead of a glass ceiling, he suggested, these elites constructed a “glass floor” beneath themselves, making it more difficult for others to ascend. Institutions like universities, once pathways to upward mobility, have increasingly become gatekeeping mechanisms reinforcing elite reproduction. In the United States especially, he argued, the stagnation of mobility post-2008 has transformed higher education into a symbol of exclusion rather than opportunity—fuelling resentment and energizing populist backlash.
Third, Dr. Tucker emphasized the erosion of liberal democratic institutions and the failure of elites to adapt to the changing needs of society. Rather than blame social media or neoliberalism per se, he pointed to specific institutional bottlenecks—especially in urban housing and education policy—that have exacerbated inequality and bred frustration. In his view, these failures have created the conditions for populism not merely as an electoral style but as a symptom of deeper structural decay.
Importantly, Dr. Tucker did not limit his analysis to critique. He proposed a range of pragmatic, forward-looking solutions. At the psychological level, he advocated for education that helps individuals understand economic cycles and manage fear—what he called a “sentimental education” that teaches people to deal with their passions and anxieties. He also endorsed universal basic income as a stabilizing measure to prevent people from perceiving personal downturns as catastrophic. Furthermore, he stressed the importance of teaching history, not as a teleological narrative of national greatness or inevitable progress, but as a means of cultivating what he, drawing on George Santayana, called “historical virtue”—the ability to learn from the past without being traumatized by it.
In terms of institutional reform, Dr. Tucker proposed expanding elite educational institutions like Oxford and Harvard through global franchising, likening them to Starbucks: scalable, replicable, and capable of democratizing access to elite education. “Don’t sell exclusion,” he warned, “sell knowledge.” Exclusivity, he argued, breeds resentment and ultimately self-destruction. Likewise, he proposed deregulating urban housing markets to facilitate population movement to cities, which tend to be more pluralistic and less susceptible to populist appeals.
On the topic of digital media, Dr. Tucker differentiated between the medium and the algorithms. He encouraged resisting algorithmic amplification of outrage and passion, rather than condemning social media outright. Social media, he argued, connects the world; the problem lies in its monetization logic that rewards emotional manipulation.
Finally, in a more speculative vein, Dr. Tucker turned to China as an ambiguous case. While the country has experienced enormous economic uplift— China contributed, along with India, and mostly other Asian countries to the escape from poverty of two billions—its authoritarian consolidation defies expectations of democratization. Yet, he hinted at subterranean shifts, citing anecdotal evidence of Chinese academics reading Kafka as a sign of latent critical consciousness. “If they read Kafka,” he remarked, “they belong to my civilization.”
In conclusion, Dr. Tucker offered a complex and unsentimental reading of populism: not as a revolt of the oppressed, nor merely a symptom of economic anxiety, but as a historically contingent phenomenon shaped by elite behavior, institutional design, and emotional misrecognition. His intervention was a call to reimagine liberalism not through nostalgia or abstraction, but through reforms rooted in education, inclusion, and historical awareness. In his view, the path forward lies not in restoring a broken contract, but in rebuilding institutions capable of renewing trust and enabling human flourishing.
Lord John Alderdice: Emotional Roots of Political Conflict and the Path to Democratic Peace
Lord John Alderdice’s speech at Rountable 3 was a deeply reflective and empirically grounded intervention shaped by his extensive political and
Lord John Alderdice’s speech at Rountable 3 was a deeply reflective and empirically grounded intervention shaped by his extensive political and psychoanalytic background. As the Founding Director of the Conference on the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University and a former political leader in Northern Ireland, Lord Alderdice offered an alternative to the technocratic and institutional approaches to democratic crises, focusing instead on the emotional and relational dimensions of conflict.
Lord Alderdice began by situating his interest in conflict resolution within the lived experience of growing up in Northern Ireland amid cyclical violence. As a teenager, he observed that conventional political science frameworks, which presumed that actors behave rationally in pursuit of material or strategic self-interest, failed to explain the seemingly irrational and self-destructive behaviors prevalent in his society. This realization led him to study psychiatry and psychoanalysis, with the ambition of understanding—and eventually transforming—collective behaviors that sustained long-term conflict.
Crucially, he emphasized the difference between understanding and healing: diagnosis alone, whether in medicine or political science, is insufficient. Healing requires intervention, empathy, and sustained engagement. Drawing a parallel to psychiatry, he noted that even a precise understanding of pathology does not guarantee transformation unless one enters into meaningful, therapeutic engagement. Similarly, in political contexts, academic analyses that illuminate the causes of populism or polarization often fail to translate into solutions unless they are emotionally attuned and relationally grounded.
One of the most significant turning points in Lord Alderdice’s political journey came during the Northern Ireland peace process, when a key assumption—that peace could be achieved by engaging only moderate actors and excluding extremists—was proven false. He recalled how negotiations among the four non-violent party leaders reached a dead end until John Hume proposed talking directly with Sinn Féin and the IRA. While many, especially unionists, found this morally and politically unacceptable, Lord Alderdice recognized the necessity of testing this path “to destruction.” The inclusion of paramilitary-linked actors eventually led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, proving that exclusion of “extremists” could not resolve the conflict. Their inclusion was not a reward for violence, he clarified, but a prerequisite for peace.
Through these experiences, Lord Alderdice developed a foundational thesis: the root of intractable political conflict lies not in flawed institutions or socio-economic disparities, but in “disturbed historic relationships” between communities. The key to resolving such conflicts lies in repairing relationships. He distilled the emotional drivers of such relational breakdowns into three primary elements:
Humiliation and Disrespect: Lord Alderdice emphasized the psychological and political power of humiliation. Across every conflict zone he has engaged with, from Northern Ireland to beyond, there was always at least one community that felt humiliated and disrespected. Unlike rational disagreements that may dissipate, experiences of public humiliation endure. People may forget arguments, but they rarely forget how someone made them feel, especially when that feeling is one of humiliation. For communities, this becomes a deeply embedded political memory that fuels resentment and cycles of violence.
Perceptions of Unfairness: The second emotional catalyst is a visceral sense of injustice. Lord Alderdice illustrated this point with examples from childhood to communal politics, noting that the cry of “It’s not fair!” emerges from a deep emotional place rather than rational analysis. However, he cautioned that fairness is complex. For example, educational investment may initially be viewed positively by a disadvantaged group. But if, after acquiring education, they still face exclusion from jobs and opportunity, the sense of injustice is intensified, not mitigated. Such dynamics, he explained, triggered unrest in Northern Ireland during the 1960s and 1970s despite formal expansions in educational access for the Catholic community.
Democratic Disillusionment: The third critical factor is the widespread perception that “we’ve tried democracy and it doesn’t work.” When communities engage with democratic institutions in good faith and still experience exclusion, inequality, or humiliation, they may conclude that violence or radical alternatives are the only paths forward. Lord Alderdice called this a “tinderbox” condition—when people lose hope in democratic means, political rupture becomes almost inevitable.
Against this bleak diagnosis, Lord Alderdice offered a hopeful and actionable vision. The path forward, he argued, involves:
Practicing respectful engagement at all levels, even with those once seen as beyond the pale.
Designing political systems not around majoritarianism, but around value pluralism in the sense proposed by Isaiah Berlin—structures that accommodate, rather than suppress, radically different worldviews and experiences.
Institutionalizing inclusive pathways, so that even those involved in past violence can transition into peaceful democratic participation.
Building relationships across all societal levels—from political leadership to grassroots networks. Lord Alderdice emphasized that relationships are not static achievements but organic, evolving processes that require continual investment, empathy, and repair.
He concluded with a powerful reminder: relationships, whether personal or political, are never “sorted.” If one assumes they are complete, they are likely already failing. Sustainable democracy requires ongoing relational labor—not just policy or procedure. For those committed to restoring democracy in an era of populist fragmentation, Lord Alderdice’s message was clear: emotions matter, history matters, and relationships matter most of all.
Julian F. Müller: Populism, Conceptual Clarity, and the Politics of Humiliation
Professor Julian F. Müller examined a central question for contemporary political theory: how to define and ethically confront the phenomenon of populism.
In his characteristically precise and reflective style, Professor Julian F. Müller addressed one of the most pressing challenges facing contemporary political theory: how we conceptualize and morally engage with populism. Speaking as a philosopher of political thought and applied ethics, Professor Müller’s central argument was a plea for conceptual clarity, intellectual humility, and ethical responsibility in the scholarly and public discourse surrounding populist movements.
Professor Müller opened by acknowledging the conference’s critical stance toward populism, noting that throughout the panels, populists were repeatedly associated with a wide array of problematic traits: irrationality, racism, toxic masculinity, emotional volatility, and anti-intellectualism. While these critiques may be empirically grounded in certain contexts, Professor Müller questioned the analytical utility and normative consequences of aggregating such divergent and negative features under the single label “populism.”
He then called for a more nuanced typology that distinguishes between populists, racists, and conservatives, noting that the uncritical lumping together of these identities risks alienating and humiliating a significant portion of the public—many of whom have legitimate grievances. Whether these stem from stagnant income growth, deteriorating educational conditions, cultural disorientation, or rural economic decline, these grievances are real and morally relevant. Professor Müller gave a poignant example of a student-teacher in Hamburg who is unable to teach mathematics or philosophy due to severe language barriers in her multicultural classroom—a structural issue often overlooked in abstract theorizing.
This, Professor Müller argued, raises an ethical and political question: how does academic discourse contribute to public humiliation? Echoing Lord Alderdice’s emphasis on humiliation as a central driver of political alienation and violence, Professor Müller warned that dismissive or derisive characterizations of large swathes of the population as irrational “populists” may deepen social polarization and entrench hostility toward liberal institutions. The rhetoric of exclusion, even when cloaked in scholarly critique, carries moral and political consequences.
Professor Müller then proposed a normative and conceptual distinction that is often elided in public debate. True populists, he suggested, are characterized not by a particular ideology but by their rejection of rational discourse and deliberation. These actors do not seek dialogue but instead weaponize polarization. However, most citizens categorized as populists are not of this kind; many are conservatives or economically anxious citizens with whom democratic negotiation is not only possible but necessary.
The solution, Professor Müller concluded, is twofold: first, scholars and political actors must practice conceptual discipline, carefully differentiating between ideologically distinct categories. Second, and equally important, they must refrain from treating political opponents with contempt. Moral clarity and analytic rigor must not give way to rhetorical overreach. Without this humility, political philosophy risks becoming complicit in the very alienation it seeks to overcome.
Closing Reflections by von Wiese: Rebuilding Trust and Redefining Democracy
In her closing remarks, Irina von Wiese, Honorary President of ECPS and a seasoned politician, offered a deeply personal yet analytically informed reflection on the conference theme. Drawing from her lived experiences as a public servant in South London and her upbringing in post-war Germany, von Wiese articulated a grounded political vision centered on rebuilding trust, revitalizing democratic legitimacy, and reimagining the broken social contract.
Von Wiese began by acknowledging the intellectual richness of the preceding panel and the relevance of Eric Beinhocker’s theory of social contract breakdown. From her perspective as a practitioner, she found much of Beinhocker’s argument confirmed by her daily interactions with constituents in one of London’s most economically and socially unequal boroughs. The stark juxtaposition between wealth and poverty in her Southwark ward, she noted, represents a microcosm of broader global fractures—marked by unequal access to housing, education, security, and dignity.
Reflecting on her childhood in 1970s Germany, von Wiese evoked a period of post-war reconstruction imbued with optimism and democratic consolidation. The belief in generational progress, combined with access to public goods like free education and EU mobility, created a palpable sense that the social contract was both real and equitable. That faith, however, has since eroded—first gradually, then more visibly after the 2008 financial crisis. Today, she argued, both anger and resignation dominate the public mood. Anger fuels populist mobilization; resignation fosters political apathy.
Critically, von Wiese drew a clear distinction between the exploited and the exploiters. Populists, in her view, are not the disillusioned masses themselves but the political actors who instrumentalize legitimate grievances for anti-democratic ends. Their goal is not reform but power, often achieved by dismantling the very democratic institutions they claim to defend.
She stressed that rebuilding the social contract requires a long-term, multi-pronged approach: enhancing material equality, ensuring access to high-quality education, and restoring a sense of agency through local and democratic participation. Decentralization—giving real power to local communities—was one such avenue, though she warned that tokenistic consultations without responsive governance risk deepening disillusionment.
Von Wiese also highlighted the corrosive role of corporate power in democratic erosion, referencing the paradox of populist leaders like Donald Trump advancing policies that consolidate wealth and undermine democratic norms. She pointed to the need for democratic renewal through inclusive political mentorship, especially for underrepresented groups such as women and ethnic minorities, noting the considerable barriers and abuse faced by aspiring politicians today.
In closing, she contrasted her own generation’s post-war optimism with her daughter’s sense of precarity and disaffection—despite the latter’s elite education. This generational pessimism, she argued, is symptomatic of a deeper failure in political institutions to deliver hope. Addressing that failure will require not only policy reform but also cultural and moral leadership to restore trust in the democratic project.
Conclusion
Roundtable 3 of the ECPS International Conference 2025 brought together a diverse and interdisciplinary panel of scholars and practitioners to grapple with the roots of democratic disillusionment and the practical, emotional, and philosophical challenges of rebuilding civic trust. Throughout the session, panelists converged on a shared insight: that the current democratic malaise cannot be understood solely through institutional or economic lenses. As Dr. Aviezer Tucker underscored, populism is less a consequence of broken contractual ideals than a symptom of elite entrenchment, blocked mobility, and institutional failure. He called for innovative solutions in education, housing, and media that reduce exclusion and enable equitable opportunity.
Lord John Alderdice shifted the focus from structures to relationships, urging participants to consider the emotional scars—humiliation, injustice, and loss of faith in democratic processes—that drive political rupture. Drawing on his experience from the Northern Ireland peace process, he argued that long-term conflict resolution begins not with systems but with human connection, empathy, and mutual respect.
Professor Julian F. Müller cautioned against rhetorical overreach in political theory, warning that careless moralizing and conceptual imprecision around populism can alienate individuals with valid grievances. By conflating “populist” with “irrational” or “racist,” scholars may unintentionally deepen the alienation they aim to heal. He advocated for respectful, honest discourse and a commitment to moral humility.
Concluding the roundtable, Irina von Wiese grounded the discussion in lived experience. From the war-scarred streets of her childhood in Germany to the economic inequality she confronts daily as a councillor in South London, von Wiese illustrated the urgency of renewing the social contract. Echoing Beinhocker, she reminded the audience that rebuilding trust is not abstract—it means restoring dignity, opportunity, and agency to those who feel democracy no longer serves them.
Together, the roundtable’s contributions reflected the complexity of our moment—but also the possibility for renewal. If democracy is to flourish again, it must do so not only through institutions and policies, but through relationships, shared meaning, and a collective recommitment to justice.
Note: To experience the panel’s dynamic and thought-provoking Q&A session, we encourage you to watch the full video recording above.
Please cite as: ECPS Staff. (2025). “ECPS Conference 2025 / Panel 8 — ‘The People’ vs ‘The Elite’: A New Global Order?” European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). July 9, 2025. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00108
At the 2025 ECPS Conference in Oxford, Panel 8 offered a rich exploration of populism, elite transformation, and democratic erosion. Co-chaired by Ashley Wright (Oxford) and Azize Sargın (ECPS), the session featured cutting-edge scholarship from Aviezer Tucker, Pınar Dokumacı, Attila Antal, and Murat Aktaş. Presentations spanned elite populism, feminist spatial resistance, transatlantic authoritarianism, and the metapolitics of the French New Right. Discussant Karen Horn (University of Erfurt) offered incisive critiques on intellectual transmission, rationalism, and democratic thresholds. Together, the panel underscored populism’s global diffusion and its capacity to reshape both elites and “the people,” demanding renewed theoretical and civic engagement. Democracy, the panel emphasized, remains a contested space—never static, always in motion.
Reported by ECPS Staff
As part of the ECPS International Conference 2025, titled “We, the People” and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches, held from July 1–3 at St Cross College, University of Oxford, Panel VIII explored the contentious and evolving dynamic between “the people” and “the elite” in global political discourse. The session, titled “The People” vs “The Elite”: A New Global Order?, investigated the ideological and institutional transformations underway as populist movements reframe public authority, challenge established elites, and redefine democratic legitimacy across diverse national contexts.
This panel was co-chaired by Dr. Ashley Wright, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Minerva Global Security Programme, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, and Dr. Azize Sargın, Director of External Relations at ECPS. Their combined academic and practical expertise provided critical framing and continuity across the session.
The panel featured four intellectually rich presentations. Dr. Aviezer Tucker, Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Historiography and the Historical Sciences (University of Ostrava), opened with “We: The Populist Elites,” offering a provocative take on how contemporary populist leaders paradoxically assume elite roles while railing against elitism. Next, Dr. Pınar Dokumacı (University College Dublin) presented “Reclamations of ‘We, the People’,” reframing civil society in Turkey as a relational and spatial practice of democratic resistance under authoritarian populism.
In a transatlantic frame, Dr. Attila Antal (Eötvös Loránd University) delivered “The Transatlantic Network of Authoritarian Populism,” tracing how Schmittian legal theory and the rise of executive authority underpin political convergence between Trumpism and Orbánism. Closing the session, Professor Murat Aktaş (Muş Alparslan University) introduced their ongoing research in “The French New Right and Its Impact on European Democracies,” unpacking the metapolitical strategies and ideological currents that have shaped the European far-right.
The panel concluded with incisive commentary from Professor Karen Horn (University of Erfurt), who offered thoughtful critiques of transmission mechanisms, intellectual genealogies, and the limits of rationalist paradigms in explaining populist ascendancy.
Together, the session demonstrated how populism’s global diffusion and elite contestation demand renewed theoretical and practical engagement with the future of democratic governance.
Aviezer Tucker: “We: The Populist Elites”
In a sharp and thought-provoking presentation, Dr. Aviezer Tucker, Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Historiography and the Historical Sciences at the University of Ostrava, questioned core assumptions in current populism research.
In a characteristically provocative and intellectually agile presentation, Dr. Aviezer Tucker—Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Historiography and the Historical Sciences at the University of Ostrava—challenged the foundational assumptions of contemporary populism scholarship. Speaking during Panel 8 of the ECPS Conference at Oxford, titled “We: The Populist Elites,” Dr. Tucker proposed a contrarian interpretation: that populism is not fundamentally a revolt of “the people” against elites, but a pathology of the elites themselves—a performance of political passions rather than a rational movement for justice or equality.
