Why did Keir Starmer fail to neutralize Reform UK despite commanding a large parliamentary majority? In this incisive commentary, Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that Reform UK’s greatest achievement was not electoral but discursive. By transforming immigration, sovereignty, national identity, and culture-war politics into the central measures of political authority, Nigel Farage’s party compelled Labour to react on terrain it did not control. Drawing on the scholarship of populism and radical-right agenda-setting, Dr. Dias shows how attempts to accommodate populist themes often strengthen rather than weaken their appeal. The result, he argues, was a politics of defensive adaptation that left Labour trapped between technocratic governance and populist mobilization, ultimately exposing the limits of mainstream anti-populist strategies.
Keir Starmer did not fall simply because he lacked charisma or because Labour mismanaged government. He fell because Britain’s populist right succeeded in turning immigration and culture-war politics into the central test of political authority, and Labour never found a convincing answer. His resignation exposed a deeper crisis: a parliamentary landslide had not become political hegemony, and one of Europe’s oldest democracies was again being reorganized by forces outside the governing party.
The paradox of Starmer’s premiership is therefore not that a cautious leader struggled to inspire, but a government with an overwhelming majority found itself reacting to a party that did not hold power. Reform UK did not need to govern in order to discipline the government. It only needed to define what counted as political reality: borders, sovereignty, national identity, crime, “common sense,” and the betrayal of ordinary people by remote elites.
Reform as the Agenda-setter
There is a long-term debate in academia and the public sphere on how radical-right populist parties influence public debate and mainstream parties’ agendas. This influence is not only electoral. It is also discursive. Populist parties may lose elections, remain outside government, and still force the political system to speak their language (Meguid, 2005; Minkenberg, 2001; Mudde, 2019; Schmidt, 2025; Saldivia Gonzatti & Völker, 2026).
In many circumstances, parties — and especially governments — tend to address topics such as immigration, border control, national identity, and moral panic around Muslim migrants in terms already defined by the populist right (Poynting & Morgan, 2016; Mudde, 2019). This is one of the most important mechanisms of radical-right power: it wins when its opponents accept that its issues are the real issues, and that its vocabulary is the vocabulary of political seriousness.
As Cas Mudde argues, mainstream parties cannot address the radical-right agenda in its original terms. They must face the debate, the problems and public perceptions, but they must do so in democratic and moderate terms. Otherwise, they become contaminated by radical solutions or are perceived as opportunistic copies (Mudde, 2007, 2019).
This was Starmer’s first failure: the temptation to neutralize Reform UK by hardening Labour’s language on immigration and cultural values. The second failure was to do so while failing to recover public confidence, show authority, and offer ideological clarity.
Reform UK did not need to govern to impose its agenda. It shifted the debate to borders, sovereignty, national identity, crime, elites, and “common sense.” It made immigration not just one policy area among others, but the central test of whether the state still controlled the country.
That was the asymmetry. Farage could radicalize. Starmer had to calibrate. Reform could accuse. Labour had to administer. Reform could speak in symbols. Labour answered with management. And in a political moment dominated by anxiety, management was not enough.
Immigration as Reform UK’s Issue Ownership
Reform UK succeeded because it turned immigration into a symbol of state failure. It was no longer only about numbers, visas, asylum backlogs, or labor-market needs. It became a story about control, sovereignty and betrayal.This is why the issue was so powerful. Immigration became a metonymy for everything that seemed broken in Britain: pressure on housing, waiting lists, low wages, crime, cultural change, weak borders, and distant elites. The point was not simply that immigration was high. The point was that immigration could be used to explain almost every other failure.
For Reform UK, immigration was evidence that the state protected others before its own citizens. This is a classic populist grammar. The “people” are presented as abandoned; migrants become the visible beneficiaries of elite betrayal; and mainstream parties are accused of refusing to say what everyone allegedly knows (Mudde, 2007; Poynting & Morgan, 2016; Norris & Inglehart, 2019).
The concept of issue ownership helps explain why this was so damaging for Labour. Once Reform UK became the party most strongly associated with immigration control, any Labour attempt to sound tougher risked confirming Reform’s authority over the issue. Mainstream parties can change their position, but they do not automatically change who voters trust on the issue itself (Meguid, 2005; Bale et al., 2010; Abou-Chadi & Krause, 2020).
Starmer never found a convincing answer to this framing. When he hardened the discourse, he validated Reform’s premise that immigration was the central problem. When he moderated, he looked evasive or weak. He was trapped between moral discomfort and electoral fear.
Culture Wars as a Substitute for an Economic Programme
Reform UK did not need to present a detailed economic programme if it could keep politics focused on immigration, “woke politics,” crime, free speech, gender, patriotism, and resentment against Westminster. These themes worked because they were not just policy topics. They were identity markers.
The advantage of culture-war politics is that it simplifies the political field. It divides the country between those who allegedly see reality and those who hide behind elite language. It allows Reform UK to present itself as the party of “common sense,” while Labour appears as the party of caution, procedure, and institutional restraint.
This was another Starmer problem. Labour answered with competence, seriousness, and technocracy. Reform answered with conflict, identity, and emotion. Starmer promised delivery. Farage offered recognition. Starmer said the state could be repaired. Reform said the state had been captured.
This dynamic fits the broader cultural-backlash argument: radical-right populism does not grow only from material insecurity, but also from conflicts over identity, status, cultural change, and national belonging (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). This does not mean that Reform had better answers. It means that it had a clearer emotional structure. It knew who was guilty, who had been betrayed, and what had to be restored. Labour had policies, but Reform had a story.
The Mainstream Trap
The central mistake of mainstream parties is to believe that they can borrow the radical right’s themes without strengthening the radical right’s authority. But this rarely works. If a mainstream party copies the populist right, it confirms that the populist right identified the real problem first. If it refuses to engage, it looks detached from public anxiety.
This is the dilemma identified in much of the literature on mainstream responses to the radical right. Social-democratic parties, in particular, face a difficult strategic choice: they can ignore the radical right, confront it, or accommodate parts of its agenda. But accommodation often increases the salience of issues owned by the radical right, especially immigration and national identity (Bale et al., 2010; Akkerman et al., 2016; Meyer & Rosenberger, 2015).
This was Starmer’s dilemma. He could not ignore immigration, because silence would have allowed Reform to monopolize the issue. But he could not simply “out-Farage Farage,” because Reform would always sound more authentic on its own terrain.
The result was a politics of defensive adaptation. Labour tried to look tougher, but not too tough; moderate, but not weak; liberal, but not naïve. That balance may work in government documents. It does not work against a populist party that has reduced politics to betrayal, borders, and national decline.
Reform UK won the agenda because it forced Labour to react. And once Labour was reacting, its majority no longer looked like hegemony. It looked like “administration under pressure.”
Conclusion
Starmer’s fall shows that populist parties can shape politics before they capture power. Reform UK’s success was not only that it grew electorally. Its deeper success was that it made immigration, sovereignty, and culture-war politics the measure of political authority.
The lesson is not that mainstream parties should avoid immigration. That would be politically naïve and democratically dangerous. The lesson is that they must address immigration without accepting the populist frame that turns migrants into the master explanation for national decline.
A stronger Labour response would have linked immigration to state capacity, wages, housing, integration, public services and fairness. It would have spoken about control without cruelty, borders without scapegoating, and national solidarity without ethnic resentment.
Starmer could not outflank Reform UK because the contest was already being fought on Reform’s ground. Farage did not need to prove that he could govern. He only needed to prove that Labour was governing within a debate he had already defined.
References
Abou-Chadi, T., & Krause, W. (2020). “The causal effect of radical right success on mainstream parties’ policy positions: A regression discontinuity approach.” British Journal of Political Science, 50(3), 829–847.
Akkerman, T.; de Lange, S. L. & Rooduijn, M. (Eds.). (2016). Radical right-wing populist parties in Western Europe: Into the mainstream? Routledge.
Bale, T.; Green-Pedersen, C.; Krouwel, A.; Luther, K. R. & Sitter, N. (2010). “If you can’t beat them, join them? Explaining social democratic responses to the challenge from the populist radical right in Western Europe.” Political Studies, 58(3), 410–426.
Meguid, B. M. (2005). “Competition between unequals: The role of mainstream party strategy in niche party success.” American Political Science Review, 99(3), 347–359.
Meyer, S. & Rosenberger, S. (2015). “Just a shadow? The role of radical right parties in the politicization of immigration, 1995–2009.” Politics and Governance, 3(2), 1–17.
Minkenberg, M. (2001). “The radical right in public office: Agenda-setting and policy effects.” West European Politics, 24(4), 1–21.
Morgan, G. (2012). Global Islamophobia: Muslims and moral panic in the West. (S. Poynting, Ed.). Routledge.
Mudde, C. (2007). Populist radical right parties in Europe. Cambridge University Press.
Mudde, C. (2019). The far right today. Polity Press.