Dr. Tucker’s opening salvo was clear: the dominant academic consensus, which casts populism as a bottom-up, anti-elite uprising, is analytically flawed. According to Dr. Tucker, this perspective is both too broad and too narrow. It is too broad because resentment against elites is not exclusive to populism—it animates religious reformers, anti-colonialists, and even frustrated HR departments. It is too narrow because the leading figures of modern populist movements are not representatives of the marginalized; they are often extremely wealthy, famous, or already embedded in traditional elite structures. Figures like Trump, Berlusconi, and Orbán are not outsiders—they are elite actors who weaponize public resentment and channel it through affective spectacle.
Instead of viewing populism as an ideology or economic protest, Dr. Tucker reframed it as the rule of political passion, echoing ancient Greek political philosophy and Roman historical precedent. Passion, in his schema, contrasts with interest and reason. Populism, he argued, is fueled by passions that are volatile, self-destructive, and insatiable. In a vivid metaphor, Dr. Tucker likened passions to the emotional chaos of discovering infidelity: a desire to act impulsively (passion), versus a calculated strategy for self-interest (interest), versus a reasoned dialogue on consequences (reason). Where democracy ideally mediates between these levels of response, populism thrives on the first—on raw, unregulated emotionality.
For Dr. Tucker, the true antagonist of populism is not democracy, but technocracy. Technocracy, as the rule of reason and deliberative institutions, represents the control of passions through procedural rationality. Populism, conversely, bypasses this rational architecture. It is not anti-elite per se, but anti-technocratic—waging war on the very mechanisms that enable stability, compromise, and fact-based governance.
Central to Dr. Tucker’s thesis is the insight that populist leaders lack what philosopher Harry Frankfurt called “second-order volitions”—that is, the capacity to willfully regulate their own desires. Populist governance does not structure competing interests or prioritize goals. Instead, it lurches from one outrage to the next, managing public passions not by resolution, but by distraction. Here, Dr. Tucker invoked the “dead cat” strategy: when a leader faces scrutiny or failure, they simply introduce a more sensational narrative—metaphorically placing a dead cat on the table—to hijack the public’s attention.
Crucially, Dr. Tucker argued that truth within populist regimes is emotivist. It corresponds not with reality but with the intensity of passion. The more emotionally charged a claim, the more “authentic” it appears. Hence, the bizarre durability of conspiracies like “Pizzagate,” in which Hillary Clinton was alleged to be running a child trafficking ring out of a pizzeria. These myths resonate not because they are plausible, but because they channel rage into vivid, emotionally satisfying narratives. Dr. Tucker likened these to ancient Roman slanders—emperor-satirizing tales of incest and debauchery—designed not to inform, but to enflame.
Populist storytelling, then, is myth-making: an emotionally driven narrative logic that sacrifices truth for catharsis. Such stories express a collective affect more than a collective will. And in this system, the elite are not immune. Dr. Tucker provocatively claimed that today’s populist elites—whether in Slovakia, the United States, or ancient Athens—are themselves subjects of passion, as self-destructive as the masses they claim to represent.
Drawing from classical history, Dr. Tucker compared modern populists to Athenian figures like Cleon and Cleophon, whom he described as “the Trumps of their time.” These figures, Dr. Tucker noted, embodied the self-defeating tendencies of unrestrained democratic passion. Ancient Athens’ descent into ruin during the Peloponnesian War, he argued, was a case study in populism’s dangers: an emotional, irrational polity tearing itself apart in pursuit of honor and vengeance. For Dr. Tucker, this ancient warning still applies. The Founding Fathers of the United States, aware of Athens’ fate, designed constitutional safeguards to prevent such destruction. But today, we are witnessing a return to those classical dangers—where elite passions destabilize the very democratic systems they inhabit.
Dr. Tucker also turned his critique inward, targeting academic rationalizations of populism. He accused scholars—particularly rational choice theorists—of forcing populist behavior into models of reason and utility that fundamentally misunderstand its nature. Populism is not confused socialism or distorted egalitarianism; it is not an error to be corrected by intellectuals. Rather, it is an elite-led phenomenon, fueled by resentment, vanity, and the deliberate erosion of rational order. The aspiration to explain populism through a technocratic lens, Dr. Tucker argued, only masks the self-destructive tendencies of elite actors who block social mobility and then blame minorities or foreign enemies for the resulting discontent.
In a particularly striking moment, Dr. Tucker insisted, “We are the populist elites.” This “we” was not rhetorical—it was directed at the very academics, policymakers, and educated elites who, through action or inaction, perpetuate the conditions of populism. He called for introspection: Why do we block social mobility? Why do we fear pluralism? Why do we rationalize the irrational? Dr. Tucker concluded with an urgent plea to break this cycle of elite self-destruction—not through more rationalization, but by addressing the structural and psychological drivers of populist passion.
In sum, Dr. Tucker’s presentation offered a deeply original and philosophically grounded theory of populism—not as the voice of the voiceless, but as a destructive performance of elite passions masquerading as popular will. His analysis reinvigorated classical political philosophy to illuminate a profoundly contemporary crisis, urging both intellectual honesty and institutional reform in the face of democracy’s emotive unmaking.
Pınar Dokumacı: Reclamations of ‘We, the People’ — Rethinking Civil Society through Spatial Contestations in Turkey
In her co-authored presentation with Dr. Özlem Aslan, Dr. Pınar Dokumacı, Assistant Professor at the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin, delivered a nuanced and theoretically rich analysis of how civil society in contemporary Turkey is being reimagined through embodied, spatial acts of contestation. Speaking during Panel 8 of the ECPS Conference 2025 at Oxford University, Dr. Dokumacı sought to move beyond institutional and deliberative conceptions of civil society by foregrounding the generative political agency that emerges from public space reclamations. Drawing on three distinct case studies—protests in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, courtroom mobilizations around Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, and the ongoing silent protests at Boğaziçi University—Dr. Dokumacı proposed a re-theorization of civil society as a lived, relational, and care-centered practice.
Framed against the backdrop of Turkey’s slide into authoritarian populism under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) since 2002, the presentation contended that civil society in Turkey has not simply been suppressed or evacuated, but rearticulated through spatial dissent. The AKP, especially under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has transformed its initial majoritarian populist platform into a hegemonic regime that narrows the meaning of “the people” to a singular, conservative, Sunni-nationalist subject. In doing so, it has eroded formal political arenas such as the media, judiciary, and higher education, collapsing the distinction between state and ruling party while marginalizing dissenting voices as traitorous. Yet, rather than yielding to this closure, Turkish citizens have responded by enacting politics outside official channels—through occupation, performance, and co-presence in public spaces.
Dr. Dokumacı introduced the notion of “spatial contestation” as a conceptual anchor for analyzing these dynamics. She drew from theorists like Paul Routledge and Jacques Rancière to argue that public space is not a neutral backdrop for politics but is co-produced through collective action. For Routledge, space is not a container but a process, and for Rancière, politics is the interruption of the sensible order by those who have no recognized part in it. In Turkey, such spatial interventions challenge the state’s attempt to monopolize public legitimacy and rewrite “the people” as a homogenous body. By reclaiming space, participants assert alternative identities and visions of political community.
The first empirical case examined the repeated attempts by feminist, LGBTQI+, and labor groups to reclaim Taksim Square, a historically symbolic site of democratic contestation, especially since the 2013 Gezi Park protests. Despite routine bans, heavy policing, and arrests, demonstrators return to Taksim on key dates such as March 8 (International Women’s Day), May 1 (Labor Day), and during Pride marches. What matters, Dr. Dokumacı emphasized, is not merely the content of the slogans but the manner of collective engagement: protestors coordinate routes via encrypted messaging apps, walk with strangers for safety, and care for each other during and after detainment. These acts of mutual support and bodily co-presence enact a form of “chosen community,” grounded not in fixed identity or institutional membership, but in relational care and democratic commitment. Civil society here is not deliberative in the Habermasian sense, but performative and affective—built through risk, solidarity, and resistance.
The second case centered on the transformation of courtrooms into contested political spaces following Turkey’s 2021 withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention. In protest, hundreds of women from diverse cities such as Mersin, Adana, and Eskişehir traveled to Ankara to attend public hearings, where many were initially barred entry. Refusing to leave, they chanted, pressed against barriers, and asserted their right to visibility and voice within the legal apparatus. The courtroom, typically a site of state authority and procedural rationality, was reappropriated as a space of embodied dissent. Here, care again emerged as central—not as sentimentality but as democratic praxis. Women attended together, protected one another, and jointly confronted an institutional order that sought to render them passive objects of governance. Their protest was less about abstract legal rights than about reasserting agency, collectivity, and civic presence.
The final example focused on the ongoing silent protests at Boğaziçi University, where faculty, students, and alumni have opposed the government’s appointment of a rector without internal consultation since early 2021. Each day at 12:15 PM, faculty members gather in their academic regalia and silently turn their backs to the rector’s office. This silent, disciplined, and highly symbolic act reclaims the university as a moral and intellectual commons. The protest, now in its third year, has become a ritual of care and resistance: legal support is coordinated, persecuted students are assisted, and resources are pooled. As with the other cases, care here is not private or domestic, but associational and political. It sustains protest not through charisma or media spectacle, but through daily, durable acts of support and mutual responsibility.
Across all three examples, Dr. Dokumacı identifies a shared political logic: the reclamation of public space not only as resistance but as world-building. Spatial contestations do not merely oppose authoritarianism; they prefigure alternative civilities—plural, interdependent, and grounded in care. The authors draw extensively on feminist political theory, particularly the work of Iris Marion Young, Carole Pateman, Anne Phillips, and Ella Myers, to argue that mainstream liberal notions of civil society often erase dependency, embodiment, and affect. By contrast, these Turkish cases exemplify what Myers calls “worldly ethics”—a form of care rooted in engagement with the world as it is, rather than ideal abstractions. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s amor mundi, worldly ethics emphasizes political responsibility as intersubjective, collective, and contingent.
For Dokumacı, the civil society that emerges from these spatial contestations is not an intermediary domain between state and market, nor a rational sphere of disembodied discourse. It is a lived, agonistic terrain forged through vulnerability, presence, and care. Civil society, in this sense, is not something one has, but something one does—together, in the streets, in courtrooms, and on campuses. It is enacted through relational practices that challenge singularity with plurality, repression with expression, and authoritarian isolation with democratic interdependence.
In sum, Dr. Dokumacı’s presentation offered a powerful rethinking of civil society in contexts of authoritarian populism. Rather than mourn the hollowing of institutional politics, she invited scholars to look where politics has migrated—to the margins, to the bodies in motion, to the everyday ethics of solidarity and care. These practices may not deliver immediate policy outcomes, but they perform democracy in its most elemental form: as shared risk, shared presence, and shared commitment to a plural political world.
Attila Antal: The Transatlantic Network of Authoritarian Populism — The Rise of the Executive and Its Dangers to Democracy
At the ECPS Conference 2025 in Oxford, Dr. Attila Antal, Associate Professor at Eötvös Loránd University, offered a compelling analysis of the rising transnational alignment of authoritarian populist forces, with a focus on developments in Hungary and the United States.
At the ECPS Conference 2025 in Oxford, Dr. Attila Antal, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and Institute of Political Science, Eötvös Loránd University, delivered a compelling and richly contextualized presentation on the growing international convergence between authoritarian populist movements, particularly focusing on Hungary and the United States. His presentation, “The Transatlantic Network of Authoritarian Populism: The Rise of the Executive and Its Dangers to Democracy,” dissected the ideological, institutional, and legal interdependencies that bind contemporary right-wing populisms across the Atlantic, with special emphasis on the centralization of executive power.
Drawing from his broader research project on authoritarian legality and constitutional transformation in Hungary, Dr. Antal argued that what we are witnessing today is not merely a domestic authoritarian drift, but a coherent, transnational strategy to reshape democratic norms. This strategy, he contended, is undergirded by an ideological framework that combines neo-Schmittian legal theory, the “unitary executive” doctrine from the US, and Gramscian tactics of intellectual hegemony. Together, these elements form what Dr. Antal referred to as a transatlantic authoritarian-populist epistemic and institutional network, with Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Donald Trump’s America serving as its key nodes.
Dr. Antal began by challenging the assumption that nationalism and internationalism are mutually exclusive. On the contrary, he insisted, nationalist populist movements are increasingly coordinated at the international level. While the 20th century saw the internationalization of leftist ideologies—such as communism—what we observe today is the globalization of right-wing populism. This is not an accidental development, Dr. Antal stressed, but one with deep ideological roots in Carl Schmitt’s vision of unchecked executive sovereignty and in American conservative legal theory’s interpretation of presidential power.
At the core of this new populist consensus, Dr. Antal posited, lies the erosion of liberal constitutionalism and the consolidation of executive power. In Hungary, this process has been driven by what he termed neo-Schmittian authoritarian legality: the production of laws that serve autocratic ends while maintaining a veneer of legality. This legalistic authoritarianism, Dr. Antal argued, mimics constitutional form while hollowing out its liberal-democratic content. Echoing Schmitt’s infamous formulation that the sovereign is he who decides on the exception, Orbán’s regime has normalized states of exception—often justified by crises like migration or war—to expand executive discretion.
Dr. Antal connected this legal-political logic to the US context through the lens of the unitary executive theory—a doctrine that gained traction in conservative legal circles following Morrison v. Olson and was championed by figures such as the late Justice Antonin Scalia. The theory holds that all executive power is vested solely in the president, thereby legitimating the subordination of other branches of government, including the judiciary and administrative agencies. While the doctrine itself is rooted in American constitutional debate, Antal illustrated how its ideological logic has been imported into Hungary through what he called a process of ideological translation. For example, Hungary’s insistence on “national constitutional identity” in its disputes with the European Union mirrors American assertions of executive sovereignty and legal exceptionalism.
Beyond legal theory, Dr. Antal explored how this transatlantic populist project is being institutionally embedded. He focused on three dimensions: policy coordination, lobbying infrastructure, and intellectual hegemony.
First, on the level of policy and ideological coordination, Dr. Antal noted the mutual admiration and collaboration between Orbán and Trump. Orbán famously declared, “We were Trump before Trump,” emphasizing Hungary’s pioneering role in the right-wing populist agenda. This relationship has been institutionalized through venues such as CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference), which Hungary has hosted multiple times. These events serve not only as symbolic affirmations of ideological alignment but also as platforms for policy and strategic exchange.
Second, Dr. Antal examined the lobbying apparatus that has been cultivated by the Orbán regime within the United States. Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), Hungary now sponsors a sizable and professionally structured lobbying network in Washington, D.C., including institutions such as the Hungarian Foundation, the American-Hungarian Federation, and the Hungary-American Coalition. These organizations operate both formally and informally, leveraging diaspora connections and political patronage to promote Hungary’s illiberal model. According to Dr. Antal, this lobbying machine is financed with Hungarian taxpayer money and has become increasingly adept at penetrating elite conservative circles in the US.
Third, and perhaps most strikingly, Dr. Antal underscored the importance of intellectual infrastructure and ideological production. Drawing from a Gramscian framework, he argued that Orbán’s regime has made significant investments in cultivating a transnational right-wing intellectual class. Institutions like the Center for Fundamental Rights and Mathias Corvinus Collegium serve as think tanks, training centers, and propaganda hubs. These organizations fund visiting fellowships and public events that platform conservative figures such as Rod Dreher, a key intermediary with connections to US political elites, including the Vice President. Through these means, Hungary exports its ideological model while shaping public discourse around nationalism, traditionalism, and executive supremacy.
Dr. Antal’s presentation concluded with a reflection on the global implications of this authoritarian-populist network. The convergence of legal doctrines (neo-Schmittianism and unitary executive theory), institutional tactics (states of emergency and constitutional identity claims), and ideological narratives (the “real people” versus global elites) points to a reconfiguration of the democratic order. These are not isolated developments, Dr. Antal warned, but part of a coordinated backlash against liberal democratic norms across the Atlantic.
He emphasized that this backlash is being operationalized through sophisticated networks of lobbying, intellectual exchange, and institutional mimicry. The danger lies not just in the erosion of checks and balances within individual states, but in the global diffusion of illiberalism. What makes this movement powerful, Dr. Antal suggested, is not its crude authoritarianism but its strategic adaptation of democratic and legal language to authoritarian ends.
In sum, Dr. Antal’s presentation offered a sobering diagnosis of a new authoritarian internationalism—one that harnesses nationalism, exploits legal structures, and instrumentalizes executive power across borders. As liberal democracies grapple with internal vulnerabilities, the transatlantic alliance between Trumpism and Orbánism signals a profound and organized challenge to constitutional democracy itself.
Murat Aktaş: The French New Right and Its Impact on European Democracies
In his thought-provoking presentation, Professor Murat Aktaş (Muş Alparslan University) introduced a joint research initiative with Dr. Russell Foster (King’s College London) examining how the French Nouvelle Droite shapes the ideologies and tactics of today’s European radical right and populist parties.
In his thought-provoking presentation titled “The French New Right and Its Impact on European Democracies,”Professor Murat Aktaş of Muş Alparslan University introduced an emerging research project, co-developed with Dr. Russell Foster of King’s College London, which seeks to assess the ideological influence of the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right) on the political strategies of contemporary radical right and populist parties across Europe. Professor Aktaş outlined the genealogy, strategic frameworks, and transnational dissemination of the French New Right’s ideas—especially its metapolitical tactics—and explored how these have subtly but significantly transformed European political landscapes.
Professor Aktaş began by clarifying the conceptual ambiguities surrounding the term “New Right,” noting that it holds divergent meanings in different national contexts. In the Anglo-American and Turkish settings, for instance, the “New Right” typically refers to the economically neoliberal, anti-statist programs of Thatcher, Reagan, or Turgut Özal. By contrast, the French New Right—rooted in the intellectual and cultural strategies of Alain de Benoist and the Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE), established in the late 1960s—eschews economic liberalism and electoral politics in favor of long-term cultural and ideological transformation. Its mission is to reconstruct European identity on exclusionary, ethno-cultural foundations, deploying the tools of cultural hegemony and metapolitics, concepts borrowed and reconfigured from Antonio Gramsci’s Marxist theory.
The French New Right, Professor Aktaş explained, emerged in the wake of World War II and the delegitimization of biological racism and fascist ideology. Intellectuals like de Benoist responded by recasting far-right ideology through the language of cultural difference rather than racial superiority. Rather than promoting direct political action, they advocated reshaping cultural and intellectual life—education, media, and public discourse—through metapolitical means to make society more receptive to far-right values. Their aim was not simply to win elections, but to control the terms of debate about identity, civilization, and sovereignty.