Norris, P. & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism. Cambridge University Press.
Saldivia Gonzatti, D. & Völker, T. (2026). “Far-right agenda setting: How the far right influences the political mainstream.” European Journal of Political Research, 65(1), 101–123.
Schmidt, V. A. (2025). “Populist agenda-setting: Shaping the narrative, framing the debate, captivating the ‘people,’ upending the mainstream, capturing power.” Journal of European Public Policy, 32(5), 1073–1096.
As digital platforms increasingly shape how citizens encounter politics, longstanding assumptions about democratic competition are being challenged. In this insightful commentary, Yacine Boubia argues that attention has emerged as a distinct and increasingly decisive political resource, reshaping the foundations of legitimacy, influence, and power in contemporary democracies. Drawing on democratic theory, media studies, and political communication, he traces the historical transformation from an era of informational scarcity to one of informational abundance, where political success depends increasingly on the ability to command visibility. The commentary explores the rise of the influencer politician, the structural relationship between attention and populism, and the democratic consequences of communication systems optimized for engagement rather than deliberation. It offers a timely contribution to debates about democracy, media, and political power in the digital age.
The dominant frameworks for understanding contemporary democratic politics remain, in their essential structure, remarkably stable. Elections are interpreted as contests between competing ideological visions. Political success is attributed to organizational strength, policy credibility, or the capacity to mobilize voters around shared material and cultural concerns. Institutions are evaluated according to their capacity to translate popular preferences into governing outcomes. These frameworks capture real and important dimensions of political life, and the scholarship they have generated—from electoral sociology to institutional analysis to the study of political communication—constitutes an indispensable foundation for understanding how democracies function.
Yet they have proven increasingly insufficient for explaining a transformation that has reshaped the terms of democratic competition over the past two decades: the emergence of attention as an autonomous political resource, distinct from votes, organizational capacity, or policy credibility, and increasingly determinative of political influence, legitimacy, and power.
This insufficiency is not accidental. The frameworks that dominate political analysis were developed within a communication environment that no longer fully exists. They assumed, often implicitly, that political information was relatively scarce, that citizens encountered it through a limited number of institutionally mediated channels, and that political competition was therefore primarily a competition for votes organized around the capacity to persuade.
The contemporary communication environment inverts each of these assumptions. Information is not scarce but superabundant. Citizens encounter political content through a multiplicity of channels whose institutional character has been progressively dissolved by commercial and algorithmic logics. And political competition, while still ultimately organized around the capacity to win elections, increasingly unfolds as a prior competition for something that votes cannot capture: the capacity to command public attention, to dominate communicative space, and to shape the political reality that citizens encounter before they have formed the preferences that democratic theory assumes they bring to the political process.
Understanding this transformation requires not a new theory of voting behavior but a historical account of how attention became political currency—and what its ascendancy has done to the conditions of democratic governance.
The Scarcity That Democracy Lost
Democratic theory has always assumed a particular relationship between citizens and political information. The deliberative tradition associated with Habermas (1989) posited a public sphere in which citizens encounter competing arguments, evaluate them against shared standards of reasonableness, and form political judgments through processes of communicative exchange. The aggregative tradition associated with electoral democracy assumed that citizens arrive at preferences through exposure to political alternatives and cast votes that translate those preferences into governing authority. Both traditions assumed, in different ways, that the problem confronting citizens was insufficient information — that the challenge of democratic participation was obtaining enough of the right kind of political content to make informed judgments. This assumption structured the institutional architecture of twentieth-century mass democracy: public broadcasting obligations, fairness doctrines, editorial standards, and regulatory frameworks governing media ownership were all, in different ways, responses to the perceived problem of informational scarcity and the democratic imperative to address it.
That problem no longer describes the condition of citizens in advanced democracies. The average American adult is estimated to encounter between six and ten thousand advertising messages per day — a figure that captures only a fraction of the total informational environment within which political content now competes for attention. News alerts, social media feeds, podcasts, video streams, online commentary, and the continuous production of digital content have created an environment not of informational scarcity but of informational superabundance — what the cognitive scientist Herbert Simon (1971) identified, with considerable prescience, as a condition in which the abundance of information creates a corresponding scarcity of attention.
The political implications of this inversion are profound and have been insufficiently theorized. When the scarce resource is not information but attention, the competition that matters is no longer primarily the competition to inform. It is the competition to be noticed—and the rules governing that competition are structured not by the norms of democratic deliberation but by the commercial and algorithmic logics of the platforms and media systems within which it takes place.
How Attention Became Political Capital
The transformation of attention into political capital did not occur suddenly with the emergence of social media platforms. It was prepared by a longer history of media commercialization whose political consequences were identified by critical scholars well before the digital age confirmed them empirically. The postwar settlement that organized mass media in most Western democracies rested on a partial and contested separation between commercial and civic imperatives: broadcasting was regulated as a public good, journalism maintained professional norms that distinguished it from entertainment, and the political information environment was organized, however imperfectly, around standards of balance, accuracy, and democratic accountability. These arrangements were neither neutral nor without their own distortions. But they embedded within the media system a set of institutional resistances to the pure logic of attention maximization that the subsequent decades of deregulation and commercialization systematically dismantled.
The consequences of that dismantling were theorized with particular clarity by scholars working at the intersection of media studies and democratic theory. Neil Postman’s (1985) diagnosis of television’s restructuring of public discourse—its substitution of image, emotion, and entertainment for the sustained argumentative exchange that print culture had historically demanded — identified the fundamental mechanism through which commercial media logic reshapes political communication. Guy Debord’s (1967) account of the society of the spectacle, developed within a different theoretical tradition, converged on the same structural observation: that the commercialization of communication progressively elevates visibility above substance, appearance above reality, and the capacity to capture attention above the capacity to govern. Daniel Boorstin’s (1961) earlier identification of the pseudo-event—the manufactured occurrence designed primarily for media coverage rather than emerging from genuine social processes—provided the most concrete institutional illustration of how the logic of attention transforms political communication from within.
Writing in different contexts and from different theoretical perspectives, each of these scholars identified the same underlying dynamic: that media systems organized around the capture and monetization of attention progressively reward political actors who can supply what those systems demand, regardless of whether that supply serves the informational requirements of democratic citizenship.
The digital revolution accelerated and intensified this dynamic rather than reversing it. Social media platforms did not introduce the logic of attention maximization into democratic politics. They industrialized it—providing the technical infrastructure to measure attention with unprecedented precision, optimize content for its capture with algorithmic efficiency, and distribute the results at a scale and speed that no previous communication system had achieved.
The political consequences of this industrialization were not the product of platform design choices made in bad faith. They were the structural output of commercial systems optimizing for engagement in an environment where engagement is measured by emotional activation, identity confirmation, and conflict — the precise communicative register that political communication organized around attention maximization has always, as Postman (1985) and Debord (1967) recognized, tended to favor.
Visibility, Legitamcy, and the Influencer Politician
The transformation of attention into political capital has produced consequences that extend beyond the familiar observations about media spectacle and political performance. Its deepest implication concerns the structural relationship between visibility and legitimacy in democratic politics — a relationship that has been quietly but fundamentally altered by the communication systems within which contemporary democratic competition takes place. Democratic legitimacy has historically been understood as deriving from a set of sources that are, in principle, independent of communicative visibility: electoral mandate, institutional position, policy expertise, party authority, and the capacity to govern effectively. These sources of legitimacy did not require continuous public attention to remain operative. An effective administrator, a competent legislator, or a credible party organization could exercise significant political authority while maintaining a relatively modest public profile.
The contemporary attention economy has disrupted this relationship in ways whose full implications are still being worked out. When political information reaches citizens primarily through platforms that rank content by engagement rather than by institutional authority or deliberative relevance, visibility itself becomes a source of legitimacy—not merely an instrument for communicating it.
The political actor who commands sustained public attention acquires a form of democratic authority that is structurally independent of, and in some contexts more immediately potent than, the authority derived from institutional position or electoral mandate. This is not simply because attention-commanding actors reach more citizens, though they do. It is because the continuous presence in citizens’ informational environments that platform-mediated visibility provides constitutes, in itself, a form of political relationship—an ongoing communicative connection that substitutes, at the level of felt political reality, for the institutional relationships through which democratic authority has traditionally been organized and experienced.
The emergence of what might be termed the influencer politician represents the clearest institutional manifestation of this shift. Political authority has traditionally derived from the mediating structures of democratic governance: parties, legislatures, bureaucracies, and the formal processes through which citizens delegate authority to representatives accountable to collective institutions. The influencer politician — a figure whose political authority derives substantially from direct audience relationships built through continuous digital communication, personal branding, and the cultivation of online communities — represents a structural departure from this model that existing frameworks of democratic accountability were not designed to address.