Crucially, Professor Aktaş emphasized that the French New Right has had a disproportionate yet under-examined impact on political parties and movements throughout Europe. From Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) Party, Hungary’s Fidesz, and Italy’s Brothers of Italy, to older parties like Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ), the ideological DNA of the Nouvelle Droite can be traced in their discourses, strategies, and political architectures. In each case, the metapolitical strategy—prioritizing culture, identity, and symbolic power over policy detail—has been instrumental in transforming radical ideas into political mainstreams.
Through detailed case studies, Professor Aktaş illustrated how this intellectual framework has adapted to national contexts:
In Poland, the PiS government drew on French New Right strategies to reshape legal and political institutions in a nationalist and socially conservative direction. Despite EU membership, PiS reinterpreted national sovereignty through the lens of cultural homogeneity and civilizational defense, positioning itself against “liberal decadence” and immigration, echoing de Benoist’s themes. Jarosław Kaczyński and his allies also maintained a paradoxical alliance with the Catholic Church, despite the French New Right’s historical critique of Christianity as a source of universalism and egalitarianism.
In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz exemplifies the most successful application of Nouvelle Droite strategy. Since 2010, Orbán has systematically restructured Hungary’s constitutional framework, media landscape, and academic institutions. Drawing on metapolitics, Orbán presents his model as an illiberal democracy rooted in national values and historical destiny. Like the French New Right, Orbán opposes globalism, multiculturalism, and American-style liberalism, yet maintains tactical alliances with US conservative elites, including Donald Trump.
In Italy, the Brothers of Italy and associated movements like CasaPound explicitly borrowed French New Right rhetoric and aesthetics. As Professor Aktaş noted, Italian far-right intellectuals translated de Benoist’s works and established journals and publishing houses to popularize his ideas. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s cultural agenda, which emphasizes tradition, family, and national identity, reflects this intellectual heritage—despite the seeming contradiction between Catholicism’s universalism and the New Right’s pagan or Greco-Roman civilizational narratives.
One of the most striking aspects of Professor Aktaş’s presentation was his discussion of paradoxes within this ideological exportation. The Nouvelle Droite originally rejected Christianity, the American-led international order, and supranational institutions like the EU. Yet in many countries, its ideological offspring have formed strategic alliances with the Church, embraced US conservative figures such as Donald Trump, and pursued Eurosceptic yet integrationist policies when convenient. As Professor Aktaş cleverly observed, the French New Right adapts “like water,” molding itself to local cultural and institutional configurations while retaining its core metapolitical logic.
Professor Aktaş also highlighted how Nouvelle Droite-inspired parties legitimize anti-immigrant policies not through overt racism, but through arguments about cultural incompatibility and the right to difference. Here, again, the focus is less on biological essentialism and more on defending “European civilization” against perceived internal and external threats—a rhetorical move that normalizes exclusion while avoiding overt fascist associations.
In his conclusion, Professor Aktaş argued that the French New Right’s greatest success lies in its ability to provide an intellectual and strategic roadmap for a post-liberal, exclusionary political order. Its legacy is not only visible in the programs of radical right parties, but also in the gradual adoption of its narratives by mainstream conservative and even centrist actors. The presentation thus called for renewed scholarly attention to metapolitical movements and cultural strategies that operate beneath the surface of electoral politics. Rather than focusing solely on populism as style or demagoguery, Professor Aktaş urged participants to understand the slow, structural transformation of liberal democracy facilitated by ideas that were once confined to the margins.
The project, still in its early stages, promises to shed light on the intellectual circulations and ideological infrastructures sustaining Europe’s contemporary populist right. By tracking how the Nouvelle Droite’s doctrines mutate across borders—reconciling paganism with Catholicism, ethnonationalism with transatlanticism, and anti-liberalism with electoral legitimacy— Professor Aktaş opens a critical window into the metapolitical undercurrents shaping 21st-century European democracy.
Assessments by Panel Discussant Karen Horn
As discussant for the final panel of the ECPS Conference 2025 at St Cross College, University of Oxford, Professor Karen Horn provided a thoughtful and incisive commentary, offering nuanced and analytically rich reflections on the four presentations featured in Panel 8.
Serving as the discussant for the final panel of the ECPS Conference 2025 at St Cross College, Oxford University, Professor Karen Horn offered a nuanced, intellectually generous, and analytically rigorous set of reflections on the four presentations in Panel 8. Her assessment, structured in reverse order of presentation, illuminated both the strengths and tensions in the authors’ arguments, while advancing key meta-level concerns regarding method, conceptual clarity, and the normative stakes of democratic theory in the face of authoritarian populism.
Horn began with Professor Murat Aktaş’s presentation on “The French New Right and Its Impact on European Democracies.”Acknowledging the empirical richness of the paper and Professor Aktaş’s deep familiarity with the ideological legacy of the Nouvelle Droite, Professor Horn lauded the contribution for tracing the diffusion of Alain de Benoist’s ideas across national borders. However, she pressed for greater specificity regarding the mechanisms of transmission: Who are the concrete actors—translators, intellectuals, party strategists—who helped implant French New Right ideology into other political contexts such as Poland, Hungary, and Italy? Do current political elites directly reference de Benoist, or have his ideas simply “seeped” into the broader ideological ether? Professor Horn noted that such questions about the Overton window—how fringe ideas become part of mainstream political discourse—are central to understanding the New Right’s metapolitical success. She further questioned whether the stark national distinctions in intellectual traditions may now be outdated, given the increasingly transnational nature of ideological exchange in Europe.
Transitioning to Dr. Attila Antal’s paper on “The Transatlantic Network of Authoritarian Populism,” Horn praised the ambitious mapping of how Orbánism and Trumpism draw upon a shared neo-Schmittian legal-political framework, particularly in their conceptualization of unrestrained executive power. Still, she raised important questions regarding attribution: Do Viktor Orbán or Donald Trump explicitly cite Carl Schmitt, or are these structural resemblances inferred retrospectively by scholars? Professor Horn warned of the risk of post hoc intellectual genealogy—attributing theoretical lineage where actors themselves may be unaware or disinterested in such foundations. In terms of method, she commended the use of network analysis but cautioned against reifying actors as static nodes. Populist leaders, she noted, often undergo ideological transformations—Orbán himself was once a liberal democrat—and network analysis should remain sensitive to such temporal evolution.
In her response to Dr. Pınar Dokumacı’s feminist-ethnographic presentation on spatial contestations in Turkey, Professor Horn expressed admiration for the paper’s conceptual breadth, including its engagement with civil society as relational care, drawn from feminist political theory. She appreciated the rethinking of public space—not merely as a site of protest, but as an embodied terrain of ethical engagement. However, she flagged a potential straw man in the depiction of traditional political theory as uniformly neoliberal, rationalist, and male-coded. Drawing from her own discipline of economics, Professor Horn reminded the audience that even canonical thinkers like Adam Smith—often caricatured as the father of homo economicus—attended deeply to human sympathy and moral sentiments. In short, while endorsing Dr. Dokumacı’s relational theory of protest, Professor Horn encouraged the authors to moderate their opposition by recognizing existing complexity in mainstream theory.
Professor Horn also challenged the authors to consider a crucial empirical question: When does civil resistance succeed? While spatial contestations may be “transformative” in the consciousness of participants, at what point do they become transformative in institutional or regime terms? Using Belarus as a counter-example—where mass protests were brutally suppressed—she invited reflection on the thresholds of efficacy: when does relational care and presence in public space translate into political change? What conditions make civil protest merely symbolic, and when can it truly destabilize authoritarian regimes?
Finally, Professor Horn addressed the first presentation, which advanced a philosophical reconsideration of populism by shifting from strictly rationalist frames to more passion-inflected understandings of political subjectivity. While appreciating the attempt to move beyond over-rationalized models of political agency, she expressed caution about rejecting rationalism outright. Citing the long history of economic theory’s empirical self-correction—from the ideal of homo economicus to models incorporating altruism, reciprocity, and bounded rationality— Professor Horn argued that reason and passion need not be mutually exclusive. She invoked David Hume’s dictum that reason is the slave of the passions but also referenced Adam Smith’s impartial spectator as a mediating force between reason and emotion. This dialectical tension, she suggested, offers a more fruitful avenue for thinking about populist mobilization than an outright retreat from rationalism.
Toward the end of her remarks, Professor Horn homed in on the most politically urgent dimension of the panel: the self-destructiveness of populist movements. Several papers alluded to the internal contradictions of populist regimes—that their reliance on crisis, polarization, and unchecked executive power ultimately undermines their own legitimacy and governance capacity. Professor Horn asked, provocatively: Does this contain a seed of hope? Will populism collapse under its own weight? And if so, at what cost? Will the institutions of liberal democracy survive the implosion? Her closing note thus combined analytical clarity with a sobering ethical reflection: understanding populism is not only an academic imperative, but a moral one. The challenge, she emphasized, is to grasp the deep cultural and affective appeals of authoritarian populism without surrendering to its logic—and to resist being dragged down in its self-destructive spiral.
In sum, Professor Karen Horn’s discussant intervention served as a masterclass in interdisciplinary engagement. Moving fluidly between political theory, economics, intellectual history, and methodology, she demonstrated the value of critical synthesis across academic domains. Her questions did not aim to dismantle the papers but to strengthen them by pushing for deeper conceptual specificity, empirical grounding, and reflexivity. At a conference devoted to the future of democracy, Professor Horn reminded the audience that democracy’s defense requires not only resistance on the ground but intellectual precision in the realm of ideas.
Conclusion
Panel 8 of the ECPS International Conference 2025, “The People” vs “The Elite”: A New Global Order?, offered a compelling and multifaceted interrogation of how populist and authoritarian currents are reshaping the conceptual boundaries between power and people, passion and reason, resistance and complicity. The panel brought together critical voices from political theory, legal studies, feminist scholarship, and intellectual history.
The presentations revealed a global pattern in which populist leaders, while claiming to represent “the people,” increasingly operate as elite actors who weaponize emotional narratives, co-opt civil institutions, and hollow out democratic norms from within. Whether through the emotivist spectacles of populist elites (Tucker), the embodied spatial politics of feminist resistance (Dokumacı), the transnational architecture of executive overreach (Antal), or the metapolitical ambitions of the French New Right (Aktaş), each contribution exposed how democratic backsliding is no longer a deviation but a structural strategy.
Professor Karen Horn’s incisive commentary amplified these insights by questioning the theoretical assumptions underpinning populist discourse and highlighting the need for conceptual precision, empirical humility, and normative vigilance. Her final provocation—that populism’s self-destructive tendencies may ultimately implode—raised a sobering ethical dilemma: can liberal democracy survive the wreckage?
In sum, Panel 8 demonstrated that the populist challenge is neither local nor ephemeral. It is a sustained ideological project that must be met with intellectual rigor, civic imagination, and transnational solidarity. Democracy, as the panel affirmed, is not a settled order—but a continuous struggle over meaning, power, and the people themselves.
Note: To experience the panel’s dynamic and thought-provoking Q&A session, we encourage you to watch the full video recording above.
Please cite as: ECPS Staff. (2025). “ECPS Conference 2025 / Panel 7 — ‘The People’ in Schröndinger’s Box: Democracy Alive and Dead.” European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). July 9, 2025. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00109
In 2025, democracy occupies a state of superposition—at once vibrant and eroding, plural and polarized, legal and lawless. Panel 7 exposed this paradox with precision: democracy is not a fixed ideal but a shifting terrain, where power is contested through law, ritual, narrative, and strategy. Whether it survives or collapses depends on how it is interpreted, performed, and defended. The Schrödinger’s box is cracked open, but its contents are not predetermined. As Robert Person warned, authoritarian actors exploit democratic vulnerabilities; as Max Steuer and Justin Attard showed, those vulnerabilities also reveal possibilities for renewal. We are not neutral observers—we are agents within the experiment. Democracy’s future hinges on our will to intervene.
Reported by ECPS Staff
Panel 7 of the ECPS Conference 2025, held at the University of Oxford’s St Cross College, convened under the theme “‘The People’ in Schrödinger’s Box: Democracy Alive and Dead.” As part of the broader conference titled “We, the People” and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches (July 1–3, 2025), this panel examined the paradoxical condition of democracy in our time—simultaneously enduring and unraveling, vibrant and hollow.
Skillfully co-chaired by Dr. Ming-Sung Kuo (Reader in Law, University of Warwick School of Law) and Dr. Bruno Godefroy (Associate Professor in Law and German, University of Tours, France), the session set out to interrogate how democratic systems today oscillate between vitality and decay, depending on how they are enacted, contested, or undermined. The Schrödinger’s box metaphor provided a conceptual anchor for discussions that unfolded across disciplines, cases, and levels of analysis—from legal theory to ethnographic inquiry to geopolitical grand strategy.
Dr. Max Steuer (Comenius University) opened the session with his presentation “The Matrix of ‘Legal Populism’: Democracy and (Reducing) Domination.” Dr. Steuer introduced a four-quadrant typology for understanding how populism interacts with conceptions of law—either as neutral instruments or aspirational forces—and illustrated its application through empirical material from Slovakia. His matrix illuminated how law may serve either as a shield for pluralism or a tool for authoritarian entrenchment, depending on who wields it and for what purpose.
Next, Justin Attard (University of Malta) presented “Lived Democracy in Small Island States: Sociopolitical Dynamics of Governance, Power, and Participation in Malta and Singapore.” Attard shifted the focus from institutional architecture to embodied democratic practice. In small island states where political proximity is inescapable, democratic participation becomes highly visible, affective, and often entangled in informal networks. Through the metaphor of democracy in superposition, Attard argued that democracy in such settings only becomes real when performed—through gestures, rituals, resistance, or silence.
Finally, Professor Robert Person (United States Military Academy) delivered a geopolitically urgent paper titled “Russia’s War on Democracy.” Positioning democracy itself as a target of Russian grand strategy, Professor Person detailed how asymmetric tactics—from disinformation and cyberwarfare to the cultivation of populist movements—form a central part of the Kremlin’s effort to weaken democratic resilience globally. His presentation reframed the defense of democracy as a strategic imperative in an increasingly contested international order.
Collectively, Panel 7 brought together three distinct yet converging perspectives on democracy’s condition in 2025. Whether examined through the legal system, the intimacy of everyday political life, or the ambitions of autocratic powers, democracy appeared both resilient and vulnerable—very much alive and under threat. As the co-chairs emphasized in their concluding reflections, this session not only invited critical observation but also urged active engagement with the layered realities of democratic life in an age of disruption.
Max Steuer: The Matrix of ‘Legal Populism’: Democracy and (Reducing) Domination
During Panel 7 of the ECPS Conference 2025, Dr. Max Steuer (Comenius University) delivered a conceptually rich presentation on “legal populism,” offering a typology to unpack how law can both enable and resist domination in democratic and anti-democratic settings, with insights from Slovakia.
In his thought-provoking presentation, Dr. Max Steuer, Principal Investigator at Comenius University’s Department of Political Science, dissected the uneasy relationship between law and populism, offering a conceptual matrix—tentatively called a typology—for understanding what he terms “legal populism.” Delivered during Panel 7 of the ECPS Conference at Oxford University, Dr. Steuer’s paper draws from both political theory and empirical insights from Slovakia to explore how law can be weaponized or reimagined in democratic and anti-democratic contexts.
From the outset, Dr. Steuer acknowledged the terminological ambiguity surrounding populism, confessing a general reluctance to engage with the term unless conceptually necessary. In this case, however, the invitation to contribute to a volume on “legal populism” compelled him to interrogate the term seriously. Rather than offering a definition, he opted to analyze populism in relation to two contrasting conceptions of law—thereby creating a four-quadrant matrix.
Dr. Steuer’s conceptual framework rests on two axes: (1) law as either a neutral tool (instrumental view) or as inherently justice-seeking (aspirational view), and (2) populism as either a democratizing force (challenging domination) or as inherently anti-pluralist and authoritarian. These contrasting understandings allow for four different permutations of law-populism interaction: (a) legal populism as extralegal resistance, (b) populist legalism as authoritarian entrenchment, (c) strategic litigation in defense of pluralist elites, and (d) pro-social populism using law to redistribute power downward.
To illustrate the matrix, Dr. Steuer turned to the Slovak case—a jurisdiction he argued has been overlooked but is critical to understanding the spread of illiberalism in Central Europe. Slovakia, an EU and NATO member, experienced early post-socialist authoritarian tendencies under Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar in the 1990s, only to witness a re-emergence of populist authoritarianism in the 2020s under Robert Fico. Dr. Steuer noted that this resurgence follows a pattern resembling Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, although it includes earlier signs of institutional manipulation during the pandemic era under an ostensibly anti-corruption administration.
Dr. Steuer then mapped recent Slovak political events onto his matrix. The quadrant where law is seen as neutral and populism as anti-elite aligns with extralegal resistance—where, for instance, whistleblowers disclosed suspicious financial transactions of politicians at great personal legal risk. This quadrant represents rare but significant moments when actors violate the law to expose deeper systemic corruption, reflecting a logic of civil disobedience.
The second, more prevalent quadrant, which Dr. Steuer called “populist illegality” (borrowing yet problematizing the term “autocratic legalism” from Kim Scheppele), involves using legal frameworks to suppress opposition, undermine NGOs, and weaken epistemic communities like courts and universities. This aligns with populism’s anti-pluralist tendencies and the instrumental use of law to entrench domination—a hallmark of authoritarian populist regimes.
In the third quadrant, where law is seen as justice-seeking and populism is viewed negatively, Dr. Steuer located practices such as strategic litigation and civic suits used to defend pluralist elites—e.g., legal efforts by opposition parties or civil society to counter disinformation or protect institutional integrity. In this scenario, law remains a protective shield for democracy rather than a populist weapon.
The final and most speculative quadrant—“legal populism” in its positive form—imagines using the law to challenge elite domination on behalf of the socially marginalized. This includes legal reforms aimed at redistributing welfare, expanding access to healthcare and education, or regulating oligarchic power. Dr. Steuer noted that this version of legal populism remains largely aspirational in Slovakia, though theoretically plausible.
Dr. Steuer’s framework is deeply informed by republican theory, particularly the notion of domination as unaccountable power. He reflected on the need to further interrogate whether the term “legalism” is appropriate or whether it conflates the normative and instrumental uses of law. He also acknowledged the preliminary nature of his matrix, inviting critique and refinement, especially concerning its applicability beyond Slovakia.
One of the most compelling parts of Dr. Steuer’s talk was his engagement with the paradox of legality in authoritarian regimes. As legal tools are increasingly employed to shield undemocratic practices under the guise of constitutionalism, the line between legality and illegality becomes blurred. Dr. Steuer stressed the importance of resisting the temptation to cede the terrain of legality to authoritarian regimes and instead reimagine law as a space for contesting domination.
He concluded by returning to the notion of oligarchic control—a structural threat he sees as central to Slovakia’s democratic erosion. Dr. Steuer called for further research into how oligarchic power can be challenged not merely through resistance or protest, but through law itself—as a forum for both democratic struggle and anti-domination.
In sum, Dr. Max Steuer’s presentation offered a nuanced, theoretically rich, and empirically grounded typology for analyzing the variegated intersections of populism and law. His “matrix of legal populism” helps illuminate how law can serve as both a vehicle for authoritarian entrenchment and a battleground for democratic renewal, depending on how it is deployed and by whom. By grounding his framework in the Slovak case while inviting broader application, Dr. Steuer made a valuable contribution to the comparative study of legal populism in contemporary democracies under strain.
Justin Attard: Lived Democracy in Small Island States: Sociopolitical Dynamics of Governance, Power, and Participation in Malta and Singapore
At Panel 7 of the ECPS Conference 2025, Justin Attard (University of Malta) presented an insightful ethnographic study of democratic governance in small island states, highlighting the sociopolitical dynamics shaping participation and power in Malta and Singapore.
In his compelling presentation, Justin Attard, a PhD candidate at the University of Malta, offered a unique ethnographic exploration of democratic practice in small island states, focusing on Malta and Singapore. Attard’s paper advanced an innovative conceptual framework of “lived democracy,” emphasizing the embodied, relational, and performative dimensions of democratic life in compact political environments. Shifting away from conventional, institutional analyses of democracy, Attard invited the audience to reconsider how democracy is experienced, enacted, and felt through everyday behaviors, rituals, and silences—especially in societies where spatial proximity and dense social ties intensify the visibility and affective weight of political engagement.
At the heart of Attard’s argument lies the metaphor of democracy in “superposition,” drawn from Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment. Much like the cat that is simultaneously alive and dead until observed, democracy in small states can exist in both resilient and eroded forms—only collapsing into a defined state through the actions and experiences of citizens. Institutions may exist on paper, but in small island societies, democracy becomes tangible only when individuals participate, comply, resist, or remain silent. In such contexts, the observer is never passive; observation is itself participation, and every political act—no matter how minor—carries disproportionate symbolic and material significance.
To flesh out this theoretical claim, Attard juxtaposed the cases of Malta and Singapore. Both are nominally democratic: they hold elections, maintain constitutions, and adhere to parliamentary governance structures. However, their democratic substance often deviates sharply from their formal architecture. In Malta, democratic life is characterized by deeply entrenched clientelism, where political engagement is transactional and structured by interpersonal networks. Access to services and opportunities is often mediated through personal loyalty rather than merit or civic deliberation. In this sense, populism in Malta manifests through emotionally charged performances, symbolic gestures, and the informal economies of favor and proximity.
In contrast, Singapore presents a model of choreographed civic participation. Participation exists, but it is regulated and largely ritualized. Dissent is not wholly forbidden, but it is subtly discouraged through social expectations and mechanisms of internalized discipline. Public harmony is prioritized over contestation, and state-sponsored performances—such as National Day parades—serve to reinforce a tightly controlled, technocratic nationalism. Populism here is not loud or emotional, but managerial and procedural, embedded in state-led displays of order and unity. The comparison between Malta and Singapore challenges the assumption that populism must always be bombastic or oppositional. In small states, Attard argued, populism can also be quiet, embodied, and compliant.
Attard’s contribution also illuminates how scale alters the experience of democracy. In small island states, political life is hyper-visible and intensely personal. Citizens often know their representatives personally, and acts of political expression—whether a handshake at a rally or a conspicuous absence from a public event—are closely watched and socially consequential. Proximity collapses the boundary between public and private spheres, making political participation inseparable from social identity. These dynamics are especially pronounced in Malta, where kinship and neighborhood ties shape political affiliations, and in Singapore, where civic behavior is calibrated according to highly codified norms of belonging.
The theoretical underpinnings of Attard’s argument draw from Amanda Machin’s work on embodied democracy and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence. These frameworks suggest that power does not reside solely in institutions or formal mechanisms but also in the internalized behaviors and affective dispositions of citizens. In this view, democracy is not just a philosophical ideal or legal condition—it is a lived, sensory, and relational experience. It is performed in gestures of loyalty, acts of resistance, and even in silence. Thus, democracy’s vitality cannot be measured solely by institutional indicators; it must be evaluated through its enactment in daily life.
Importantly, Attard cautioned against viewing Malta and Singapore as democratic failures. Instead, he argued, they represent variations in how democracy is lived and understood. In both contexts, the form of democracy remains intact, but its substance is negotiated through informal practices that often undermine equality, pluralism, and participatory depth. These states do not defy democratic norms outright; they hollow them out through ritualization, instrumentalization, and emotional detachment.
Attard concluded by emphasizing the analytical potential of studying small island states. Their compactness offers a “high-resolution lens” for observing the micro-dynamics of democracy—making visible the everyday acts that sustain or erode democratic life. While such phenomena might be diffused or abstract in large democracies, in small states, they are immediate, legible, and profoundly consequential. By foregrounding the embodied and relational dimensions of political participation, Attard’s presentation challenged the audience to move beyond binary notions of democracy and authoritarianism, and instead ask: how is democracy lived, and by whom?
In sum, Justin Attard’s presentation was a powerful invitation to reimagine the terrain of democratic inquiry. By centering lived experience, embodied practice, and relational proximity, he offered both a critique of institutional reductionism and a roadmap for future research on political life in small states and beyond.
Robert Person: Russia’s War on Democracy
At the ECPS Oxford Conference 2025, Professor Robert Person (United States Military Academy) delivered a sharp and strategically grounded analysis of authoritarian aggression in his talk, “Russia’s War on Democracy.”
In his presentation at the ECPS Oxford Conference 2025, Robert Person, Professor of International Relations and Director of Curriculum in International Affairs at the United States Military Academy, delivered a penetrating and strategically grounded analysis titled “Russia’s War on Democracy.” Drawing from his broader scholarly work on Russia’s grand strategy, Professor Person argued that undermining democracy—both domestically and abroad—has not been a peripheral concern for the Kremlin but a core pillar of Russia’s strategic doctrine under Vladimir Putin.
From the outset, Professor Person framed Russia’s multi-decade campaign as a deliberate, multifront war on democratic governance that transcends traditional ideological confrontation. According to Professor Person, Russia’s actions are best understood not as episodic reactions to geopolitical events, but as the orchestrated implementation of a grand strategy—a coordinated and adaptive approach for achieving long-term national objectives with finite resources.
In outlining the core logic of grand strategy, Professor Person defined it as the systematic alignment of national interests, strategic objectives, and the mobilization of resources and instruments of statecraft to shape an international environment conducive to a state’s goals. Russia’s grand strategy, he posited, centers on five key goals: (1) restoring Russia as a global great power, (2) replacing unipolarity with a multipolar order (envisioned as tri-polar with the US, Russia, and China), (3) securing exclusive influence over post-Soviet space, (4) re-establishing a 19th-century-like “Concert of Powers” in which great powers dominate global decision-making, and (5) counterbalancing the United States and its democratic allies, perceived as existential adversaries.
What makes this strategic vision especially paradoxical, Professor Person emphasized, is Russia’s relatively limited economic and military resources compared to its primary rivals. Russia’s GDP, even adjusted for purchasing power parity, lags far behind that of the United States and China. Thus, in contrast to conventional “additive” balancing strategies—such as military build-up or alliance formation—Moscow has adopted what Professor Person described as “asymmetric balancing.” Rather than attempting to match the West’s capabilities, Russia focuses on subtracting from its adversaries’ strategic coherence and political resilience. In this context, democratic vulnerability becomes a strategic opportunity.
Professor Person contended that democracies, by virtue of their pluralistic and open nature, present exploitable fissures. These include contentious political cleavages, ethnic tensions, institutional constraints, and electoral volatility. Russia has adeptly weaponized these vulnerabilities through what Professor Person termed asymmetric methods—a diverse toolkit encompassing disinformation campaigns, propaganda, judicial subversion, cyber-sabotage, financial backing of extremist movements, and the covert engagement of non-state actors, including organized crime and paramilitary groups.
This suite of tactics—deployed under the umbrella of asymmetric balancing—does not require overwhelming material superiority. Rather, it focuses on weakening rival states from within by fomenting instability, eroding public trust in democratic institutions, and fueling political polarization. In Eastern Europe, Russia’s strategy has often revolved around activating Russian-speaking or ethnic Russian minorities as “internal levers” to destabilize democratic consolidation in post-Soviet states. By contrast, in Western democracies such as the United States and EU member states, Russia has gravitated toward supporting far-right populist parties and figures, many of whom espouse anti-EU, anti-NATO, or pro-Kremlin narratives.
In this way, populism becomes a conduit, not only for domestic political discontent, but for external manipulation. Russia’s “war on democracy,” therefore, does not solely involve tanks and troops, but is waged through the subtle distortion of democratic discourse and the strategic exacerbation of democratic weaknesses. Professor Person referred to this terrain as a “populist playground” in which Moscow identifies and exploits social fragmentation for geopolitical gain.
Bringing his analysis into the present, Professor Person cited the United States as a compelling case study. He pointed to recent congressional debates over Ukraine aid, noting how populist rhetoric—particularly from the American right—has contributed to waning bipartisan support for Ukraine’s defense. This trend, he argued, exemplifies the success of Russian strategy in polarizing democratic consensus around foreign policy, thereby obstructing unified responses to Russian aggression. The juxtaposition of halting aid to Ukraine while advancing a domestic tax policy that massively increases US debt, he suggested, reveals the disruptive power of populist narratives in warping strategic priorities.
Throughout his presentation, Professor Person emphasized that Russia’s strategic targeting of democracies is not merely tactical or opportunistic; it is doctrinal. The erosion of democracy abroad enhances Russia’s comparative power and ideological legitimacy at home, where the Kremlin increasingly casts liberal democracy as corrupt, decadent, and destabilizing. Thus, the internal and external dimensions of Russia’s authoritarian consolidation are intimately linked.
In conclusion, Professor Person’s address urged scholars and policymakers to treat democracy not as a passive or self-sustaining system, but as a fragile and embattled political order—one that adversarial powers like Russia are actively seeking to undermine. The presentation served as both diagnosis and warning: while Russia’s material constraints may prevent direct military parity with the West, its strategic sophistication in exploiting the vulnerabilities of democratic societies poses a significant, enduring threat. The defense of democracy, therefore, demands not only military deterrence but a deeper understanding of how information, institutions, and ideology are weaponized in the global contest for influence.
Conclusion
Panel 7 offered a multidimensional and urgent inquiry into the precarious state of democracy in 2025—one caught, much like Schrödinger’s cat, between life and death. Through the lens of legal theory, ethnographic observation, and international strategic analysis, the panel’s three presentations exposed the fragility, complexity, and contested meanings of democratic life across varied contexts.
Dr. Max Steuer’s contribution revealed how law itself can either reinforce domination or serve as an emancipatory tool, depending on how it intersects with populist narratives. His matrix of “legal populism” invites scholars to rethink the role of legality not as an anchor of liberalism per se, but as a battleground where power is contested, justified, and resisted.
Justin Attard’s ethnography turned our attention to the micro-politics of participation in small island states. By theorizing democracy as “lived experience” rather than formal procedure, Attard challenged dominant institutionalist frameworks. His metaphor of democracy in “superposition” deepened our understanding of how democracy becomes real only through social performance, personal proximity, and political embodiment.
Professor Robert Person’s strategic analysis reminded us that democracy is not only internally threatened—it is also under coordinated assault from abroad. His account of Russia’s asymmetric war on democracy underscored how populism can function as a Trojan horse, exploited by hostile powers to divide and destabilize open societies. In a world of shrinking margins for democratic resilience, his call for strategic and institutional vigilance could not be more timely.
Together, the presentations underscored the panel’s central provocation: democracy today is not merely an object of empirical analysis or normative ideal—it is a site of contestation. Its survival, decline, or renewal hinges on how it is interpreted, enacted, defended, and reimagined. Implicit in the panel’s discussions is a call to action: as democrats, our role is not simply to observe the contents of Schrödinger’s box but to actively shape its outcome. Democracy may be simultaneously alive and dead—but it is never inert.
Note: To experience the panel’s dynamic and thought-provoking Q&A session, we encourage you to watch the full video recording above.
Please cite as: ECPS Staff. (2025). “ECPS Conference 2025 / Panel 6 — The ‘People’ in Search of Democracy.” European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). July 9, 2025. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00110
As part of the ECPS Conference 2025 titled “‘We, the People’ and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches,” held at St Cross College, University of Oxford from July 1–3, Panel VI—“The ‘People’ in Search of Democracy”—brought urgent focus to the evolving meaning of democratic agency. Chaired by Dr. Max Steuer (Comenius University, Bratislava), the session opened with a reflection on whether democracy and “the people” can be conceptually disentangled. Rashad Seedeen examined how Gramsci’s war of position and Wright’s real utopias intersect in Indigenous civil society initiatives. Jana Ruwayha analyzed how prolonged emergencies blur legal norms, threatening democratic accountability. Özge Derman showcased how the “we” is performatively constructed in Occupy Wall Street and the Gezi movement. Together, the panel offered sharp insights into the plural and contested meanings of “the people” in contemporary democratic struggles.
Reported by ECPS Staff
The 6th panel, titled “The ‘People’ in Search of Democracy,” served as a dynamic and intellectually rich segment of the ECPS Conference 2025, held at the University of Oxford. It brought together three distinct, interdisciplinary perspectives on how democratic agency, civil resistance, and institutional transformation are being reshaped by contemporary crises, social movements, and emergent political subjectivities. The panel addressed some of the most urgent and foundational questions animating the future of democratic life: Who are ‘the people’? What modes of collective action best articulate democratic claims? And how do crisis, governance, and performance intersect in today’s contested political landscapes?
In his opening remarks as chair of the panel, Dr. Max Steuer—Principal Investigator at the Department of Political Science at Comenius University in Bratislava and affiliated with Jindal Global Law School—offered a thoughtful framing of the session in light of the ECPS Conference theme, “We, the People” and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches (St Cross College, Oxford University, July 1–3, 2025). Reflecting on the panel’s title, he raised the provocative question of whether democracy and “the people” can—or should—be conceptually disentangled. Can there be democracy without “the people”? Steuer suggested that this line of inquiry opens new possibilities in democratic theory, particularly in relation to posthumanist and planetary frameworks that look beyond the human subject as the core agent of democratic life. At the same time, he pointed to the resilience and agency of “the people” in resisting authoritarianism—a theme that would recur throughout the panel presentations.
The panel unfolded with three carefully crafted presentations: Rashad Seedeen explored how Antonio Gramsci’s concept of war of position and Erik Olin Wright’s real utopias framework converge to reimagine democracy through grassroots civil society initiatives. Jana Ruwayhaexamined the normalization of emergency governance and its transformative—sometimes regressive—effects on liberal democratic orders, using the lens of legal theory and complex adaptive systems. Finally, Özge Derman illuminated the role of performative collectivity in Occupy Wall Street and the Gezi Movement, showing how “the people” emerged not through institutional structures, but through embodied acts of protest, silence, and solidarity.
Together, these interventions illustrated the multiple ways in which “the people” are both agents and constructs in the ongoing redefinition of democratic life. Dr. Steuer’s facilitation guided the panel toward an inclusive and critical conversation, allowing for reflections that transcended disciplinary silos while remaining grounded in rigorous analysis.
Rashad Seedeen: Between Antonio Gramsci and Erik Olin Wright: Deepening Democracy through Civil Society Engagement
At Panel 6 of the ECPS Conference 2025, Rashad Seedeen presented a thought-provoking analysis of civil society’s potential to advance democratic engagement, combining rich theoretical insights with grounded empirical reflection.
Delivered during Panel 6 of the ECPS Conference 2025, Rashad Seedeen’s presentation offered a compelling theoretical and empirical examination of civil society as a site for deepening democratic practice. Seedeen, Adjunct Research Fellow at La Trobe University, Melbourne, proposed an analytical synthesis of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of “war of position” and Erik Olin Wright’s “real utopias” framework, arguing that democratic transformation is most viable when it combines radical institutional experimentation with strategic ideological contestation.
Framed against the backdrop of growing far-right populism and the erosion of democratic norms, Seedeen began by grounding his work in respect for Indigenous sovereignty, acknowledging the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people and emphasizing that the research was developed in solidarity with their ongoing struggles. From this ethical foundation, Seedeen outlined the stakes: democracy is increasingly under assault, particularly in contexts where marginalized communities face heightened vulnerability. The response, he asserted, must involve more than liberal proceduralism—it must entail active efforts to reconstruct power relations through civil society engagement.
Drawing on Wright’s “real utopias” project, Seedeen highlighted the normative and functional principles that underpin such emancipatory designs: equality, democracy, sustainability, desirability, viability, and achievability. A real utopia, he explained, is not a utopian fantasy but a transformative institutional form that is both visionary and grounded. However, Seedeen noted a critical limitation in Wright’s approach: a lack of attention to antagonistic social forces and historical-political context. This omission, he argued, leaves real utopias vulnerable to ideological sabotage and institutional capture.
To address this shortcoming, Seedeen turned to Antonio Gramsci, whose concept of “war of position” offered a strategic complement to Wright’s institutional vision. Gramsci, steeped in historicism, theorized the war of position as a slow, strategic contest for ideological hegemony within civil society. For Seedeen, this Gramscian heuristic provides the necessary lens to account for counter-hegemonic resistance and the need to construct “an intellectual and moral bloc” that can sustain democratic innovation against reactionary backlash. Gramsci’s emphasis on mutual education, inclusivity, and grassroots leadership further resonates with democratic aspirations of real utopias.
The analytical model Seedeen proposed—an integration of Wright’s normative-functional metrics and Gramsci’s strategic-historic lens—was then applied to a case study from Seedeen’s home country: the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria (Australia). This Indigenous-led body was established to negotiate a treaty process with the Victorian government and exemplifies what Seedeen termed “associative democracy.” Structurally, the Assembly includes elected and traditional-owner representatives, supports youth and elder voices, and uses culturally grounded deliberative mechanisms such as yarning circles and community gatherings. Moreover, it asserts Indigenous data sovereignty by maintaining a separate electoral roll and governing structures.