The boundaries separating political communication from celebrity culture and digital content creation have become genuinely blurred, not as a cultural curiosity but as a political-institutional development with significant consequences for how authority is constructed, legitimized, and challenged in contemporary democracies. Zeynep Tufekci’s (2017) account of how digital tools have transformed political organizing captures part of this dynamic, but the influencer politician phenomenon represents a further development: not merely the use of digital tools to organize existing political constituencies, but the construction of political authority itself through the logic of platform visibility.
The Communication Advantage and Its Democratic Costs
The history of modern democratic politics offers a consistent and instructive pattern: political leaders who master the dominant communication technologies of their era acquire advantages that transcend the specific content of their policy programs or the strength of their organizational support. Roosevelt’s fireside radio addresses exploited the intimacy of broadcast audio in ways that opponents trained in the conventions of print-era political oratory were unprepared to match. Ronald Reagan’s command of television — his capacity to project emotional warmth, moral clarity, and direct personal address within a medium that rewarded image and affect over argumentative substance — redefined the terms of presidential communication for a generation, demonstrating that the political resources derived from communication mastery could, in the right conditions, substantially compensate for weaknesses in policy credibility or institutional support. The pattern these cases illustrate is not merely that new media create new political opportunities. It is that new media restructure the entire field of political competition, altering the relative value of different political resources and systematically advantaging actors whose communicative capacities align with the demands of the new environment.
The political actors who have most effectively navigated the attention economy have demonstrated an intuitive understanding of this pattern. Donald Trump’s political communication represented not merely an adaptation to social media but a recognition—more explicit and more strategically deliberate than his opponents acknowledged—that the communication environment had undergone a structural shift whose implications mainstream political practice had not yet absorbed.
His capacity to generate continuous attention through provocation, conflict, and the deliberate violation of communicative norms that the previous media environment had enforced was not a deviation from rational political strategy. It was a precise calibration to the incentive structures of platforms optimized for engagement, in an environment where engagement is disproportionately generated by content that is emotionally activating and conflict-driven. The platform algorithm did not produce his political style. But the convergence between that style and the reward structures of the attention economy gave him communicative resources that the institutional logic of democratic competition was not equipped to neutralize.
The democratic costs of this dynamic are real but require careful specification to avoid the twin errors of technological determinism and institutional nostalgia. The attention economy does not make deliberative democracy impossible. Citizens retain the capacity to evaluate political arguments, hold leaders accountable, and form political judgments that resist the simplifications that attention-maximizing communication encourages. What the attention economy does is alter the cost structure of different forms of political communication—making conflict cheaper than consensus, simplicity cheaper than complexity, and emotional activation cheaper than deliberative persuasion—in ways that systematically disadvantage the communicative forms that democratic theory has historically associated with informed political participation. This is not a claim about citizen irrationality. It is a claim about institutional design: that communication systems optimized for commercial engagement create structural incentives that are, at their core, in tension with the communicative requirements of democratic governance, and that this tension has political consequences that compound over time.
Attention, Populism, and the Restructuring of Democratic Competition
The relationship between the attention economy and the contemporary rise of populism is neither causal nor coincidental. It is structural. Populism, understood as a discursive political logic that constructs a frontier between an authentic people and a corrupt elite (Laclau, 2005), has always depended on communicative forms that the attention economy systematically rewards: emotional intensity, adversarial simplicity, the clear identification of enemies, and the cultivation of a direct affective relationship between leader and followers that bypasses the mediating institutions of representative democracy. These communicative requirements are not incidental features of populist politics. They are, as Laclau (2005) argued, constitutive of its discursive logic—the means through which diverse and otherwise disconnected grievances are articulated into a unified political identity capable of challenging established power. What the attention economy has done is not create these requirements but dramatically lower the cost of meeting them, providing the technical infrastructure through which populist communication can reach mass audiences at a scale and speed, and with a directness and emotional intensity that previous communication systems did not permit.
The implications extend beyond the electoral fortunes of specific populist movements. The deeper consequence is the progressive restructuring of democratic competition itself around the logic of attention—a restructuring that affects not only explicitly populist actors but all political actors operating within the same communication environment. When visibility becomes a prerequisite for political influence, all political actors face pressure to adapt their communication strategies to the demands of the attention economy, regardless of their ideological commitments or governing ambitions.
The result is a gradual convergence of political communication styles toward the emotional, the conflictual, and the spectacular—a convergence that the attention economy rewards and that democratic deliberation, in its classical sense, cannot easily survive. Margaret Canovan’s (1999) observation that populism represents the permanent shadow of democracyacquires particular resonance in this context: the communication systems through which contemporary democracy operates have created conditions in which that shadow falls more heavily, and more continuously, than the institutional architecture of liberal democracy was designed to accommodate.
Conclusion: Attention, Democracy, and the Question of Institutional Design
The transformation of attention into political capital is not a temporary disruption produced by the novelty of digital platforms or the exceptional character of specific political figures. It reflects a structural shift in the communication environment within which democratic politics operates — a shift whose origins lie in the deregulation and commercialization of media that began in the 1980s and whose acceleration through platformization has produced a political information environment organized around fundamentally different imperatives than those that shaped the institutional architecture of postwar liberal democracy.
The political consequences of this shift—the premium on visibility over competence, the restructuring of political legitimacy around audience relationships rather than institutional authority, the systematic rewarding of communicative forms that are in tension with deliberative democratic norms — are not the product of technology alone. They are the product of choices about how communication systems are designed, regulated, and governed, choices that reflect and reproduce particular distributions of power and particular understandings of what democratic communication is for.
The conventional responses to these developments — calls for platform regulation, media literacy education, the reform of campaign finance, or the restoration of public broadcasting — each address real dimensions of the problem without capturing its structural depth. The challenge is not merely to correct specific malfunctions within the existing communication environment but to recover a prior question that the attention economy has rendered increasingly difficult to ask: what kind of communicative infrastructure does democratic self-governance actually require?
Habermas’s account of the public sphere as a constitutive condition of democratic legitimacy remains analytically indispensable here, not as a nostalgic ideal to be restored but as a standard against which the communicative conditions of contemporary democracy can be evaluated and found wanting. The public sphere that democratic theory requires is one in which citizens can encounter competing political arguments, evaluate them against shared standards of evidence and reason, and form political judgments through processes of collective deliberation. The communication environment that the attention economy has produced systematically undermines each of these requirements — not through overt censorship or deliberate political manipulation, but through the structural logic of systems optimized for engagement rather than understanding, visibility rather than accountability, and emotional activation rather than deliberative exchange.
The question facing contemporary democracies is therefore not simply who commands attention — though that question has become, as this analysis has argued, increasingly central to the distribution of political power. It is whether the institutional conditions can be reconstructed under which attention follows argument rather than precedes it, under which visibility derives from democratic accountability rather than substituting for it, and under which the communicative requirements of self-governance take precedence over the commercial imperatives of the platforms through which democratic politics now predominantly unfolds. That reconstruction is among the most consequential institutional challenges of the present democratic moment — and it cannot be addressed without first understanding, in its full historical depth, how attention became the currency it has.
References
Boorstin, D. J. (1961). The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Harper & Row.
Canovan, M. (1999). “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy.” Political Studies, 47(1), 2–16.
Debord, G. (1967). La Société du spectacle. Buchet-Chastel. [English translation: The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books, 1994.]
Habermas, J. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. MIT Press.
Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. London: Verso (new edition, 2018).
Postman, N. (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Viking.
Simon, H. A. (1971). “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World.” In: M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. Yale University Press.
Are you interested in global trade politics and the future of Europe in a shifting world order? Do you want to understand how populism, great-power rivalry, and geopolitical tensions are reshaping EU trade between the Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific? The ECPS Academy Summer School 2026 offers a unique five-day program where leading scholars and policymakers explore the EU’s role in an era of economic uncertainty and strategic competition. Participants will engage in interactive lectures, small-group discussions, and a dynamic simulation game on EU trade strategy, gaining hands-on experience in policy analysis and recommendation drafting. Join an international, multidisciplinary environment, exchange ideas with peers worldwide, earn ECTS credits, and become part of a global network studying populism, political economy, and international relations.
Overview
In today’s rapidly shifting global order, the European Union can no longer afford to think in one direction. For decades, the transatlantic relationship has been the backbone of global trade, built on shared institutions, economic interdependence, and liberal values. Yet this foundation is no longer stable. As highlighted in the ECPS report Populism and the Future of Transatlantic Relations, domestic political polarization and the rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic are reshaping trade policy, weakening trust, and challenging the very principles of open markets and multilateralism. The EU now faces a critical question: how to remain a global trade power when its closest partner is becoming less predictable.
At the same time, the center of gravity of global trade is shifting toward the Indo-Pacific. This region has become the epicenter of economic dynamism and geopolitical competition, where the future of global trade rules is increasingly being contested. The growing rivalry between the United States and China is not only a security issue but also a trade and technological struggle shaping supply chains, investment flows, and regulatory standards. As the US adopts more unilateral and strategic approaches to trade, moving away from traditional multilateralism, the EU must navigate a complex environment where cooperation, competition, and coercion coexist. Ignoring the transpacific dimension would mean missing where the future of global trade is being written.