Central to this initiative is the Yoorrook Justice Commission, a truth-telling process that collected over 10,000 documents and testimony from 9,000 Indigenous participants, with recommendations for restitution and self-determination. Seedeen demonstrated how the Assembly and Yoorrook fulfill Wright’s principles: they aim for equality through inclusive representation; foster democratic participation through grassroots engagement; and contribute to sustainability via institutional recognition and government support. Yet challenges remain: non-traditional Indigenous residents of Victoria are excluded from representation, leading to internal critique, and as the Assembly grows, it risks bureaucratization and diminished transparency.
Gramsci’s war of position, Seedeen argued, is vital to the Assembly’s resilience. He compared two contrasting examples of Indigenous political engagement to underline this point. The failed 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum, despite initial majority support, was defeated after a coordinated disinformation campaign by conservative elites. Lacking a robust counter-hegemonic intellectual bloc and suffering from strategic ambiguity and internal divisions, the “Yes” campaign faltered. In contrast, the Māori resistance to New Zealand’s Treaty Principles Bill in 2024 provided a vivid illustration of successful war of position. Māori leaders, supported by civil society and mainstream politicians, launched a multi-layered, culturally resonant protest campaign—culminating in a nationwide Hīkoi (march) and parliamentary haka that galvanized public opposition and ultimately defeated the bill.
Seedeen’s comparative analysis reinforced Gramsci’s insight: the battle for democratic reform is won not only in institutional design but also in the ideological trenches of civil society. The Māori example demonstrated the power of a coherent moral-intellectual bloc mobilized through historical consciousness, cultural symbolism, and participatory solidarity.
In concluding, Seedeen contended that treaty processes and democratic experiments like the First Peoples’ Assembly should not be viewed as endpoints but as evolving processes of radical democratic deepening. The marriage of Gramscian historicism with Wrightian pragmatism provides an essential framework for theorizing—and realizing—sustainable democratic alternatives in the face of entrenched power and populist reaction. His presentation exemplified the spirit of ECPS Conference 2025: interdisciplinary, critical, and committed to the defense and expansion of democracy through innovative, context-sensitive scholarship.
Jana Ruwayha: Resilient or Regressive? How Crisis Governance Reshapes the Democratic Future of ‘The People’
In her sharp and timely presentation, Jana Ruwayha (University of Geneva) examined how the normalization of emergency powers in liberal democracies reshapes the role and agency of “the people” within democratic governance.
In her incisive presentation, Jana Ruwayha, a PhD candidate at the University of Geneva’s Faculty of Law and a teaching and research assistant at the Global Studies Institute, interrogated the growing normalization of emergency powers in liberal democracies and its implications for the democratic role of “the people.” Through a combination of legal analysis and Complex Adaptive Systems Theory (CAST)—a framework more commonly used in the sciences—Ruwayha provided an interdisciplinary lens to assess how governance during crises may either deepen resilience or accelerate democratic regression.
Ruwayha began by challenging the “classical emergency paradigm,” which traditionally views emergencies as temporary, exceptional, and proportional deviations from normal legal order, with the ultimate aim of returning to a pre-crisis status quo. Historically, such frameworks were rooted in legal constructs like the Roman dictatorship (limited to six months) or post–World War II constitutional safeguards in Europe designed to prevent authoritarian overreach. Emergencies were viewed as akin to a light switch: clearly demarcated, temporally bound, and reversible.
However, Ruwayha argued that this binary view is increasingly obsolete. The crises of our time—whether the COVID-19 pandemic, the global war on terror, or the Russian invasion of Ukraine—are interconnected, prolonged, and overlapping. They do not “switch off,” but instead operate on a dimmer switch of intensities, gradually embedding emergency logics into ordinary governance. This metaphor, borrowed from legal scholar Stephanie Boucher, illustrates how democratic erosion becomes incremental and opaque, making it harder for citizens to discern when normal governance ends and emergency rule begins.
To map these shifts, Ruwayha applied CAST to legal systems, conceptualizing them as nonlinear, dynamic, and interconnected networks. This approach illuminated several crucial insights. First, crises introduce “trigger mechanisms”—acute shocks such as terrorist attacks or pandemics—that legitimize sweeping emergency measures. Second, they foster “feedback loops”: public fear and insecurity generated during crises often bolster support for policies that further concentrate power and suppress dissent. Third, prolonged crises may reach “bifurcation points,” forcing democratic systems to choose between adaptation and backsliding. When states normalize exceptional measures and extend them into regular law, they risk entering a condition of “hysteresis”—a point of no return.
Ruwayha substantiated her argument with contemporary examples. In the United States, emergency surveillance powers introduced via the Patriot Act after 9/11 remain largely intact more than two decades later. In France, counterterrorism measures enacted after the 2015 Paris attacks—originally designed to combat jihadist threats—have since been repurposed to target environmental activists and migrants. Similarly, COVID-era public health laws in various countries have institutionalized digital surveillance, mobility restrictions, and data collection—many of which persist despite the waning of the pandemic.
This contamination of ordinary law, Ruwayha warned, undermines foundational democratic principles such as transparency, accountability, and proportionality. It also erodes the legal architecture designed to protect civil liberties, and fosters executive overreach at the expense of parliamentary or judicial scrutiny. At the discursive level, governments increasingly rely on crisis rhetoric—characterizing challenges as existential threats and invoking metaphors of war (e.g., “war on terror,” “battle against the virus”)—which not only legitimizes exceptionalism but also fuels populist narratives that portray “the people” as besieged by external or internal enemies.
Here, Ruwayha highlighted the paradox at the heart of emergency governance: while it is often justified in the name of protecting “the people,” it simultaneously sidelines them from meaningful participation in shaping policy. “The people” become passive subjects to be secured, rather than active democratic agents.
Against this bleak backdrop, Ruwayha turned to the notion of resilience—not as a return to pre-crisis normalcy, but as the ability of democratic systems to adapt, endure, and regenerate without abandoning core values. She outlined three pillars of resilient legal systems: Robustness – the capacity to withstand disruptions while upholding democratic norms. Adaptability – the flexibility to recalibrate laws and institutions in response to evolving threats. Recovery potential – the ability to regain full democratic functionality post-crisis without suffering permanent distortion.
Resilient governance, Ruwayha contended, requires more than legal insulation; it demands participatory structures that preserve the voice of the people during and after crises. This involves strengthening democratic feedback mechanisms, embedding civil society oversight, and ensuring constitutional safeguards that are not easily overridden by executive discretion. Drawing connections to other presentations in the panel, she emphasized that inclusive, grassroots engagement—such as citizen assemblies or bottom-up accountability initiatives—are indispensable to counter the instrumentalization of crises by populist actors.
In conclusion, Ruwayha’s presentation made a forceful case for rethinking the democratic implications of long-term emergency governance. She urged scholars and practitioners to abandon the myth of the “short-term exception” and recognize that today’s emergencies are shaping a new legal equilibrium. Whether this equilibrium is resilient or regressive, she argued, will depend on how institutions are reconfigured and whether “the people” are empowered as central actors in crisis governance. Her framework—combining legal theory with systems thinking—offered a powerful interdisciplinary contribution to understanding how democracy can be defended, not only through law, but through collective vigilance and participatory renewal.
Özge Derman: The Performative Power of the ‘We’ in Occupy Wall Street and Gezi Movement
In her richly interdisciplinary and empirically grounded presentation, Özge Derman (PhD, Sciences Po and Sorbonne University) explored how the collective “we” is visually, bodily, and discursively constructed through performative acts of togetherness in post-2010 protest movements—namely, Occupy Wall Street (New York, 2011) and the Gezi Park protests (Istanbul, 2013). Drawing on fieldwork, interviews, archival material, and theories from political philosophy and performance studies, Dr. Derman made a compelling case for understanding social movements not merely through ideological content or institutional outcomes, but through their embodied and creative enactments of solidarity and dissent.
Dr. Derman began by situating her work within a broader theoretical framework, particularly the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler. As Arendt reminds us in The Human Condition, power arises when people act in concert in public space. Yet this power is inherently ephemeral, lasting only as long as people continue to appear, speak, and act together. Building on this, Butler emphasizes the performative nature of political assembly—the way bodies materialize dissent and generate public space through their presence, speech, and action. Dr. Derman took these insights further to argue that the “we” of democratic resistance is not a fixed or homogenous identity, but a precarious, plural, and performatively constituted subjectivity.
To investigate this dynamic, Dr. Derman employed a qualitative methodology involving semi-structured interviews with activists, participant observation, and analysis of both traditional and digital archives. She framed her inquiry around how the “we” emerges not from shared ideology, but from acts of co-presence, speech, and performance that reconfigure urban space and challenge hegemonic narratives.
In Occupy Wall Street, Dr. Derman observed how protestors reclaimed Zuccotti Park in the heart of New York’s financial district, creating an experimental space of non-hierarchical, direct democracy. General Assemblies were held daily, enabling collective decision-making through consensus rather than majoritarian voting. Importantly, the protestors adopted creative tools to circumvent legal restrictions—most notably, the “human microphone” (a call-and-repeat communication method) and hand signals, both of which emphasized listening, repetition, and embodied consensus. These practices disrupted conventional oratory and leadership models, fostering what activists called “leaderlessness” or “leaderfulness”—forms of horizontal organization where every voice, especially those traditionally marginalized, could be heard.
Dr. Derman highlighted how the slogan “We are the 99%” encapsulated this collective subjectivity. Far from a rigid class category, the phrase acted as a discursive and visual representation of solidarity, uniting debt-ridden students, unemployed workers, and housing activists under a shared opposition to the global financial elite. The slogan’s visual dissemination—in banners, digital media, street art, and performative projections (such as the iconic “bat signal” on the Verizon building)—allowed the “we” to materialize across physical and digital platforms.
In Istanbul’s Gezi movement, similar performative articulations of the “we” took root. Here, too, urban space—Gezi Park and Taksim Square—was transformed through encampments, assemblies, and artistic interventions. One of the most emblematic performative acts was that of the “Standing Man” (Duran Adam), a silent dancer who stood immobile for eight hours to protest police brutality. His non-verbal act of resistance quickly became contagious, replicated by individuals across Turkey and online. Dr. Derman described this as a moment where a single body became a performative catalyst, activating a dispersed and resilient collective “we”—a political choreography of stillness that reclaimed public space through vulnerability and silence.
Notably, Dr. Derman emphasized that these performative enactments were not free of conflict or contradiction. In both Occupy and Gezi, internal tensions emerged—from disagreements over the role of drumming collectives in Zuccotti Park, which disrupted deliberations, to ideological schisms within Gezi between secularists, feminists, Kurds, and Islamists. Yet these tensions, rather than undermining the movements, served to reveal the heterogeneity of democratic action. Drawing on Jacques Rancière, Dr. Derman suggested that these “conflictual disruptions” were themselves forms of politics—moments where the established order is contested and new forms of inclusion imagined.
Dr. Derman further examined how symbols and slogans became sites of performative identification. In Occupy, the blog “We Are the 99 Percent” allowed individuals to narrate their struggles, visually linking diverse lives into a common narrative of injustice. In Gezi, the figure of the “Çapulcu” (roughly translated as “looter”)—a term initially used by then-Prime Minister Erdoğan to delegitimize protestors—was ironically reclaimed by activists as a badge of resistance. T-shirts, graffiti, memes, and even Noam Chomsky’s public declaration (“I am a Çapulcu”) reinforced the idea of a collective identity forged through performance and creativity.
Despite the ephemeral nature of both movements, Dr. Derman argued that their performative legacies endure. The aesthetic and discursive repertoires developed in Occupy and Gezi continue to inspire new generations of protest, offering alternatives to top-down politics through acts of improvisation, embodiment, and mutual recognition. These movements did not produce traditional party structures or electoral victories, but they redefined political space, rendering visible new forms of democratic agency.
In her conclusion, Dr. Derman returned to Arendt’s formulation that power arises when people “are with others,” not necessarily for or against them. In both Occupy and Gezi, the “we” was not a predetermined category but a performative constellation—a fleeting yet potent political form. Through creative enactments of togetherness, protestors generated a space where direct democracy, dissent, and solidarity could be experimented with in real time.
Ultimately, Dr. Derman’s presentation offered a nuanced, affective, and visually rich account of how democratic subjects emerge in protest. By tracing the embodied practices, affective resonances, and symbolic innovations of two landmark movements, she illuminated the transformative power of performative “we-ness.”
Conclusion
Panel VI, “The ‘People’ in Search of Democracy,” concluded with an enriched understanding of how democratic agency is redefined in contemporary contexts of crisis, social resistance, and performative politics. From the outset, Chair Dr. Max Steuer framed the discussion with a provocative question: can democracy exist without “the people”? This critical inquiry anchored a session that interrogated democracy not as a fixed institutional arrangement, but as a dynamic field of struggle, rearticulation, and reimagination.
Through Rashad Seedeen’s synthesis of Gramsci and Wright, the panel explored how democratic deepening must be anchored in civil society’s ideological and institutional labor, especially when practiced from within historically marginalized communities. Jana Ruwayha’s legal-systems approach revealed the creeping normalization of emergency governance and the risks it poses to democratic resilience. Özge Derman’s analysis of the Occupy and Gezi movements showed how democratic subjectivities form not only through formal structures but through aesthetic, embodied acts of collective presence and dissent.
Taken together, the panel demonstrated that “the people” are not a singular, stable identity but an ever-contested construct—sometimes excluded, sometimes mobilized, always central to the democratic imagination. Whether through grassroots utopias, legal resilience, or performative solidarity, the search for democracy is ongoing, multifaceted, and urgent. Panel VI offered a compelling, interdisciplinary contribution to the ECPS Conference 2025, reminding us that democracy’s future lies in rethinking who “the people” are—and who they might yet become.
Note: To experience the panel’s dynamic and thought-provoking Q&A session, we encourage you to watch the full video recording above.
Please cite as: ECPS Staff. (2025). “ECPS Conference 2025 / Panel 5 — Governing the ‘People’: Divided Nations.” European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). July 9, 2025. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00111
Panel V of the ECPS Conference 2025, “Governing the ‘People’: Divided Nations,” held on July 2 at St Cross College, University of Oxford, explored how contested constructions of “the people” are shaped by populist discourse across national, religious, and ideological contexts. Co-chaired by Dr. Leila Alieva and Professor Karen Horn, the session featured presentations by Natalie Schwabl (Sorbonne University), Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz (Northeastern University), and Petar S. Ćurčić (Institute of European Studies, Belgrade). The panel examined Catholic nationalism in Croatia, American Christian ethno-populism, and the evolving German left, offering sharp insights into the manipulation of collective identity and memory in populist projects. Bridging multiple regions and disciplines, the panel revealed populism’s capacity to reframe belonging in deeply exclusionary and globally resonant ways.
Reported by ECPS Staff
Panel V of the ECPS Conference 2025, titled Governing the ‘People’: Divided Nations, convened on July 2, 2025 at St Cross College, Oxford, under the overarching theme of “We, the People” and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches. This intellectually charged session examined the fractured and contested constructions of “the people” across varied historical, cultural, and political contexts, focusing particularly on how populist discourse navigates religious identity, memory politics, and socio-political polarization.
Co-chaired by Dr.Leila Alieva(Associate Researcher, Russian and East European Studies, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies) and Professor Karen Horn (Professor of Economic Thought, University of Erfurt), the session benefitted from their combined expertise in post-Soviet transformation, democratic theory, and political economy. Dr. Alieva welcomed the audience by underlining the significance of case-driven approaches to dissecting populism’s conceptual ambiguity and real-world diversity.
The panel featured three analytically rigorous and empirically rich presentations. Natalie Schwabl (Sorbonne University) opened with a diachronic analysis of Catholic nationalism in Croatia, demonstrating how the term Hrvatski narod has been sacralized, politicized, and manipulated by state and ecclesiastical actors from the Ustaša period through post-socialist independence. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz (Northeastern University) followed with a provocative ethnographic account of American far-right Christian nationalism, highlighting transnational alignments between U.S. Orthodox converts and Russian illiberalism. Finally,Petar S. Ćurčić(Institute of European Studies, Belgrade) offered a comparative analysis of Die Linke and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance in Germany, interrogating whether a coherent form of left-wing populism is still viable amid competing ideological pressures and electoral challenges.
Under the guidance of the co-chairs, the session provided a vibrant space for critical reflection and scholarly dialogue. The panel’s breadth of focus—from Southeastern Europe to the US and Germany—underscored the global entanglements of populist discourse and the enduring power of identity politics in shaping both democratic crisis and populist resurgence.
Natalie Schwabl: Catholicism and Nationalism in Croatia: The Use and Misuse of ‘Hrvatski Narod’
In a historically informed and sharply analytical talk at the ECPS Conference 2025, Natalie Schwabl (Sorbonne University) examined how Catholicism and nationalism intersect in shaping Croatian identity, focusing on the symbolic use of Hrvatski narod (“the Croatian people”).
In her historically grounded and analytically incisive presentation at the ECPS Conference 2025, Natalie Schwabl, a doctoral candidate at the Sorbonne University, explored the entangled relationship between Catholicism, nationalism, and the construction of the Croatian national identity—specifically through the discursive deployment of the term Hrvatski narod (“the Croatian people”). Her talk, “Catholicism and Nationalism in Croatia: The Use and Misuse of ‘Hrvatski Narod’,” offered a compelling diachronic examination of how religious symbolism and political narratives have fused across different regimes to forge, sacralize, and instrumentalize national identity.
Schwabl opened her presentation by quoting historian Matveyevich, who warned of the ideological reshaping of national consciousness through mythmaking. This interpretive lens framed the entirety of her presentation, which tracked how Croatian nationalism, especially in the 20th century, was often undergirded by religious imaginaries and selectively mythologized histories. She laid out a chronological structure that traced the evolving concept of Hrvatski narod, highlighting its oscillations between heroization, victimization, and erasure, depending on the prevailing political regime.
Central to Schwabl’s analysis was the Catholic Church’s enduring role in shaping Croatian identity, especially during periods when Croatia lacked formal statehood. In both Yugoslav periods, the Church served as a surrogate national institution, reinforcing a millenarian narrative that aligned Croatia with Catholic Western Europe while casting its Orthodox and Muslim neighbors as alien others. She underscored the Church’s dual role: as both a spiritual guardian and a political actor, contributing to the persistence of a civilizational us versus them discourse.