For the European Union, the challenge and opportunity lie in managing both arenas simultaneously. The transatlantic relationship remains indispensable for economic scale, regulatory cooperation, and political alignment, while the transpacific region is crucial for diversification, resilience, and strategic autonomy. As scholars increasingly argue, the EU is no longer just a “junior partner” but an actor that must define its own role within a triangular system shaped by US–China competition. To lead in international trade today means mastering this dual engagement: stabilizing relations with the United States while actively shaping the Indo-Pacific order. This requires not only policy innovation but also a new generation of thinkers who understand trade through a geopolitical lens.
Against this backdrop, ECPS Academy Summer School-2026 brings together leading scholars and policymakers to examine how populism and great-power competition are reshaping EU trade policy across both transatlantic and transpacific arenas.
It offers a unique opportunity to explore:
The future of EU–US trade relations in an era of populism
The strategic importance of the Indo-Pacific and the US–China trade rivalry for the EU
How global trade is being reshaped by geopolitics, security, and ideology
The populist discourse around trade, policy, and power, and its implications for the EU’s trade relations
It also allows participating in an enjoyable and dynamic simulation game on the EU’s trade relations, trying to bring policy suggestions.
You will learn and actively engage in discussions, develop your own policy ideas, take part in simulation games, have the opportunity to publish on ECPS venues, and become part of an international network working at the intersection of political economy, international relations, and populism studies.
Tentative Program
Day 1 – Monday, July 6, 2026
Theme: The EU in the Global Trade Order: From Liberalism to Geoeconomics
This opening day sets the conceptual stage. It introduces how EU trade policy evolved from embedded liberalism to strategic autonomy, and how trade is now intertwined with security and geopolitics. It also establishes the role of populism and domestic politics in reshaping trade preferences and legitimacy crises in Europe and beyond.
Lecture One: (15:00-16:30) –Evolution of EU Trade Policy and Global Trade Order
Lecturer:Arlo Poletti (Professor of International Relations at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento).
Moderator:Sonali Chowdhry (Ph.D., Research Associate, DIW Berlin, Fellow, Kiel Institute for the World Economy).
Lecture Two: (17:30-19:00) –Populism, Legitimacy, and the Politicization of Trade
Lecturer:Kent Jones (Professor Emeritus of Economics, Babson College).
Moderator: TBC.
Day 2 – Tuesday, July 7, 2026
Theme: EU–US Trade Relations under Pressure: Cooperation, Conflict, and Populism
Focuses on the transatlantic pillar, still central but increasingly unstable. It examines tariff disputes, regulatory divergence, and how populist and protectionist politics in the US and Europe challenge long-standing cooperation and WTO-based norms.
Lecture Three: (15:00-16:30) – Political Economy of EU–US Trade Relations
Lecturer: Erik Jones (Professor of European Studies and International Political Economy, Director of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute and Non-resident Scholar at Carnegie Europe).
Moderator:Elaine Fahey (Professor of EU Law, City Law School, City St. Georges, University of London).
Lecture Four: (17:30-19:00) –Populism and the Erosion/Reconfiguration of Transatlantic Trade Cooperation
Lecturer: Alasdair Young (Professor and Neal Family Chair in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Georgia Tech).
Moderator: Jessica Lawrence (Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex School of Law).
Day 3 – Wednesday, July 8, 2026
Theme: The EU Between the US and China: Trade, Power, and Strategic Autonomy
This session introduces the triangular dynamic (EU–US–China) and how the EU navigates between partnership and rivalry. It highlights de-risking, economic security, supply chains, and competing models of globalization.
Lecture Six: (14:00-15:30) –Strategic Autonomy, De-risking, and EU Economic Security Tools
Lecturer:Reuben Wong (Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore).
Moderator: TBC.
Lecture Five: (16:00-17:30) –The EU’s Policy Towards Asia Amidst Changing US–China Security and Trade Dynamics
Lecturer: Giulio Pugliese (Director of the EU-Asia Project, European University Institute + Associate Fellow Istituto Affari Internazionali, and King’s College London).
Moderator:Anita Tusor (Researcher in International Relations, Charles University, Prague).
Day 4 – Thursday, July 9, 2026
Theme: The Indo-Pacific Turn: EU Trade Strategy in a Shifting Global Centre
This session shifts focus to the transpacific dimension, emphasizing that the future of trade is increasingly shaped in the Indo-Pacific. It explores how US strategies toward China and the region reshape global trade, and how the EU responds through diversification and partnerships.
Lecture Seven: (15:00-16:30) –US Indo-Pacific Strategy and Its Trade Implications
Lecturer:Kristi Govella (Associate Professor of Japanese Politics and International Relations in the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies and the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies at the University of Oxford).
Moderator:Andrea Carteny (Professor of History of International Relations, Sapienza University of Rome).
Lecture Eight: (17:30-19:00) –EU Engagement in the Indo-Pacific (FTAs, Partnerships, Strategic Positioning)
Lecturer:Axel Berkofsky (Associate Professor at the University of Pavia and Co-Head of the Asia Centre at ISPI).
Moderator:Sebastien Goulard (Ph.D., Manager of Cooperans, Consultant in EU-Asia connectivity projects).
Day 5 – Friday, July 10, 2026
Theme: The Future of EU Trade Power: Between Fragmentation and Leadership
This session will ask whether the EU can become a global trade power amid fragmentation, populism, and great-power rivalry. It also allows for normative and policy-oriented discussions.
Lecture Nine: (15:00-16:30) – Scenarios for the Future of Global Trade Governance (Fragmentation vs Reform)
Lecturer:Manfred Elsig (Professor of International Relations and Managing Director of the World Trade Institute of the University of Bern). (TBC)
Moderator: TBC
Lecture Ten: (17:30-19:00) –Can the EU lead? Policy Tools, Regulatory Power, and Global Influence
Lecturer:Markus Kotzur (Professor of European and International Law, Vice Dean for International Relations and Chair for Public Law, European and International Public Law, Hamburg University).
Moderator:Camille Nessel (Ph.D., Lecturer in Political Science Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB)-CEVIPOL).
Methodology
The program will take place on Zoom, consisting of two sessions each day and will last five days. The lectures are complemented by small group discussions and Q&A sessions moderated by experts in the field. Participants will have the opportunity to engage with leading scholars in the field as well as with activists and policymakers working at the forefront of these issues.
The final program with the list of speakers will be announced soon.
Furthermore, this summer school aims to equip attendees with the skills necessary to craft policy suggestions. To this end, a simulation game will be organized on a pressing theme within the broader topic to identify solutions to issues related to the future of the EU trade relations.
Who should apply?
This course is open to master’s and PhD level students and graduates, early career researchers and post-docs from any discipline. The deadline for application submissions has been extended to June 26, 2026. As we can only accept a limited number of applicants, it is advisable to submit applications as early as possible rather than waiting for the deadline.
The applicants should send their CVs to the email address ecps@populismstudies.org with the subject line: ECPS Summer School Application.
We value the high level of diversity in our courses, welcoming applications from people of all backgrounds.
Evaluation Criteria and Certificate of Attendance
Meeting the assessment criteria is required from all participants aiming to complete the program and receive a certificate of attendance. The evaluation criteria include full attendance and active participation in lectures.
Certificates of attendance will be awarded to participants who attend at least 80% of the sessions. Certificates are sent to students only by email.
Credit
This course is worth 5 ECTS in the European system. If you intend to transfer credit to your home institution, please check the requirements with them before you apply. We will be happy to assist you; however, please be aware that the decision to transfer credit rests with your home institution.
Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that the rise of anti-immigrant unrest across Europe reflects not simply tensions over migration, but a deeper crisis of democratic integration. In this timely commentary, he contends that diversity alone cannot sustain social cohesion without strong institutions capable of transforming difference into common citizenship. Drawing on scholarship by Robert Putnam, David Goodhart, Yascha Mounk, and others, Dr. Dias examines how weakening civic institutions, declining social trust, and unresolved integration challenges create fertile ground for nativist mobilization. Rather than framing the debate as a choice between openness and exclusion, he calls for renewed attention to the civic foundations that make pluralism politically sustainable. At stake, he argues, is Europe’s ability to reconcile diversity, solidarity, and democratic stability.
Recent episodes of anti-immigrant unrest in cities such as Southampton and Belfast are often interpreted through the lens of public order, criminality, or political extremism. Yet these events may also be symptomatic of a deeper challenge confronting liberal democracies across Europe: the growing tension between openness and social cohesion.
One of the defining assumptions of the late twentieth-century liberal order was that increasingly open societies would naturally generate greater inclusion. Diversity, mobility, and multiculturalism were frequently treated not merely as compatible with democratic stability, but as self-evident expressions of it. What this assumption overlooks, however, is that openness alone does not produce integration.