In her discussion of the interwar period and the rise of the Ustaša movement in the 1930s, Schwabl provided a detailed account of how the movement drew heavily on 19th-century Catholic-nationalist ideas. Thinkers such as Ante Starčević and later ideologues developed a narrative of divine providence, framing Croats as a chosen people with a sacred duty to protect Western Christendom from Eastern encroachment. This narrative found powerful visual and rhetorical expression in the fascist puppet state known as the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), established in 1941 under Ante Pavelić with Nazi and Italian backing.
Schwabl examined the NDH’s ideological apparatus, showing how Catholic symbols, medievalist imagery, and notions of providential destiny were mobilized to construct a sacralized Croatian national myth. Examples included newspapers like Hrvatski narod, iconography invoking the Virgin Mary as the nation’s protector, and reinterpretations of medieval history to justify contemporary political goals. She identified these deployments as examples of “medievalism”—a selective invocation of historical tropes to legitimize nationalist claims.
The presentation then turned to the Titoist period (1945–1980), where the Yugoslav state promoted a new supranational identity centered on brotherhood and unity. Under this second Yugoslavia, Schwabl noted, the concept of narod was depoliticized and homogenized into the abstract figure of the “Yugoslav people.” The violence and complicity of Croatian actors during World War II were largely subsumed under a collective narrative of anti-fascist resistance, sidelining culpability while emphasizing shared suffering under Nazi and Axis occupation. Drawing on Luca Manucci’s theoretical framework, Schwabl mapped how this period was characterized by a triad of memory strategies: victimization, heroization, and cancellation of culpability.
Crucially, Schwabl argued that this historical amnesia laid the groundwork for the resurgence of nationalist sentiment during the Croatian Spring of the 1970s and especially in the post-1991 independence period. The Croatian Catholic Church regained institutional and symbolic prominence, often supporting revisionist interpretations of history that glorified the Ustaša regime or downplayed its atrocities. Under President Franjo Tuđman, state-Church relations intensified, with promises made to restore ecclesiastical rights and national memory restructured through a nationalist lens. The destruction of anti-fascist monuments and their replacement with Catholic and national symbols in Herzegovina served, in Schwabl’s view, as a clear example of memoricide—the systematic rewriting of public memory to align with a new ideological order.
In her final sections, Schwabl turned to contemporary Croatia. She illustrated the persistence of fascist-era symbols and slogans in public life, particularly in emotionally charged moments such as football matches or nationalist commemorations. Phrases like “Za dom spremni” (“For the homeland, ready”), once used by the Ustaša, continue to circulate, sometimes with the tacit or explicit approval of clergy. The blending of Church colors, Vatican symbolism, and national flags at public events exemplifies the dual appropriation of religion for nationalist purposes and the Church’s active participation in shaping political narratives.
Throughout her presentation, Schwabl remained attentive to the historical continuities and ruptures in the use of Hrvatski narod. She emphasized that this term has not remained stable over time but has been redefined and repurposed across different ideological regimes—monarchical, fascist, communist, and post-socialist. Each reconfiguration involved the intertwining of religious myth, political opportunism, and selective memory, often producing exclusionary and essentialist visions of national identity.
Her critical insight lay in revealing the instrumental use of religion not for theological reflection, but as a legitimizing force in nationalist projects. The Croatian case, she argued, offers a potent example of how the sacred can be weaponized for the political—and how institutions like the Church can both shape and be shaped by the forces of populism and ethno-nationalism.
In conclusion, Schwabl’s presentation was a methodologically rich and theoretically robust contribution to the ECPS Conference. By unpacking the symbolic, historical, and political dimensions of Hrvatski narod, she demonstrated how the politics of belonging in Croatia have been built upon—and continue to rely upon—the selective invocation of Catholicism, historical memory, and national myth. Her work not only sheds light on Croatia’s past and present, but also offers critical tools for interrogating the broader dynamics of religious nationalism and populist memory politics in post-socialist Europe.
Sarah Riccardi-Swartz: ‘Become Ungovernable:’ Covert Tactics, Racism, and Civilizational Catastrophe
In a methodologically robust and compelling presentation, Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz (Northeastern University) analyzed how Christian nationalism, racialized populism, and civilizational discourse intersect within the contemporary American far right.
In her deeply compelling and methodologically rich presentation, Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz (Assistant Professor of Religion and Anthropology at Northeastern University) addressed the complex convergence of Christian nationalism, racialized populism, and civilizational rhetoric in the contemporary American far right. Drawing on ethnographic research, digital media analysis, and transnational theoretical frameworks, Dr. Riccardi-Swartz traced how far-right American Christians are constructing an ideologically potent imaginary of “becoming ungovernable”—a theological-political vision grounded in racial purity, anti-democratic sentiment, and an admiration for Russia’s illiberal authoritarianism.
The presentation began with Dr. Riccardi-Swartz recounting the symbolic and ideological affinities articulated by groups such as the League of the South, which has praised cultural and “bloodline” similarities between white Southerners and Russians. Such transnational rhetorical gestures serve to legitimize a shared civilizational project among white Christian ethno-nationalists, linking the American South to Putin’s Russia. In particular, figures like Michael Hill, Christopher Caldwell, and digital influencers have framed Russia as a bulwark against Western liberalism, multiculturalism, and globalism—values they associate with societal decay.
Central to Dr. Riccardi-Swartz’s argument is the paradoxical desire among these actors for both securitization and rebellion: the wish to reimpose a stable, morally homogenous society governed by Christian traditionalism, and simultaneously, the desire to become “ungovernable” within the framework of liberal democratic institutions they reject. In this vision, civilizational collapse becomes not a threat to be averted but a purifying crucible through which white Christian dominance might be re-established.
Her case study of Rebecca Dillingham, an Orthodox Christian content creator known as “Dissident Mama,” powerfully illustrated these dynamics. A former atheist and feminist turned traditionalist, Dillingham represents a new genre of far-right micro-celebrities who fuse religious conviction with white nationalist nostalgia. Her media content blends neo-Confederate symbolism, theological commentary, and conspiratorial narratives of white marginalization, all situated within a broader rejection of the American liberal order.
Dr. Riccardi-Swartz traced Dillingham’s affiliations to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) and her support of Putin’s geopolitical vision. Her digital content, broadcast across platforms and amplified through networks of far-right actors, promotes the mythos of white victimhood and Christian civilization under siege. She positions herself and her followers not just as culture warriors, but as defenders of an imagined moral order threatened by racial diversity, gender equality, and religious pluralism.
This fusion of Southern American nationalism with Orthodox Christian traditionalism, Dr. Riccardi-Swartz argued, reflects a larger movement among disaffected white Christians seeking sanctuary in Russia’s illiberalism. Russia, she demonstrated, has been rebranded in American far-right circles as a moral stronghold. This is evidenced by events like the World Congress of Families and by the alignment of Russian state ideology with anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, anti-feminism, and civilizational rhetoric centered on the Christian family.
Dr. Riccardi-Swartz located these trends within a longer history of white anxieties about demographic change, migration, and the collapse of racial hierarchies—what some frame as “white genocide.” However, in the digital age, these concerns are refracted through coded language and aesthetic strategies that allow for broader reach while evading direct censorship. She highlighted how new media technologies facilitate connections between American Christian nationalists and Russian Orthodox actors, allowing for transnational collaborations that rest on shared disdain for liberalism, modernity, and secularism.
Particularly disturbing, Dr. Riccardi-Swartz noted, is the resurgence of anti-Semitism and the valorization of violence. She referenced the paramilitary aspirations of groups like “The Base,” a neo-Nazi organization with operational links across the US, Russia, and Ukraine. Such networks, she argued, seek to create a white ethnostate that is unmoored from geography but unified ideologically through faith, race, and militant opposition to modern democratic institutions.
Quoting Michael Hill and other white nationalist voices, Dr. Riccardi-Swartz demonstrated how such figures view Putin’s Russia as both inspiration and ally. The invocation of spiritual warfare, “defense of the motherland,” and the Christianization of the geopolitical domain are rhetorical strategies used to frame authoritarianism as not only legitimate but divinely sanctioned.
In her concluding reflections, Dr. Riccardi-Swartz drew upon political theorist Michael Feola’s assertion that ethno-nationalism’s defining feature lies in the racialized construction of “the people.” For actors like Dillingham, whiteness and Christianity become the twin axes of moral legitimacy and national destiny. Populist suspicion of elites is not only political but deeply existential—framed as a struggle for the survival of civilization itself.
Thus, Dr. Riccardi-Swartz’s presentation unveiled the theological undercurrents of contemporary white Christian nationalism as more than a reactionary cultural force. It is, she contended, an apocalyptic vision that seeks to re-found the political order on notions of racial purity, heteronormative family values, and religious homogeneity. In doing so, it constitutes a transnational illiberal project—one that sees in Russia not an enemy of the West, but the last hope for its imagined civilizational continuity.
This presentation, situated at the intersection of religion, digital anthropology, and political extremism, was one of the most provocative of the ECPS Conference 2025. It illuminated the global dimensions of far-right mobilization, the spiritualized grammar of white grievance, and the alarming ideological bridges being built between American dissidents and Russian ethno-authoritarians. Dr. Riccardi-Swartz’s work offers a crucial lens for understanding how populism, religion, and racism co-produce new imaginaries of power and belonging in the post-liberal era.
Petar S. Ćurčić: Is There Left-wing Populism Today? A Case Study of the German Left and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance
In a historically grounded and analytically precise presentation, Petar S. Ćurčić (Institute of European Studies, Belgrade) examined the current relevance of left-wing populism in Europe, interrogating its presence through the lens of political theory and electoral developments.
In his analytically detailed and historically informed presentation, Petar S. Ćurčić, Research Associate at the Institute of European Studies in Belgrade, tackled a pressing question at the intersection of political theory and contemporary electoral dynamics: does left-wing populism still exist in Europe today? Through a comparative case study of Die Linke (The Left Party) and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW, Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance for Reason and Justice), Ćurčić examined the evolving contours of left-populist mobilization in Germany in the context of broader ideological fragmentation, party realignment, and the competing appeals of radical left and right formations.
Framing his inquiry within the theoretical lens of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse on populism—particularly the dialectic between radical reformism and revolutionary politics—Ćurčić identified post-reunification Germany as a key site where the legacy of East German socialism, structural transformations in the political economy, and shifting voter coalitions continue to shape the prospects of left populism. The fusion of the post-communist PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) with disaffected elements of the SPD (Social Democratic Party) in the early 2000s birthed Die Linke, but the new formation was beset by internal ideological divisions that compromised coherence and hindered long-term consolidation.
The presentation mapped the electoral landscape following Germany’s 2024 federal elections, which saw Die Linke gain an unexpected boost (8.8% of the vote and six direct mandates) while the BSW failed to pass the 5% threshold required for parliamentary representation. Interestingly, Die Linke’s modest resurgence was interpreted as a function of its return to a clear outsider status, recapturing disillusioned voters from the Greens and SPD, especially those dissatisfied with the Ampelkoalition (traffic light coalition). By contrast, the BSW’s populist promise—centered around Sahra Wagenknecht’s personalized leadership and contrarian stances—sputtered under internal contradictions, policy ambiguities, and a misreading of the electorate’s tolerance for anti-immigration rhetoric within a left-wing frame.
In the first analytical section, Ćurčić assessed socioeconomic policy as the bedrock of left-wing populist appeal. Both Die Linke and BSW espoused redistributive agendas: nationalizing large housing corporations, advocating public ownership, and taxing the ultra-wealthy. These were classical populist demands—aimed at mobilizing economically marginalized constituencies against “the rich” and “corporate elites.” Yet Ćurčić noted that BSW’s more cautious embrace of this rhetoric, due to concerns about capital flight and economic stagnation, signaled strategic ambivalence.
The second dimension of analysis—migration—revealed a sharper divergence between the parties. Die Linke remained staunchly pro-immigration, defending asylum rights and inclusive multiculturalism. BSW, by contrast, advocated for migration quotas and structured assimilation—a position veering into exclusionary populist discourse more typically associated with the radical right. Although framed as a defense of working-class interests, BSW’s appeal to migration referenda (legally unviable under German constitutional law) and regional party divisions—particularly in Bavaria—highlighted both the ideological risks and operational incoherence of such positioning. Ćurčić stressed that while BSW distanced itself from AfD’s overt xenophobia, it flirted with similarly populist tropes of national destabilization through immigration.
In the third section, Ćurčić addressed the anti-fascist orientation of left populism, contrasting the firewall politics (Brandmauerpolitik) of Die Linke—a refusal to cooperate with the far-right AfD—with BSW’s critique of such strategies. While Die Linke called for mass mobilization against fascism, including street protests and institutional exclusion of AfD, BSW positioned itself as a defender of “dissenting opinion” against political correctness and establishment censorship. Wagenknecht’s rhetoric reframed the anti-AfD consensus as authoritarian overreach, drawing criticism from within her own ranks for weakening democratic resistance to extremism.
The fourth point delved into political strategy and engagement with state institutions—an often-neglected dimension in populism studies. Ćurčić underscored the strategic dilemma of left-wing populists when transitioning from opposition to governance. BSW’s brief coalition experiments in Thuringia and Brandenburg, followed by a decline in electoral support, were emblematic of the broader challenge populist parties face when tasked with compromise and administration. In response to electoral setbacks, BSW alleged vote-counting irregularities—a narrative tactic borrowed from right-wing populism and suggestive of eroding trust in democratic institutions. In contrast, Die Linke used its electoral gains to press for constitutional reforms (notably the abolition of Germany’s debt brake) and anchored itself in parliamentary activism rather than populist delegitimation of the system.
The final section of the presentation explored populist responses to war, particularly in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the conflict in Gaza. Ćurčić explained how Die Linke redefined its foreign policy stance by condemning Russian aggression and advocating a multilateral peace initiative involving the EU and Global South actors. This marked a break from its earlier ambiguity and showcased an anti-militarist, solidarity-based foreign policy that resisted both NATO interventionism and Kremlin propaganda. BSW, on the other hand, adopted an anti-war discourse rooted in economic nationalism and skepticism of Atlanticist geopolitics. Wagenknecht’s critiques of NATO expansion and warnings about Germany’s economic vulnerabilities mirrored some elements of Kremlin talking points, raising concerns about the resonance of such narratives with disaffected constituencies in Eastern Germany.
In conclusion, Ćurčić contended that the German left is undergoing a deep recalibration of its populist potential. While both Die Linke and BSW articulate critiques of neoliberalism and centrist consensus, their strategic divergences on migration, anti-fascism, institutional engagement, and foreign policy illustrate fundamentally different visions of what left-wing populism can be. For Die Linke, the path lies in reinvigorating class-based solidarities and institutional legitimacy. For BSW, the wager is on a heterodox populism that blends left economics with cultural conservatism—an experiment that, thus far, appears to have reached its electoral limits. Ćurčić suggested that the future of left-wing populism in Germany may depend on its ability to both differentiate itself from the radical right and avoid internal fragmentation in the face of complex societal challenges.
Conclusion
Panel V, Governing the ‘People’: Divided Nations, provided a timely and multi-dimensional exploration of how populist narratives around national identity, religion, race, and ideology are constructed, contested, and reconfigured across diverse geopolitical contexts. Drawing from richly sourced case studies—Croatia, the United States, and Germany—the panel offered nuanced insights into the ways in which “the people” are defined, governed, and mobilized in fractured democratic landscapes.
A recurring theme across the three presentations was the instrumentalization of collective identity—be it religious, racial, or class-based—for populist ends. Natalie Schwabl’s historical excavation of Croatian Catholic nationalism demonstrated how sacralized narratives of belonging, buttressed by the Church and selectively curated memory politics, can be wielded to legitimize exclusionary nationalisms. In parallel, Sarah Riccardi-Swartz’s ethnographic investigation into white Christian nationalism in the United States spotlighted the globalizing, digitally mediated dimensions of populist theology and its alignment with illiberal, transnational authoritarianism. Petar S. Ćurčić’s comparative study of Germany’s left-wing populist spectrum added further depth by analyzing intra-left tensions over migration, anti-fascism, and institutional trust in the wake of electoral realignments.
Together, these contributions not only affirmed the conference’s interdisciplinary ethos but also challenged simplistic binaries between populist left and right, secular and religious, or nationalist and globalist. Instead, they highlighted the hybrid and often paradoxical formations populism takes in contemporary political life. Under the thoughtful stewardship of co-chairs Dr. Leila Alieva and Professor Karen Horn, the session fostered critical reflection on the global entanglements of populist discourse and the urgent need for historically informed, context-sensitive scholarship to navigate the complexities of democratic backsliding and contested belonging in the 21st century.
Note: To experience the panel’s dynamic and thought-provoking Q&A session, we encourage you to watch the full video recording above.
Please cite as: ECPS Staff. (2025). “ECPS Conference 2025 / Roundtable II — ‘The People’ in and against Liberal and Democratic Thought.” European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). July 10, 2025. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00112
Held at St Cross College, University of Oxford, as part of the ECPS Conference 2025 (“We, the People” and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches,” July 1–3), Roundtable II offered a wide-ranging philosophical and political interrogation of how “the people” is theorized, invoked, and contested in contemporary democratic thought. Chaired by Dr. Aviezer Tucker (University of Ostrava), the session featured presentations by Naomi Waltham-Smith (Oxford), Bruno Godefroy (Tours), Karen Horn (Erfurt), and Julian F. Müller (Graz). Together, the panel explored the rhetorical, constitutional, and epistemic instabilities surrounding the concept of “the people,” challenging static or essentialist understandings and calling for renewed attention to pluralism, temporality, and audibility within liberal democratic frameworks.
Reported by ECPS Staff
At the ECPS Conference 2025, held from July 1–3 at St Cross College, University of Oxford under the theme “‘We, the People’ and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches,” Roundtable II offered a particularly provocative and philosophically expansive exploration of the populist challenge to liberal democratic thought. Chaired by Dr. Aviezer Tucker (University of Ostrava), the session titled “‘The People’ in and against Liberal and Democratic Thought”assembled a diverse array of perspectives, traversing political theory, music philosophy, legal studies, and liberal political economy.
As chair, Dr. Tucker aptly remarked on the intellectual breadth of the panel—a “smorgasbord” (smörgåsbord) of approaches that might well result in an Eintopf, or philosophical stew. With four distinct yet interrelated presentations, the roundtable demonstrated both the urgency and conceptual richness of current debates surrounding democratic legitimacy, popular sovereignty, and the epistemic ruptures posed by populism.
The sequence began with Professor Naomi Waltham-Smith (University of Oxford), whose philosophical interrogation of “listening to the people” challenged political theorists to take seriously the ontological and rhetorical weight of listening in democratic discourse. She provocatively reclassified both “listening” and “the people” as “impossible concepts,” offering a compelling intervention that bridged musical aesthetics and democratic theory.