Democratic societies require more than legal frameworks and economic opportunities. They depend upon a shared civic foundation capable of sustaining trust, cooperation, and political legitimacy. As Robert Putnam (2007) argued in his influential work on diversity and social capital, heterogeneity can enrich societies in the long term, but it may also create short-term challenges for social trust when institutions fail to mediate difference effectively.
The fragility of contemporary liberal democracies lies not in diversity itself, but in the weakening of the mechanisms that transform diversity into common citizenship. Schools, political parties, trade unions, local associations, and public institutions historically played a crucial role in integrating individuals from different backgrounds into a shared civic culture. When these mediating institutions weaken, identities that might otherwise coexist within a broader political community increasingly become sources of social fragmentation (Judt, 2010).
Immigration policy illustrates this dilemma particularly clearly. Contemporary European migration regimes often emerge from the intersection of several legitimate objectives: humanitarian obligations, historical responsibilities, labor market demands, and demographic decline. Yet political debate frequently neglects a more uncomfortable question: the absorptive capacity of receiving societies.
The notion that democratic states must continuously assess their capacity to integrate newcomers is often portrayed as morally suspect, as if limits necessarily imply exclusion. Yet a growing body of scholarship suggests the opposite. Sustainable inclusion requires not merely access, but incorporation into a common civic framework defined by rights and responsibilities, constitutional norms, linguistic participation, gender equality, and democratic values (Mounk, 2022; Miller, 2016).
Without such a framework, diversity risks evolving from pluralism into segmentation. Social groups become increasingly disconnected from one another, trust declines, and political entrepreneurs find fertile ground for mobilizing resentment. It is under these conditions that nativist movements gain traction.
The appeal of contemporary nativism rests on a powerful narrative: that European societies are losing control over their cultural continuity, historical identity, and political sovereignty. Whether empirically accurate or not, this perception acquires political force when citizens conclude that mainstream institutions are either unwilling or unable to address concerns related to integration, social cohesion, and public order.
Importantly, the rise of nativism should not be understood as a simple reaction to immigration itself. Such explanations are analytically insufficient. The same levels of migration can produce dramatically different political outcomes depending on the strength of institutions, the effectiveness of integration policies, and the degree of social trust present within a society (Goodhart, 2017; Krastev & Holmes, 2019).
The danger emerges when individual acts of crime, disorder, or social conflict cease to be interpreted as the actions of particular individuals and instead become symbolic markers of collective identity. In such contexts, immigrants are increasingly viewed as representatives of an undifferentiated out-group, while native populations come to see themselves as members of a threatened in-group. The resulting dynamic resembles what social psychologists have long identified as the transition from individual judgment to group-based political cognition.
History suggests that democracies become particularly vulnerable when they lose the ability to interpret and respond to the anxieties of their own citizens. Polarization thrives when complex social challenges are reduced to simplistic moral binaries, dividing societies into opposing camps of “us” and “them.” In this environment, both exclusionary nativism and uncompromising forms of ideological universalism feed off one another, narrowing the space for pragmatic democratic solutions.
The challenge facing Europe today is therefore not simply whether to accept more or fewer immigrants. It is whether liberal democracies can rebuild the institutional and civic foundations necessary to transform diversity into solidarity. The question is not openness versus closure, but whether openness can remain politically sustainable without a renewed commitment to integration.
The events witnessed in Southampton, Belfast, and elsewhere may not signal the inevitable triumph of nativism. They do, however, suggest that the political center is increasingly squeezed between competing certainties: on one side, an understanding of inclusion that often underestimates the importance of social cohesion; on the other, a nativist reaction that seeks belonging through exclusion.
Europe’s democratic future may well depend on its ability to recover the difficult middle ground between these two positions.
References
Goodhart, D. (2017). The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. London, UK: Hurst.
Judt, T. (2010). Ill Fares the Land. New York, NY: Penguin Press.
Krastev, I., & Holmes, S. (2019). The Light That Failed: A Reckoning. London, UK: Allen Lane.
Miller, D. (2016). Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mounk, Y. (2022). The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure. New York, NY: Penguin Press.
Putnam, R. D. (2007). “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century.” Scandinavian Political Studies, 30(2), 137–174.
In this ECPS interview, Associate Professor Stefano Bottoni offers a compelling assessment of Hungary’s post-Orbán transition and the formidable challenges of democratic reconstruction after sixteen years of institutional capture and democratic backsliding. Rejecting simplistic notions of democratic restoration, Assoc. Prof. Bottoni argues that Hungary is not merely returning to a previous democratic order but attempting to “invent a new democracy for the twenty-first century.” Reflecting on European reintegration, anti-corruption efforts, institutional reform, civic education, and political culture, he contends that democracy cannot be rebuilt through legal changes alone. Instead, lasting democratic consolidation requires the cultivation of democratic citizens, the restoration of public accountability, and the creation of a new civic patriotism that reconciles national identity with European belonging.
The electoral defeat of Viktor Orbán and Fidesz in Hungary’s April 12, 2026 election has triggered one of the most consequential political transitions in contemporary Europe. After sixteen years of increasingly centralized rule, democratic backsliding, institutional capture, and persistent conflict with the European Union, the rise of Prime Minister Péter Magyar has generated renewed debate about democratic restoration, post-populist governance, and the prospects for rebuilding liberal-democratic institutions. Yet, as scholars of democratization have long emphasized, the removal of an incumbent regime marks only the beginning of a transition rather than its successful completion.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Associate Professor Stefano Bottoniof the University of Florence—one of the foremost historians of contemporary Hungary and author of the forthcoming book The Orbán Enigma—offers a deeply historical assessment of Hungary’s uncertain democratic future. Drawing on his extensive scholarship on authoritarianism, nationalism, post-communist transformation, and democratic backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe, Assoc. Prof. Bottoni argues that the challenges confronting Hungary today may, in important respects, be even greater than those faced during the democratic transition of 1989–1990.
Rejecting simplistic narratives of democratic restoration, Assoc. Prof. Bottoni cautions that the current moment cannot be understood merely as a return to a pre-Orbán political order. “This is not simply about restoring something. Rather, it is about inventing a new democracy for the twenty-first century,” he argues. For Assoc. Prof. Bottoni, Hungary’s predicament is rooted not only in the institutional legacy of Orbánism but also in the country’s longer historical experience, which offers “only brief and largely unsuccessful democratic experiments, followed by a succession of autocratic, authoritarian, or fully totalitarian regimes.”
Throughout the interview, Assoc. Prof. Bottoni emphasizes that democratic reconstruction will require far more than personnel changes or legal reforms. While supporting the new government’s efforts to rejoin the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), recover frozen EU funds, and confront systemic corruption, he stresses that institutional renewal must be accompanied by a profound transformation of political culture. The task is particularly difficult because, as he bluntly observes, “you cannot build democracy with a state apparatus forged by an autocratic system.”
One of the interview’s central themes is the distinction between formal institutional change and deeper democratic consolidation. Assoc. Prof. Bottoni warns against the illusion that democracy can be rebuilt quickly. “Building democratic consciousness takes 15, 20, or even 30 years,” he notes, arguing that genuine democratization requires sustained efforts across education, civil society, media, and local government. In his view, the most important test of democratic success will not be found in constitutional amendments or anti-corruption prosecutions alone, but in whether Hungary can cultivate future generations of democratic citizens rather than passive subjects.
At the same time, Assoc. Prof. Bottoni offers a nuanced interpretation of the emerging political landscape. He suggests that Hungary may be witnessing the formation of a new political cleavage across Europe, one that increasingly pits pro-European and pro-integration forces against sovereigntist and anti-European movements. Within this evolving framework, he sees the possibility of a “new civic patriotism” that reconciles national identity with European belonging.
Perhaps most strikingly, Assoc. Prof. Bottoni contends that Hungary’s current transition is “far more difficult and controversial” than that of 1989–1990 because it must confront not only political legacies but also the entrenched networks of wealth, patronage, and oligarchic power created during the Orbán era. For this reason, he concludes that “the transition taking place today is even more difficult and more challenging” than Hungary’s post-communist democratic breakthrough.
This interview offers a timely and thought-provoking exploration of democratic resilience, institutional reconstruction, political accountability, and the long-term challenges of overcoming authoritarian legacies in twenty-first-century Europe. It also raises a broader question with implications far beyond Hungary: how can democracies rebuild themselves after years of democratic erosion without reproducing the very illiberal practices they seek to overcome?
Here is the revised version of our interview with Associate Professor Stefano Bottoni, lightly edited for clarity, readability, and publication.
This Is Not About Restoring Democracy—It Is About Inventing a New One
Supporters of the TISZA Party gather on Andrássy Avenue in Budapest during a national march led by Péter Magyar on Hungary’s March 15 national holiday, March 15, 2026. Photo: Istvan Balogh / Dreamstime.
Professor Bottoni, welcome! Much commentary has framed Hungary’s 2026 election as the end of an era. Yet democratic transitions are often easier to proclaim than to consolidate. How should we conceptualize the current moment: as regime change, democratic restoration, elite circulation, or merely the beginning of a prolonged and uncertain post-Orbán transition?
Assoc. Prof. Stefano Bottoni: As we are speaking now, at the beginning of June, almost two months have passed since the elections held on April 12, 2026. We can clearly see that the crushing electoral defeat of Viktor Orbán and his party, Fidesz, was followed by the rapid collapse of the power structure as well, which was unexpected. Political analysts in Hungary are now saying that a genuine transfer of power is taking place. It is a regime change that can, of course, be compared to the regime change of 1989–1990. But it is also very different from that. It unfolds in a different geopolitical context. We are no longer in the Cold War; we are in a very different position. It is also different because János Kádár’s Hungary in the late 1980s was an opening regime, whereas Viktor Orbán’s regime was a closing one, especially in its final years.
Democratic restoration is one of the terms you mentioned. It is very catchy and very tempting, but it probably does not capture the complexity of the task. This is not simply about restoring something. Rather, it is about inventing a new democracy for the twenty-first century in a country like Hungary, where, from a historical perspective, democracy does not really offer many functional models to follow.
After the First World War, after the Second World War, and after the end of the Cold War, Hungary experienced only brief and largely unsuccessful democratic experiments, followed by a succession of autocratic, authoritarian, or fully totalitarian regimes. So, we are not merely speaking about the consolidation or restoration of democracy. We are speaking about a demanding, but also intellectually stimulating, transition toward something new. Hungarians genuinely need something new. Of course, when searching for something new, you can turn to existing models, draw on your own history, and learn from foreign experiences. But first and foremost, you must understand what went wrong on previous occasions and then adapt democratic models to the realities of the country.
Without European Support, Serious Accountability Would Be Difficult to Achieve
Flags of Hungary and the European Union displayed together in Budapest. Hungary has been an EU member since 2004. Photo: Jerome Cid / Dreamstime
The new government has moved rapidly to restore relations with Brussels, reopen discussions on frozen EU funds, and announce Hungary’s intention to join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. To what extent are these measures primarily symbolic gestures of European reintegration, and to what extent do they represent deeper institutional transformations?
Assoc. Prof. Stefano Bottoni: They are not merely symbolic, primarily because access to European funds and Hungary’s accession to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office are necessary political steps for consolidating Péter Magyar’s power.
Péter Magyar first needs the frozen EU funds in order to revitalize the declining Hungarian economy. In that sense, these resources are essential to the idea of a fresh start from an economic perspective. At the same time, joining the European legal framework for combating corruption provides the new government and the emerging power structure with far greater opportunities to address the corruption associated with Orbán’s system.
We should not forget that the Hungarian legal system remains largely controlled by individuals appointed by Viktor Orbán. As a result, it will be difficult to initiate a serious prosecution of crimes in Hungary until the country joins the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. From this perspective, European support is extremely important for the new Hungarian political order.
So, this is not simply a symbolic reunion with Europe. It is also a very well-conceived and, politically speaking, rewarding set of measures that Magyar must pursue to consolidate his own power.
You Cannot Build Democracy with a State Apparatus Forged by Autocracy
One of the central challenges facing the Magyar government is rebuilding institutions that many observers argue were systematically politicized over the last decade and a half. In comparative perspective, what are the greatest difficulties democratic governments face when attempting to depoliticize state institutions after prolonged periods of dominant-party rule?
Assoc. Prof. Stefano Bottoni: There are multiple challenges facing the new power structure. Let us begin with the most immediate one: the president of the republic. Tamás Sulyok, the current president, is a lawyer who previously served as president of the Hungarian Constitutional Court. He was a Fidesz appointee and, during the last two years, was essentially Orbán’s puppet. He did absolutely nothing to prevent the democratic crisis from unfolding. He remained silent on all the major political, moral, and legal issues surrounding Orbán’s power.
Magyar immediately called on him to resign before a formal procedure for his dismissal could be initiated by the new government. Of course, this creates the possibility of a serious institutional conflict. Forcing a president who was democratically elected by the Hungarian parliament to resign—or removing or impeaching him, because that is essentially what this amounts to—is not part of standard democratic practice, at least in Western Europe. For example, such a scenario would be virtually inconceivable in Germany. It is very difficult to explain to German lawyers how this could occur in a normal democratic setting. Unfortunately, Hungary today is not in a normal democratic condition.
The challenge, therefore, is to restore a more or less normal democratic order in the medium and long term by removing many individuals who were appointed by the previous regime solely on the basis of political allegiance. From an institutional perspective, this is not an elegant process. It represents a high degree of discontinuity and can create discomfort, because many people may perceive it as a purge. But it is what it is. Unfortunately, Magyar has very few alternatives, because you cannot build democracy with a state apparatus forged by an autocratic system. It is simply not possible. This is the very narrow path that Magyar must navigate, and it appears that he wants to move through it as quickly as possible.
At the moment, public support for this process is very strong. According to opinion polls, more than two-thirds of voters seem to support a rapid transition. That is what he wants to achieve. Afterwards, the real task begins: restoring democracy with new people. Once new people are in place, a new democratic framework must be built around them. At that point, it will no longer be possible to blame those appointed by Orbán, because they will have been removed—or will be removed—from key positions in the judiciary, the financial courts, the legal system, and the economic sphere.
Prosecutions will also begin against oligarchs and against those who made billions and billions of euros disappear. This is the huge difference between 1989 and 2026 in Hungary. In 1989, the struggle was about politics and ideology. It was about prosecuting crimes committed by the communist authorities—for example, after the 1956 Revolution. It was about the past.
In Hungary today, it is about money. It is not really about ideology. We are not prosecuting sovereignism or populism, because they cannot be prosecuted as such. They are debatable political positions. You cannot prosecute someone simply because he is a sovereignist or a populist, however we may define those terms.
But you can certainly prosecute an oligarch for the misappropriation of billions of euros. And if those oligarchs are closely connected to political power—and personally connected to former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—then we encounter the clear link between politics and business that was one of the defining features of the Orbán regime throughout its entire period in power since 2010.
For that reason, this transition will be far more difficult and controversial. It must address the challenge of transforming wealth accumulated through corruption back into public resources. This is a different task from that of 1989–1990, but it is no less significant. In some respects, I would argue that the transition taking place today is even more difficult and more challenging.
Building Democratic Consciousness Takes Decades, Not Election Cycles
The Hungarian case raises a broader theoretical question about democratic resilience. Can institutions that have undergone extensive partisan capture genuinely regain autonomy, or do they inevitably retain traces of the political order that created them?
Assoc. Prof. Stefano Bottoni: This is a huge issue, and I am not in a position to answer it now. In fact, I do not think anyone is in a position to answer it at this stage, because we do not yet have an empirical basis for doing so. That empirical basis will emerge in the coming months, following the top-level personnel reshuffle. Once that process has taken place, we will see what new people can do with these old institutions. Can they transform the institutional logic according to which these institutions operate, or can they not? This is a huge issue and a major question mark. At the moment, we do not have answers; we only have hopes.
My personal intuition is that a great deal of damage has been done. Even if one accepts the idea—which is not pessimistic but simply realistic—that such a regime change implies, first and foremost, educating people in democracy, that process takes 15, 20, or even 30 years. We should therefore expect such a transition, even if it is successfully implemented, to last several decades. It requires bringing together the media system, the educational system, public engagement, local administrations, civil society, and so on within a new way of thinking. Even if all these societal subsystems are interconnected through a new democratic mindset, it still takes several decades to achieve substantial results—not merely new Potemkin villages or superficial examples of democracy. After 1990, Hungary built a highly successful formal democracy with very little democratic substance.
The divergence between these two realities became dramatically evident after the 2008 financial crisis, when it became clear that the majority of the Hungarian population no longer supported liberal democracy as it had been presented to them after 1990. This is how Viktor Orbán became possible. If we do not want another Viktor Orbán—whether from the right, the far right, or even the left—to emerge and capture the state once again, and if we want to build a stable and sustainable democratic political culture, which would be something new in Hungary, then we must recognize that Hungary has never had such a stable and sustainable democratic political culture over the past hundred years or more.
If we want to build this, we have to take our time. We also need to be patient with ourselves, and we must ask for patience from our partners as well. Of course, it is possible to shorten the path toward becoming a more consolidated democracy. It is possible to perform well. But you cannot skip the necessary steps. You cannot avoid the intermediate phases involved in building a new democratic consciousness. You simply cannot.
Magyar Must Fight Corruption Without Creating Chaos
Péter Magyar speaks at a public demonstration near the Hungarian Parliament building in Budapest on April 6, 2024. Photo: Istvan Balogh / Dreamstime.