Next, Associate Professor Bruno Godefroy (University of Tours) advanced a bold normative framework that redefined “the people” in temporal rather than essentialist terms. Arguing for a “presentist” conception grounded in the authority of the living generation, Godefroy called for a democratic constitutionalism that embraces periodic renewal over historical entrenchment.
Finally, Professors Karen Horn (University of Erfurt) and Julian F. Müller (University of Graz) co-presented insights from their edited volume Liberal Responses to Populism. While Professor Horn charted the liberal tradition’s internal reckoning with populism, Professor Müller offered a theoretically rigorous diagnosis of populism’s epistemic incompatibility with liberal democracy—underscoring its rejection of pluralism, compromise, and fallibility.
In sum, Roundtable II embodied the interdisciplinary ethos of the ECPS Conference. Under Dr. Tucker’s guidance, the panel created a dynamic intellectual space in which normative theory, conceptual critique, and institutional reflection could intersect to reassess one of the most contested categories in contemporary politics: the people.
Naomi Waltham-Smith: Listening to ‘the People’: Impossible Concepts in Political Philosophy
At Roundtable 2 of the ECPS Conference 2025, Professor Naomi Waltham-Smith (University of Oxford) offered a deeply reflective and conceptually bold presentation exploring the political and philosophical significance of the often-invoked terms “listening” and “the people.”
In a rigorously reflective and conceptually adventurous presentation delivered during Roundtable 2 of the ECPS Conference 2025, Professor Naomi Waltham-Smith (Music Faculty, University of Oxford) interrogated the political and philosophical stakes of two deceptively ordinary yet persistently invoked terms in contemporary public life: listening and the people. Speaking with evident intellectual clarity, Professor Waltham-Smith situated her remarks within her ongoing project exploring the philosophy of listening—an inquiry that traverses music, political thought, and rhetorical analysis.
Her central argument unfolded around the notion that both “listening” and “the people” are impossible concepts: the former is conceptually vague yet rhetorically ubiquitous, while the latter is theoretically contested and politically volatile. Drawing on a wide-ranging archive of political speech—from Margaret Thatcher’s leadership bid to Mike Huckabee’s Trumpist populism— Professor Waltham-Smith demonstrated how politicians frequently promise to “listen to the people” as a performative gesture, often substituting this phrase for concrete political accountability. Citing examples from both sides of the Atlantic, she showed how this rhetorical move appears across ideological lines, from Thatcher and Tony Blair to contemporary figures like Zoran Mamdani and Lord Ashdown.
Professor Waltham-Smith argued that listening, despite its popular currency, is notably absent from the lexicon of political philosophy. Unlike concepts such as democracy, equality, or sovereignty, listening rarely appears in political theory’s formal vocabulary. Yet, paradoxically, it functions as a universalizing metaphor in democratic discourse—an elastic term used to build consensus, gloss over division, and offer reassurance without structural change. It carries an emotional and ethical charge that often masks its conceptual vagueness, which she characterized as a kind of “polysemy without politics.” In this way, listening becomes an ideologically neutral placeholder, performatively invoked but seldom critically examined.
In contrast, the people is a thoroughly theorized but equally problematic concept—particularly in the tradition of Carl Schmitt, who identifies political concepts as “contested” in both subject and usage. Professor Waltham-Smith emphasized that “the people” is often wielded to draw friend/enemy distinctions, collapsing plural constituencies into singular identities for the sake of rhetorical force. Here, the concept becomes both powerful and exclusionary, prone to being mobilized against its own pluralistic potential.
To further illustrate the “impossibility” of listening as a political concept, Professor Waltham-Smith offered a theoretical taxonomy of current political analyses that presuppose a crisis of listening—even if they do not name it as such. She identified three dominant frameworks: first, the cultural backlash thesis, which views the rise of right-wing populism as a reaction to liberal, post-materialist value shifts that ignored traditionalist constituencies; second, a political-economic critique that sees party de-alignment and neoliberal technocracy as failures to respond to the socio-economic demands of core electorates; and third, a structural critique of neoliberal governance as inherently anti-democratic, intentionally limiting popular voice through selective responsiveness and institutional silencing.
Each of these frameworks, she argued, can be interpreted as responding to a deficit of listening—whether understood as empathy, responsiveness, or structural audibility. Yet, listening, in these contexts, remains undertheorized. Its presence is symptomatic of a deeper malaise in democratic representation, but it is rarely elevated to the level of philosophical scrutiny. Professor Waltham-Smith thus proposed that we must begin treating listening as a political concept in its own right, not merely as an affective or rhetorical gesture.
Her intervention was also historical. Tracing the problem of listening back to classical contract theorists like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, she explored how each understood the sovereign’s relationship to popular voice. While Hobbes dismissed the need for further listening once authorization had been granted, Locke envisioned more reciprocal dynamics, and Rousseau—most intriguingly—was skeptical of deliberation as a means of producing the general will, fearing it would always be skewed by inequalities in property and voice. Professor Waltham-Smith extended Rousseau’s insight by proposing that listening might serve as a metaphor for justice—not in the abstract legal sense, but in the sense of redistributing audibility across social and political domains.
This concept of “audibility justice” emerges as a potential way to reimagine universalism not as the flattening of difference, but as a careful and contested project of equalizing the conditions for being heard. In this framing, listening is not about passive receptivity or liberal tolerance, but about transforming the structural conditions under which political voice can be articulated, recognized, and responded to.
By the close of her talk, Professor Waltham-Smith had not only traced the genealogies of listening and “the people” through theory and praxis but had also made a compelling case for why political philosophy must take the act—and impossibility—of listening seriously. Her remarks challenged participants to rethink foundational assumptions in democratic theory, opening up a rich terrain for interdisciplinary investigation. In doing so, she embodied the ECPS Conference 2025’s core ambition: to interrogate the boundaries of populism and democracy through fresh conceptual lenses that resist disciplinary silos and easy consensus.
Bruno Godefroy: The Living Generation – A Presentist Conception of the People
During Roundtable 2 of the ECPS Conference 2025, Associate Professor Bruno Godefroy (University of Tours) presented a stimulating talk on “The Living Generation – A Presentist Conception of the People,” offering fresh insights into legal and philosophical understandings of political community.
At Roundtable 2 of the ECPS Conference 2025, Bruno Godefroy, Associate Professor in Law and German at the University of Tours, delivered a thought-provoking presentation titled “The Living Generation – A Presentist Conception of the People.” His intervention advanced a bold normative argument and conceptual reorientation, challenging dominant paradigms in constitutional theory and democratic legitimacy by reframing “the people” as a temporally limited collective: the living generation.
Professor Godefroy’s presentation began with a diagnosis of contemporary democratic malaise. Populism, he argued, does not arise ex nihilo but emerges in response to a persistent and structural crisis of representative democracy. This crisis is visible in phenomena such as the erosion of trust in political institutions, declining party memberships, the inability of democratic regimes to adapt to challenges like climate change, and the growing gap between citizens and elites. Central to this crisis is what Professor Godefroy termed “the paradox of constitutionalism”: while modern constitutional regimes claim legitimacy from the people’s sovereign will, they simultaneously entrench legal and institutional structures designed to resist further exercises of constituent power. In this view, the sovereign people are permitted to speak only once—during the founding moment—and are thereafter placed in constitutional “coma,” unable to reassert their will without triggering accusations of destabilization.
Professor Godefroy’s core concern was to evaluate the different responses to this paradox, particularly in relation to populist constitutionalism. Populists, he observed, often call for the reactivation of constituent power to amend constitutions in the name of reclaiming popular sovereignty. However, while these appeals can initially appear democratic, they frequently result in long-term democratic erosion. Citing the 2007 Venezuelan reforms and the 2012 Hungarian constitution, Professor Godefroy warned that populist-driven constitutional change often concentrates power and undermines institutional checks.
In the face of this dilemma, political theorists tend to fall into two camps. The first adopts a position of constitutional entrenchment, advocating resistance to constitutional change by invoking a transgenerational understanding of “the people”—one that transcends any given generation and anchors sovereignty in an abstract, collective identity. This conception protects institutions from volatile shifts but sidelines the living citizenry’s role in shaping their legal and political order.
The second approach, aligned with democratic constitutionalism, recognizes the partial validity of populist critiques and seeks to deepen democratic participation through controlled, incremental constitutional innovation. However, this perspective lacks a robust alternative conception of “the people.” Professor Godefroy’s intervention aims to fill this conceptual gap by articulating what he called a presentist or living generation conception of the people.
Drawing inspiration from Jefferson, Paine, and Condorcet, Professor Godefroy proposed that the people should be understood not as a transhistorical entity binding the dead, living, and unborn—as Edmund Burke famously claimed—but as the concrete collective of those currently alive. This reorientation reframes political legitimacy around the idea that constitutions and institutions derive authority from the ongoing, renewed consent of the living generation.
To clarify the stakes of this proposal, Professor Godefroy identified two central challenges to any theory of “the people”: the identity problem and the time problem. The identity problem asks how a coherent collective identity of “the people” can be grounded without appealing to fixed traits like ethnicity or culture. Traditional answers often rely on pre-political or essentialist notions, as found in Carl Schmitt’s existential homogeneity or in liberal theorist Alessandro Ferrara’s distinction between ethnos and demos. However, these models risk exclusionary consequences, as evidenced in the 1993 ruling by the German Constitutional Court on the Maastricht Treaty, which declared that democracy was only viable within the homogenous confines of the nation-state.
Professor Godefroy’s presentist alternative circumvents this by anchoring identity not in substance but in temporality and coexistence. The people, he argued, should be seen as a thin, temporally limited collective bound by shared existence rather than immutable characteristics. This view allows for the existence of collective identity without invoking dangerous essentialisms, while retaining the possibility of democratic self-constitution.
The second challenge—the time problem—asks whether the people’s identity and sovereignty are permanent or contingent. The transgenerational conception treats the people as an eternal subject, thereby curbing its capacity to act in time. In contrast, the presentist model insists on sovereignty as inherently temporal: the authority to constitute or reconstitute institutions belongs to the people insofar as they are alive and coexisting. Rather than viewing change as dangerous rupture, Professor Godefroy suggested that periodic constitutional renewal could be a safeguard of democracy, not its threat.
Critically, Professor Godefroy addressed common criticisms of this view. Detractors argue that a temporally limited conception of the people threatens stability and weakens institutional legitimacy. But Professor Godefroy contended that this critique overlooks the democratic necessity of periodic re-legitimation. Without such renewal, constitutions risk becoming vehicles of inert tradition rather than expressions of popular will.
In the final portion of his presentation, Professor Godefroy outlined institutional implications of his theory. He proposed three mechanisms for operationalizing the presentist conception of the people. First, periodic constitutional conventions—as endorsed by Jefferson and Condorcet—could be institutionalized every 20 years, enabling living generations to reaffirm or revise foundational texts. Second, mandatory constitutional referendums, still found in several US states, could require electorates to decide periodically whether to initiate constitutional reform. Third, sunset clauses—or temporary constitutional provisions—could prevent the ossification of laws and allow for regular reconsideration of foundational norms. He pointed to the German Basic Law as a historical example that, while never formally sunsetted, was initially conceived as provisional.
By the end of his presentation, Professor Godefroy had not only challenged dominant constitutional paradigms but had articulated an ambitious, normatively rich, and practically oriented alternative. His conception of the people as the living generation foregrounds coexistence, consent, and temporal finitude as central to democratic legitimacy. In so doing, he offered a compelling framework that reclaims constituent power from both populist excess and technocratic inertia, offering a democratic vision rooted in temporal humility and political responsibility.
Professor Godefroy’s intervention resonated powerfully with the interdisciplinary goals of the ECPS Conference, drawing together legal theory, political philosophy, and democratic practice. His presentist lens invited scholars to rethink how we define “the people,” challenging them to take seriously the sovereignty of the living—not as an abstract slogan but as a constitutional imperative.
Karen Horn: Liberal Responses to Populism
At Roundtable 2 of the ECPS Conference 2025 at the University of Oxford, Professor Karen Horn (University of Erfurt) offered a nuanced and analytically grounded presentation on “Liberal Responses to Populism,” examining how liberal thought engages with contemporary populist challenges.
At Roundtable 2 of the ECPS Conference 2025 at the University of Oxford, Professor Karen Horn (University of Erfurt) delivered a reflective and analytically rich presentation titled “Liberal Responses to Populism.” Speaking from a third-eye vantage rooted in both historical scholarship and contemporary liberal thought, Professor Horn used the occasion to introduce an important recent anthology she co-edited, also titled Liberal Responses to Populism. The volume, a product of an academic workshop hosted by the interdisciplinary New Ideas in Economic Thought (NEWS) network, was both the backdrop and the scaffolding of her address.
Professor Horn began by situating the work within the broader intellectual infrastructure of NEWS—an international, interdisciplinary network of approximately 200 scholars from philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, and history. Established in Germany in 2015 and increasingly global in scope, NEWS is explicitly non-partisan and non-sectarian, aiming not to advocate specific political agendas but to foster rigorous inquiry across ideological lines. It is in this space of pluralistic yet rigorous liberal inquiry that the anthology was conceived.
The volume, Professor Horn explained, emerges from a three-part framing of liberalism’s contemporary challenges. The first question: Does classical liberalism need to rethink its relationship with democracy? This question recognizes the historical ambivalence within liberal thought toward majority rule and popular sovereignty, sometimes prioritizing the rule of law and institutional constraint over participatory processes. The second question: Can liberalism be reformulated—conceptually or institutionally—in ways that withstand the populist challenge? And third: How do digital transformations impact liberal democratic governance, especially as technologies potentially empower both authoritarian control and radical democratization?
Professor Horn underscored that populism’s threat is not merely rhetorical but structural. Drawing from thinkers like Jan-Werner Müller, she affirmed that democracy requires pluralism, and that liberalism—rooted in freedom, equality, and diversity—cannot coexist comfortably with populist projects that seek homogeneity, personalization of power, and political antagonism. Populism, in its more pernicious forms, threatens to reconfigure society into clientelist regimes, eroding liberal democratic norms from within. Thus, the liberal challenge is to defend democratic institutions without falling into illiberal strategies in the process.
Central to Professor Horn’s argument was a nuanced critique of liberalism itself. While rejecting populist anti-liberalism, she emphasized the need for internal reform and self-critique. Classical liberalism, she argued, must confront its blind spots—especially its often reductive economic focus and historical indifference to the psychological and sociocultural dimensions of political life. This detachment, she suggested, has weakened liberalism’s capacity to offer compelling responses to the grievances that fuel populist support.
Professor Horn’s presentation moved beyond abstract critique to outline the structure and insights of the Liberal Responses to Populism volume. Divided into four thematic parts, the book begins with conceptual analyses of populism, followed by empirical discussions of political responses, normative proposals for liberal reform, and engagements with influential thinkers such as Chantal Mouffe, Michael Sandel, and Isaiah Berlin. Several essays within the volume stood out in Horn’s summary. Max Friebe’s piece, for instance, explores how populist appeals often express a yearning for representation and recognition—an insight echoed by Bruno Godefroy’s earlier remarks on constituent power. Another contribution by Aristotle Tziampiris explores how populism corrodes liberal democracy by morphing it into a clientelist system—a gateway to authoritarianism that is difficult to reverse.
Professor Horn also highlighted contributions that explore more constructive liberal strategies. Essays examining the role of civic virtues, the revival of decentralized governance (especially in areas like migration), and institutional pluralism offer pathways for reform that remain faithful to liberal principles while addressing populism’s roots. One particularly timely intervention considers the risks and opportunities presented by blockchain technologies—an emblem of digital transformation that intersects with debates about decentralization, transparency, and institutional trust.
Throughout her presentation, Professor Horn stressed the breadth and openness of liberalism as a tradition. Rejecting narrow or doctrinaire definitions, she insisted that liberalism encompasses a wide spectrum—from ordoliberals to social liberals—and can draw from both center-right and center-left sensibilities. The task, then, is not to ossify liberal orthodoxy, but to renovate it, ensuring that it remains responsive to the challenges of the 21st century while preserving its core commitment to individual dignity, institutional pluralism, and democratic deliberation.
Professor Horn closed by inviting further engagement with the volume, emphasizing that it was conceived not as a definitive answer, but as a springboard for debate and reflection. Her presentation served as both an introduction to a collective scholarly effort and a call to action for liberals confronting a volatile political landscape: to reaffirm their principles, to rethink their frameworks, and to resist the temptation to sacrifice liberal values in the name of expediency.
In sum, Professor Horn’s intervention offered a deeply considered, self-reflective, and interdisciplinary approach to one of the central political questions of our time. Rather than retreating into dogma or despair, she advocated for an intellectually honest and reform-oriented liberalism—one that confronts populism not with authoritarian mimicry, but with renewed democratic conviction.
Julian F. Müller: Liberal Responses to Populism
During Roundtable 2 at the ECPS Conference 2025, Professor Julian F. Müller (University of Graz) contributed a thought-provoking philosophical perspective to the discussion.
At the ECPS Conference 2025, Professor Julian F. Müller (University of Graz) also delivered a compelling philosophical intervention during Roundtable 2. Speaking in continuity with Professor Karen Horn—his co-editor of the newly published volume Liberal Responses to Populism— Professor Müller shifted the discussion from liberal reform strategies to a more fundamental inquiry into the epistemic foundations of populism itself.
Professor Müller began by contextualizing his remarks within the broader editorial project. While the book includes their joint exploration of “crypto-democracy”—a technologically enabled model for liberal-democratic reform—his Oxford presentation focused instead on his individual theoretical work, published recently in Episteme. His goal was to offer a precise and conceptually robust account of populism, one capable of distinguishing it from adjacent but distinct political positions such as conservatism.
From the outset, Professor Müller insisted that “getting populism right” is not a mere academic exercise but an urgent political necessity. Misidentifying populism, he argued, leads to diagnostic errors, ineffective remedies, and a dangerous flattening of ideological distinctions. He illustrated this point through a stark comparison: the respectful political disagreements voiced by Senator John McCain in contrast to Donald Trump’s conspiratorial, delegitimizing rhetoric about Barack Obama. Without conceptual clarity, Professor Müller warned, we risk conflating principled conservatism with demagogic populism.
Turning to existing theories, Professor Müller systematically critiqued two influential models. The first is Ernesto Laclau’s discourse-based theory, which defines populism as a rhetorical strategy of constructing “the people” against “the elite,” unified around empty signifiers like “America First.” For Professor Müller, this theory’s flaw lies in its overreach: if all politics is populist in Laclau’s framework, the term loses discriminatory power. It becomes impossible to distinguish between democratic mobilization and illiberal manipulation.