Prime Minister Magyar has promised anti-corruption reforms while simultaneously facing intense pressure to unlock billions of euros in frozen EU funds. How sustainable is this strategy politically if economic recovery becomes dependent upon satisfying external European conditions?
Assoc. Prof. Stefano Bottoni: He has to do both things at the same time. He has no choice. The Hungarian government and the new ruling elite can, rather amusingly, be described as a democratic one-party system. If we look at the polls, we can see that TISZA is now virtually above 70 percent, which is stunning. Fidesz is collapsing. They probably now have between 10 and 20 percent of genuine popular support, and they are still shrinking. Meanwhile, the far-right Mi Hazánk, or Our Homeland, which is represented in parliament and received 6 percent in the elections, seems unable to benefit from the collapse of Fidesz and remains stuck at around 5–6 percent.
So, we can speak of a democratic one-party system because we have a democratic party that is, paradoxically, in an almost unchallenged and unchallengeable position. They are in the best position to implement radical reforms because they cannot be challenged. But, of course, their responsibility is enormous, because they carry the full weight of difficult decisions on their own shoulders.
At the moment, there are no meaningful checks and balances through political competition. Fidesz cannot serve as a check and balance. When someone from Fidesz says, “You are doing this wrong,” the obvious response in parliamentary debates these days is, “I’m sorry, but after what you did to this country for sixteen years, be quiet.” That kind of response effectively closes every space for genuine political conversation.
But I understand your point. They have to do two very different and very difficult things simultaneously. First, they have to secure this money. I would say, whatever it takes, because Hungary’s financial and economic position is now so precarious that these 10-15 billion euros of fresh European funding are genuinely needed to fuel the economy. At the same time, they must send strong and unequivocal messages regarding corruption. Here I draw on my Italian background. I was born and raised in Italy. In 1993, the entire Italian political system collapsed under the weight of the anti-corruption campaign known as Mani Pulite—Clean Hands. It was a dramatic reshuffle. Eight thousand people were jailed, arrested, or placed in temporary custody. Entire parties that had dominated Italian political life for forty years—the Christian Democrats, the Socialist Party, the Liberal Party, and the Social Democratic Party—collapsed in little more than a year, between 1992 and 1993. And what did Italy get from all of this? We got Silvio Berlusconi and his long domination of Italian politics beginning in 1994.
Perhaps because I am a historian, and historians tend to be pessimistic, but also because I experienced this firsthand, I am acutely aware of how enthusiasm for an anti-corruption campaign can cause a democracy to derail in another direction, namely through chaos. Populism is often fueled by perceptions of chaos, by the feeling that things have become uncontrollable and that people must “take back control.” Berlusconi and his Forza Italia party successfully convinced many Italians that the chaos generated by the anti-corruption campaign was harmful, detrimental to the economy, and had to be stopped.
So Péter Magyar now has to carry out one of the most significant anti-corruption campaigns Europe has ever seen. I am not exaggerating. Experts on Hungary’s political economy consistently argue that the Orbán regime’s neopatrimonialism and appropriation of state resources are astonishing by European standards. These oligarchs cannot simply be allowed to walk away.
It is difficult to imagine that Viktor Orbán could still have a future in international politics. There are now rumors that he may be trying, with American support, to secure a senior position within the United Nations. That simply cannot happen. If it does, it would send a profoundly damaging message for democratic governance worldwide. It would suggest that you can cheat, deprive a country of its own resources, enrich yourself, and then simply leave office without any legal or political consequences. That cannot happen.
So, Magyar has to purge the former state apparatus—democratically, but still purge it. That means sending many people to jail, or at least confronting them with the prospect of jail. At the same time, he must prevent chaos from prevailing. The Hungarian public became accustomed to the stability of the system provided by Orbán. They would not tolerate a chaotic transition. You have to ensure at least the appearance of an orderly transition. This is what Magyar must deliver: democratic restoration of rights, an anti-corruption campaign, the prosecution of those who committed economic or ideological crimes, and action against those who organized what was perhaps the most remarkable Putin-era propaganda system in Europe.
It also means confronting those who helped support and finance populist and far-right parties across Europe. We now know that institutions such as Mathias Corvinus Collegium and the Danube Institute in Budapest were central nodes in a transnational network connecting far-right actors across the Atlantic. This cannot be left unchallenged. At the same time, it must not lead to a chaotic transition, because that would be unbearable for the Hungarian public. It is an extremely difficult task. But it is something that can be done now, thanks to the enormous popular support that Magyar has gathered before and after the elections. He has to take advantage of this unique momentum.
Hungary Needs Publicly Funded and Politically Free Research
Several early initiatives—including joining the EPPO, strengthening the Integrity Authority, and reforming university foundations—appear designed to address longstanding rule-of-law concerns. Do these reforms represent technocratic adjustments, or do they amount to a fundamental redefinition of the relationship between state power, public accountability, and democratic governance?
Assoc. Prof. Stefano Bottoni: I am not currently part of the Hungarian higher education system, so I would not pretend to know these issues in their full depth. But what we can see is an unprecedented challenge. The government has to take back 22 formerly public universities across the country—not only in Budapest but also in the provinces—and transform them once again into public institutions.
What is the problem? The problem is that, as in many other European and non-European countries, Hungarian public higher education was severely underfunded. Salaries were miserable. Scholarships were limited. After these universities were transferred under the umbrella of semi-private, semi-public foundations, salaries increased. As a result, many people within Hungarian higher education now fear that returning under the umbrella of a poorly financed state could worsen the financial position of university professors and the Hungarian research system as a whole.
Of course, one can argue that European grants may once again become available to the Hungarian research system, and that is true. But we also know that this is a highly competitive environment. It is increasingly difficult to obtain EU research funding through the ERC, Horizon, or other programs. This is not helicopter money that automatically arrives to keep the system running.
In this respect, the coming months will allow us to test Péter Magyar’s commitment to a new set of priorities for the Hungarian government. I would say: less money for oligarchs, less money for stadiums and non-essential infrastructure, and much more money for public health and public education—from preschool all the way through universities and PhD programs. This commitment will be tested because the university system can only be successfully transformed back into a public system if substantial resources are invested in it. You cannot do it for free.
This challenge is not unique to Hungary; it exists in many European countries. Even if we reject the idea of partially privatizing the university system because we believe it undermines institutional independence and the capacity for critical thinking, we are still confronted with low salaries and a system that does not adequately reward performance. How do we make the system more effective and more attractive to young researchers without sacrificing democracy within it? This is yet another one of the great challenges.
I think the first steps taken by Magyar and by the Minister of Education and Technology, Zoltán Tanács, are moving in the right direction. They seem genuinely committed to this agenda, and I hope they continue along this path because Hungary has a great tradition in higher education and public research. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences, for example, is now taking back control over research institutes that had previously been handed over to a questionably governed, half-public, half-private body. So, there is a major reshuffle taking place within the Hungarian research system.
Personally, as a former employee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, this is the part of the system I know somewhat better. There is a huge need for publicly funded and politically independent public research. The problem is funding. You cannot pay a university professor—as is currently the case in parts of the public sector—€1,000 per month. It is simply not possible. Salaries need to be adjusted to the current cost of living in Hungary, which is at least twice that amount.
The Greatest Mistake Hungarians Made Was Giving Politicians a Blank Check
Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister, arrives for a meeting with European Union leaders in Brussels, Belgium, on June 22, 2017. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis.
Democratic reconstruction often generates a paradox: governments must dismantle illiberal structures while avoiding the appearance of exercising illiberal power themselves. How can the Magyar government pursue institutional reform without reproducing the majoritarian logic it seeks to replace?
Assoc. Prof. Stefano Bottoni: As I tried to explain earlier, if we think seriously about this in the long run, and if we do not want to become democratic populists who pretend to build democracy on promises that cannot be delivered, then we have to accept the fact that it takes time. And time means not months, not even a couple of years, not even a single government cycle, but much more time—generations.
So, what can Magyar start now, and what does he have to start now? I hope he will begin by laying the foundations for a new democratic system. That means a new democratic framework for the education system, for example. New programs and curricular frameworks for the teaching of Hungarian language, literature, and history—the so-called ideological subjects. Not mathematics, of course, which remains more or less the same under every system, but social studies and civic education.
What does it mean to be a citizen in Hungary? What are the rights, commitments, and obligations of every citizen? What does it mean to live in a democracy? Democracy is not about the ombudsman. Of course, the ombudsman is a useful institution to have, but if people do not know how to turn to the ombudsman, what the institution is for, what fundamental rights are, or how they can be defended, then the whole thing becomes pointless. So, a huge effort has to be invested in building the mental preconditions that allow people to understand the long-term advantages of democracy over authoritarian rule.
Because we should not forget one thing. And this also helps answer your question about how democracy can be rebuilt without falling back into old authoritarian models. All the democratic and non-democratic systems that succeeded one another in Hungary over the last century—the Horthy regime in the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s, or the Kádár regime from the late 1950s until 1989—were not at all unpopular. They were highly successful in consolidating power, preserving power, and gathering remarkable public support.