The second model Professor Müller addressed was Cas Mudde’s “thin-centred ideology” approach, which posits that populism hinges on a moral dualism between a pure people and a corrupt elite. While more analytically discrete than Laclau, Mudde’s model, Professor Müller argued, fails to explain a critical aspect of populist behavior: hostility toward democratic institutions. Even if citizens share moral values, they still require institutional mediation to resolve instrumental disagreements—such as how best to achieve economic growth or safeguard national security. Mudde’s model, Professor Müller claimed, does not account for this institutional deficit in populist politics.
In response to these theoretical shortcomings, Professor Müller presented the core of his own contribution: a deductive theory of populism grounded in four axioms. While he did not enumerate each axiom in full during the brief presentation, he emphasized that these foundational premises allow us to derive a wide range of empirical patterns characteristic of populist behavior. Among these patterns are the populists’ rejection of compromise and pluralism, their deep distrust of institutions and intellectual elites, their preference for direct democracy and charismatic leadership, and their habitual invocation of conspiracy theories and “fake news.”
The distinctive contribution of Professor Müller’s theory lies in its epistemic framing. Populism, he contended, is not merely a political style or strategy—it is an epistemological stance fundamentally incompatible with the norms of liberal democracy. Liberal democratic theory, from John Stuart Mill to Karl Popper and contemporary deliberative democrats, rests on the assumption that human judgment is fallible, that truth is contestable, and that disagreement is a normal outcome of free public reasoning. In contrast, populists believe truth is self-evident and univocal—already known by “the people”—and only obstructed by corrupt elites, bureaucrats, or intellectuals. This epistemic certainty, Professor Müller warned, dissolves the very foundation of democratic legitimacy, which is predicated on negotiation, compromise, and the open-ended search for shared understanding.
Professor Müller’s ultimate diagnosis is stark but illuminating: populism is not just a threat to liberal democracy because of its procedural violations or authoritarian impulses; it is a threat because it rejects the epistemic humility upon which democratic discourse depends. By treating disagreement as betrayal and dissent as treason, populism delegitimizes pluralism at its root.
In conclusion, Professor Müller’s remarks provided an incisive complement to the themes raised by Professor Horn. While Professor Horn explored institutional and ideological reforms within the liberal tradition, Professor Müller pushed the conversation deeper—toward the cognitive and epistemic conditions that sustain democratic life. His presentation underscored the importance of epistemology in political theory and positioned the fight against populism not only as a battle over institutions or rhetoric, but as a defense of intellectual openness, fallibilism, and deliberative engagement. In this respect, Liberal Responses to Populism emerges not just as an edited volume, but as a timely philosophical intervention in the democratic crises of our time.
Conclusion
Roundtable II of the ECPS Conference 2025—“‘The People’ in and against Liberal and Democratic Thought”—offered a powerful testament to the intellectual and normative complexities involved in defining “the people” within democratic theory, especially in an era marked by populist turbulence. With interventions traversing political epistemology, constitutional theory, liberal reform, and philosophical inquiry into affect and rhetoric, the session advanced the conference’s overarching ambition to unsettle and reconceptualize foundational democratic categories.
Each speaker brought distinct disciplinary perspectives to bear, yet converged on a shared insight: that “the people” is not a static referent but a contested and often dangerous construct, simultaneously invoked to legitimize political authority and obscure pluralism. Professor Naomi Waltham-Smith’s notion of listening as an “impossible concept” foregrounded the performative and often depoliticizing invocation of the people in democratic discourse—unmasking the rhetorical mechanisms through which representation is claimed but not enacted. Her call for an “audibility justice” expands the terrain of democratic theory to include sensory and affective registers, reminding us that political voice is not only about speech but about being heard in structurally just ways.
Professor Bruno Godefroy’s proposal for a presentist conception of the people advanced this interrogation into constitutional temporality, arguing that democratic legitimacy must stem from the authority of the living generation. His emphasis on periodic constitutional renewal as a democratic safeguard challenges both populist nostalgia and liberal entrenchment, offering a framework that is as normatively robust as it is institutionally concrete.
Meanwhile, Professor Karen Horn and Professor Julian F. Müller turned the lens inward on liberalism itself. While Professor Horn called for an adaptive, self-critical liberalism that resists both dogmatism and despair, Professor Müller’s epistemological critique of populism underscored how liberal democracy depends not just on institutions, but on the shared acceptance of fallibility and contestation as democratic virtues. Populism’s threat, they argued, is not merely institutional but epistemic.
Together, these contributions demonstrated that the concept of “the people” is not merely a tool of populist mobilization but a central site of philosophical and political contestation. Roundtable II thus reaffirmed the value of interdisciplinary dialogue in the struggle to preserve—and reimagine—democracy in the face of populist encroachment.
Note: To experience the panel’s dynamic and thought-provoking Q&A session, we encourage you to watch the full video recording above.
Please cite as: ECPS Staff. (2025). “ECPS Conference 2025 / Panel 4 — Politics of Belonging: Voices and Silencing.” European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). July 8, 2025. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00106
Panel IV of the ECPS Conference 2025, held at St Cross College, Oxford University (July 1–3), explored the theme “Politics of Belonging: Voices and Silencing.” Chaired by Dr. Azize Sargın (ECPS), the panel investigated how belonging is constructed and contested through populist discourse and historical memory. Dr. Maarja Merivoo-Parro (University of Jyväskylä) examined olfactory memory and grassroots aid in Estonia’s democratic awakening. Maria Jerzyk (Masaryk University) analyzed how the figure of the child is symbolically instrumentalized in Polish populism, revealing deep continuities with communist-era narratives. Together, the papers offered rich insights into how identity, exclusion, and affect shape democratic participation in post-authoritarian and populist contexts.
Reported by ECPS Staff
Panel IV of the ECPS Conference 2025, titled Politics of Belonging: Voices and Silencing, was held on the morning of July 2 at St Cross College, University of Oxford. As part of the broader conference theme—‘We, the People’ and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches—this panel delved into how democratic belonging is shaped, contested, and narrated within and beyond populist frameworks.
Chaired by Dr. Azize Sargın (PhD), Director of External Relations at the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), the session opened with a theoretically grounded overview of the politics of belonging. Dr. Sargın emphasized that in an age of resurgent populism, belonging is no longer a neutral or merely affective category but a highly politicized mechanism of inclusion and exclusion. Populist actors increasingly construct “the people” by drawing sharp lines between insiders and outsiders, often invoking exclusionary logics tied to ethnicity, morality, or national destiny. Drawing on insights from political theory and migration studies, she outlined two key dimensions of belonging: “to whom one belongs” (social group affiliation) and “where one belongs” (spatial-territorial identity), both of which play critical roles in populist and post-authoritarian contexts.
The panel featured two intellectually rich and methodologically distinct papers. Dr. Maarja Merivoo-Parro (Marie Curie Fellow, University of Jyväskylä) explored the role of olfactory memory in the democratization of Estonia, arguing that cross-border sensory exchanges—especially smells tied to Finnish aid—played a profound role in shaping political consciousness and belonging during the late Soviet period. Maria Jerzyk (Masaryk University, Czechia) examined how children are symbolically deployed in contemporary Polish populist narratives, tracing striking continuities with communist-era state propaganda. She showed how the child functions as both a vessel of national purity and a screen for projecting anxieties over societal change.
Together, these contributions offered a powerful demonstration of how the politics of belonging operate through both the body and the imagination—an approach that resonated strongly with the interdisciplinary aims of the ECPS Conference.
Opening Remarks by Dr. Azize Sargın
Dr. Azize Sargın, Director of External Relations at the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), opened the first panel of the second day of ECPS Conference at the University of Oxford with a concise yet conceptually rich introduction to the session’s theme: The Politics of Belonging, Voices, and Silencing. Her remarks served to establish a theoretical and thematic framework, situating the panel within broader academic debates on identity, exclusion, and populism.
Dr. Sargın emphasized that questions of belonging have become increasingly politicized in recent years, particularly under the influence of populist movements that define “the people” through narrow, exclusionary frameworks. Populist rhetoric, she noted, often draws stark lines between insiders and outsiders, thus marginalizing those deemed threats to the imagined national community. This binary logic fundamentally reshapes notions of identity, social boundaries, and democratic participation.
Drawing on scholarship in the field, she distinguished between two core dimensions of belonging: to whom one belongs (social group belonging) and where one belongs (spatial or territorial belonging). She argued that both questions are central to the study of populism—domestically, through the politics of exclusion within state borders, and transnationally, in the experiences of immigrants and diasporas navigating their place within multiple communities.
Importantly, Dr. Sargın differentiated between the personal, affective experience of belonging and the politics of belonging—the latter being a deliberate political project aimed at constructing collective identities. Concluding, she underscored the temporal and contested nature of belonging, and the panel’s aim to explore these dynamics in historical and interdisciplinary perspective.
Maarja Merivoo-Parro: The Scents of Belonging: Olfactory Narratives and the Dynamics of Democratization
Chaired by Dr. Azize Sargın, this panel explored the sensory and symbolic dimensions of belonging and exclusion in populist contexts, with Maarja Merivoo-Parro examining olfactory narratives and democratization, and Maria Jerzyk analyzing the role of children in post-communist populist discourse in Poland.
In her richly evocative and methodologically innovative presentation, titled “The Scents of Belonging: Olfactory Narratives and the Dynamics of Democratization,” Dr. Maarja Merivoo-Parro (Marie Curie Fellow, University of Jyväskylä) offered a compelling interdisciplinary account of how smell shaped and symbolized the democratization process in late Soviet-era and post-Soviet Estonia. Delivered during Panel 4 of the ECPS Conference 2025 at Oxford University, her paper bridged political history, cultural memory, and sensory studies to examine how grassroots aid from Finnish citizens not only supported material survival but also catalyzed a sensory awakening to democratic possibility.
Merivoo-Parro began by setting the geopolitical stage: the late 1980s economic collapse in Soviet-occupied Estonia, and the contrasting openness of nearby Finland. Despite Finland’s cautious official stance due to “Finlandization”—a Cold War policy of alignment to Soviet interests—ordinary Finnish citizens took unprecedented grassroots action. They formed personal networks with Estonians, delivering tailor-made humanitarian relief (food, medicine, clothes, toys) in an improvised diplomacy of the people. These exchanges were not only materially transformative but also emotionally intimate and culturally revealing.
What made this aid unique, argued Dr. Merivoo-Parro, was its sensory intensity—especially its olfactory dimension. Western hygiene products, foods, and technologies carried unfamiliar yet alluring smells that stood in stark contrast to the scarcity and uniformity of Soviet life. Smell, she explained, is neurologically encoded with emotion and memory, and these olfactory stimuli became vessels of hope, aspiration, and belonging. Finnish deodorant, chocolate, and even the lingering scent of well-laundered clothes subtly communicated democratic abundance, cultivating what she called a “smell of democracy.”
She illustrated this dynamic through oral history, children’s correspondence, and anecdotal recollections—such as a girl’s envy at her Finnish pen-pal’s casual mention of ice cream. These accounts revealed the disjuncture between two neighboring worlds and illustrated how material exchanges carried symbolic, even ideological weight.
Critically, Dr. Merivoo-Parro suggested that this early, tangible exposure to democratic life inoculated Estonia against the pathologies of many post-Soviet transitions. Unlike other former Soviet republics that experienced high levels of corruption and authoritarian backsliding, Estonia pursued a robust democratic trajectory. Dr. Merivoo-Parro provocatively likened this process to Pavlovian conditioning: Estonians became conditioned to associate democracy with reliability, dignity, and material abundance—not through abstract theory but through smell, taste, and lived experience. This sensory grounding helped them “hit the ground running” in 1991, fostering low corruption, high civic trust, and strong digital and educational institutions.
In closing, she proposed that this case demonstrates the need to expand democratic theory beyond legal and institutional frameworks to include sensory, affective, and cultural registers. Belonging, she argued, is not only a political status but also a sensory experience—one capable of fostering or foreclosing democratic identification. Her intervention thus resonated deeply with the conference’s interdisciplinary mission and underscored the value of unexpected analytical lenses in studying democratization.
Dr. Merivoo-Parro’s talk stands as a powerful reminder that democracy is not only read in constitutions or heard in speeches—but smelled, touched, and tasted in daily life.
Maria Jerzyk: Silent Symbols, Loud Legacies — The Child in Populist Narratives of Post-Communist Poland
In her thoughtful and innovative presentation, Maria Jerzyk (graduate student, Masaryk University, Czechia) offered a compelling interdisciplinary analysis of how children function as symbolic instruments within populist political discourse in post-communist Poland. Her paper, titled “Silent Symbols, Loud Legacies: The Child in Populist Narratives of Post-Communist Poland,” brought to light the ideological potency of the child figure—often marginalized in both academic and policy debates—while interrogating its historical continuity and symbolic plasticity from communist to contemporary populist regimes.
Jerzyk opened by observing a common omission in populism studies: while elites, migrants, and minority groups frequently occupy the spotlight as the primary antagonists or protagonists in populist narratives, the child—less visible, less vocal—is often overlooked. Yet, she contended, the symbolic power attached to children is profound. In Poland, particularly under the rule of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, children have been recast as vessels of moral authority, purity, and national continuity. This symbolic construction is neither neutral nor inclusive. It privileges the “ideal child”—patriotic, Catholic, obedient, and heterosexual—while marginalizing children who do not conform, including those who are queer, politically engaged, or critical of nationalist narratives.
To uncover the mechanics of this symbolic deployment, Jerzyk drew from three intersecting disciplines: populism studies, childhood studies, and the sociology of memory. This triangulated framework enabled her to situate children not merely as political recipients or rhetorical props, but as figures embedded in a contested moral economy shaped by post-communist legacies. Her central questions—why exclusionary populist narratives around children still resonate in Poland, and how these narratives adapt motifs from the communist past—guided a deeply contextual and historically grounded investigation.
One of Jerzyk’s central arguments was that populist discourses, like their communist predecessors, rely on a binary construction of the child: one to be celebrated and one to be feared. Under communism, the ideal child was disciplined, collectivist, and loyal to the socialist cause; deviant children were framed as dangerous, Westernized, and individualistic. In the contemporary populist regime, the ideological content has shifted from socialism to nationalism and traditionalism, yet the structural logic remains intact. The ideal child today symbolizes moral rectitude and cultural belonging, while those who diverge—especially children of migrants or LGBTQ+ youth—are seen as ideological threats, vulnerable to foreign influence and moral decay.
Jerzyk offered a particularly striking illustration of how these dynamics are operationalized through the metaphor of the school. In both communist and populist Poland, schools are treated not only as educational institutions but also as ideological battlegrounds where future citizens are shaped. She referenced archival propaganda films from the 1960s in which children, during summer holidays, were depicted building schools with their own hands—a powerful image of self-disciplining youth serving the state. This motif reappears in contemporary populist discourses where state officials position schools as protective spaces for instilling “proper” values and shielding children from ideological contamination, whether from liberal elites, Western media, or LGBTQ+ advocates.
Methodologically, Jerzyk combined discourse analysis of recent political speeches by Law and Justice (PiS) officials with a close reading of archival media from the communist period. This diachronic approach enabled her to identify what she termed “symbolic recycling,” whereby contemporary populists inherit and reframe motifs from the past to legitimize present anxieties. She provided translated excerpts from speeches and slogans to reveal how moral panics are manufactured and how boundaries are drawn between “our children” and “their children”—a division that mirrors broader populist strategies of inclusion and exclusion.
Throughout her analysis, Jerzyk emphasized that children, though prominently featured in populist discourse, are rarely treated as autonomous political subjects. Drawing on insights from childhood studies, she reminded the audience that children are not merely “citizens in the making,” but existing participants in the political community—albeit frequently denied voice, agency, and representation. This silencing, she argued, is symptomatic of a broader authoritarian dynamic, wherein the child becomes a screen upon which adult anxieties, traumas, and aspirations are projected.
Jerzyk’s intervention was also attentive to the role of historical trauma and memory. She introduced the concept of “post-civic trauma”—a form of collective suffering linked to the legacy of communism—which remains latent in many post-communist societies. In Poland, she argued, this trauma is not only remembered but actively instrumentalized by populist leaders who draw upon Cold War tropes of cultural invasion, Western decadence, and moral crisis to justify repressive policies in education and family life.
She concluded her presentation by reflecting on the structural absence of children’s rights in Poland. Notably, the country lacks an independent ombudsperson for children—a role that is subject to parliamentary appointment and thus highly politicized. This institutional gap, coupled with the widespread belief (echoed in a Polish saying) that “children and fish have no voice,” contributes to a civic environment where children are spoken about but rarely spoken with. This cultural and institutional silencing, Jerzyk suggested, reinforces populist strategies that rely on symbolic purity while stifling actual pluralism.
Jerzyk’s presentation ultimately served as both scholarly analysis and normative appeal. She urged the audience to consider how the child—seemingly apolitical—serves as a powerful vehicle for moral panic, exclusionary nationalism, and cultural nostalgia. Populism, she argued, claims to break with the past, yet it inherits one of the most potent symbols of state ideology: the child. In both past and present, the child remains a “silent symbol,” but the ideological legacies it carries speak volumes.
Her talk thus made a vital contribution to the interdisciplinary goals of the ECPS conference. It not only expanded the scope of populism studies but also foregrounded the ethical and political urgency of treating children as full participants in the democratic project, rather than as mute emblems of contested futures.
Conclusion
Panel IV of the ECPS Conference 2025—Politics of Belonging: Voices and Silencing—brought into sharp focus the nuanced and often overlooked ways in which symbolic and sensory politics shape collective identities under populist and post-authoritarian regimes. Through the interdisciplinary lenses of cultural memory, childhood studies, and affect theory, the panel illuminated how belonging is constructed not only through institutional frameworks, but also through deeply embodied and historically situated experiences.
Both Dr. Maarja Merivoo-Parro and Maria Jerzyk underscored the persistence of ideological residues from past regimes, highlighting how present populist actors selectively inherit and retool historical narratives to legitimize exclusionary claims. Their work advanced the conference’s broader aim—captured in its title ‘We, the People’ and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches—by demonstrating that the politics of inclusion and exclusion unfold not only through speeches and ballots, but through scent, schooling, silence, and symbolic order.
Note: To experience the panel’s dynamic and thought-provoking Q&A session, we encourage you to watch the full video recording above.