Orbán himself always claimed democratic legitimacy. Of course, we can argue that the nearly 50 percent he received in almost every election up until April 12 was not entirely genuine because it was unfairly boosted by the misuse of state resources and state propaganda. But we cannot deny the fact that a substantial part of the Hungarian population genuinely believed in Viktor Orbán’s capacity to govern the country. The important point is that these people have not disappeared. They are still living among us.
It would be a mistake to forget that a substantial part of the country is still not mentally prepared to live in a democracy. People have to be patiently educated for it. We should not take for granted what is not, at least in my view, self-evident—that democracy can simply be restored by changing a few legal provisions or replacing one person with another at the head of an institution. Democracy is not about procedures. It is about how we imagine ourselves within society. What role do we imagine for the citizen? Is the citizen a subject of the state, or is he or she an equal partner in the social discourse?
What can we expect from Magyar? Of course, we know his past. He was a loyal associate of Viktor Orbán until 2022 or 2023. That much we know. Naturally, there are reasons to be skeptical. One can reasonably ask: how can someone who was once a loyal associate of Viktor Orbán suddenly discover the virtues of democracy? I think that is a legitimate concern. I do not want to play the role of the overly optimistic observer who dismisses such concerns as baseless. I cannot claim that. What I can claim is hope. Hope that a person like Péter Magyar, who went through what I would call a conversion to democracy—a painful one at that—and who spent two years in a full electoral campaign while facing an entire propaganda apparatus directed against him, has genuinely learned the difference between a functioning democracy and a fake one.
I also hope that the political community he has built, both from the top through his own charisma and from below through the TISZA Islands and the tens of thousands of people who, many for the first time in their lives, engaged in politics—joining a movement, collecting signatures, talking to their neighbors, trying to persuade others, becoming politically active—will not forget one of the most important democratic lessons.
One of the greatest democratic tasks in any country is to be able to control your politicians. You do not give them a blank check to use for whatever purpose they choose. That was the greatest mistake the Hungarian public made after 2010 with Viktor Orbán: they granted him unlimited credit. You cannot grant unlimited credit to anyone, even if you believe in them, even if you admire them. At least in Hungary, we have now seen that politicians can misuse such trust. They can exploit it. They can distort the public will. They can hollow out democratic institutions from within while relying on the democratic legitimacy that citizens themselves have granted them. I sincerely hope that this lesson—at least this one lesson—has now been learned in Hungary.
A New Civic Patriotism Is Emerging Alongside European Belonging
Hungary now finds itself in a unique position within Central Europe. Do you see the emergence of a new model of center-right governance that remains nationally oriented and culturally conservative while simultaneously embracing European integration and liberal-democratic institutions?
Assoc. Prof. Stefano Bottoni: I am not a political scientist myself. However, I do follow political science scholarship, and, as far as I can see, there is currently a major debate about the possible disappearance of the traditional right–left cleavage across much of the European Union. Instead, we seem to be witnessing the emergence of a different divide: mainstream, pro-European, and pro-integration forces on one side, and patriotic, sovereignist, pro-Russian, and anti-European forces on the other. If we take this new distinction seriously, we can see formerly center-right and center-left—or even left-wing—parties finding themselves on the same side of the political spectrum.
From this perspective, TISZA can be seen as part of this new experiment, and Hungary as a laboratory. In recent Hungarian history, we have often described Hungary as a laboratory of ideologies. Unfortunately, for most of the twentieth century, Hungary served as a laboratory for non-democratic ideologies. It would therefore be refreshing to see Hungary become a laboratory for something different.
Paradoxically, what we have today is a right-wing or center-right governing party that is, in some respects, the most progressive political project Hungary could have imagined. One really has the impression of living under a popular front, with many different parties and movements brought together—perhaps only temporarily—within a single broad political formation.
So, yes, this could be a sign that the old political divisions are no longer particularly useful, at least in this part of Europe and especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Take Romania, for example. Romania is facing a similar situation. What exactly is the Romanian Social Democratic Party today? In many respects, it appears just as populist as its opponents. Or consider Robert Fico, the Slovak prime minister and leader of a supposedly socialist party, whose positions have very little in common with what European socialists and social democrats advocate in Brussels and Strasbourg.
We are entering a new political landscape, and I think that TISZA and Péter Magyar fit quite naturally within it. It is possible that the political center of gravity is now much more right-wing—or at least much less left-wing—than it was twenty or thirty years ago. I would say that the average has shifted both to the right and toward a more nationally minded understanding of political identity.
Many foreign observers were struck on election night in Budapest by the widespread and entirely normal use of Hungarian songs, Hungarian flags, and Hungarian national symbols. But that is simply the reality. We live in a nationalized space. This is not just about Péter Magyar using national symbols. It is about ordinary Hungarians using them. And, I would argue, they do so without any toxic meaning attached to them. This is not about conquering other countries. It is not about seeking revenge for Trianon or for the territorial losses suffered after the First World War. It is simply the idea that being Hungarian is not a bad thing after all.
We like being Hungarian, just as Croats have every right to be proud of being Croatian, Serbs of being Serbian, Slovaks of being Slovak, Poles of being Polish, and so on. This is more about building what Jürgen Habermas called constitutional patriotism—a new patriotism grounded in a more civic and somewhat less ethnic understanding of the nation. This, too, is something new. Europe, as well as the European Union, is very much part of this process. It is impossible to imagine this new Hungarian patriotism without a strong sense of belonging to the European Union. The issue is no longer “we Hungarians versus the EU.” The idea is “we Hungarians within the EU.” The European Union has become inseparable from Hungary.
Today, this is true not only politically but also mentally. This is a new feature compared to twenty or thirty years ago, when such ideas still had to be explained. Now, especially among younger generations—those under thirty or forty—there is an instinctive sense of belonging to a larger European community. This no longer requires explanation. It has become part of the mental framework of these generations, regardless of their individual political opinions.
The State Must Return Where It Is Needed and Retreat Where It Is Not
Central European University building or CEU in Budapest on 27 July 2018.
Finally, if we revisit Hungary five years from now, what would convince you that the country has successfully completed a democratic transition? What concrete indicators should scholars watch most closely when evaluating whether democratic restoration has genuinely taken root?
Assoc. Prof. Stefano Bottoni: The first thing that comes to mind is the education system. History textbooks—or simply textbooks in general—are a very clear indicator of a country’s self-representation. A high school history textbook is compulsory. Students have to study it for their final examinations. It represents a compulsory body of knowledge about their own country. It is the self-representation that the state communicates to its citizens.
When I see that the Hungarian education system is striving to forge citizens rather than subjects—not young people who simply have to learn and memorize things, but individuals who are encouraged to think critically about them—that will be, for me personally, the sign that something has begun to change at a deeper level.
Only by cultivating new citizens—prospective citizens—and transforming today’s teenagers into future citizens over the next five, ten, or twenty years can Hungary seize the unique opportunity to overcome its long tradition of paternalism, nepotism, and state interference in the lives of ordinary people. So, I think this is the most important thing.
Then, of course, there is the legal system, corruption, and what I would call an education in private property and fair capitalism, which is also largely missing from the mental map of most Hungarians. For many Hungarians, the state is still seen as something that must provide a very broad range of services. There is a joke in Hungary nowadays: you have the state where you would not like it, and you do not have the state where you really need it.
For example, when you need a good hospital, you do not have good public hospitals. But you do have the state telling you how to live, how to procreate, and how to run your business. In other words, you have the state interfering in your life where it is not needed at all, while failing to be there for you as a citizen where you genuinely need its presence.
So, I think we have to reverse this balance by restoring the role of the state where it is truly necessary and removing it from areas where the private economy and civil society can perform more effectively.
In this commentary, Nikoletta Syvak examines the political and regional implications of Viktor Orbán’s electoral defeat after sixteen years in power in Hungary. Rather than interpreting the outcome as the end of far-right populism, Syvak argues that the election challenges the long-standing assumption that Orbán’s model of illiberal governance had become politically irreversible. Drawing on the works of Cas Mudde, Ágnes Batory, Zoltán Enyedi, Andrea Pirro, and Milada Vachudova, the analysis situates Hungary within the broader dynamics of democratic backsliding, ethnopopulism, and sovereignist politics across Central and Eastern Europe. The commentary further explores how Poland, Slovakia, Austria, and the Czech Republic continue to sustain political demand for anti-liberal and nationalist agendas despite Hungary’s transition
By Nikoletta Syvak*
Elections are often seen as a moment of political settlement: the campaign has ended, the votes have been counted, and the winner has been determined. But in the case of Hungary, the period following the election may prove more indicative than the day of the vote itself. After sixteen years in power, Viktor Orbán’s defeat is not merely an important milestone in the history of Hungary. Rather, this event shifts how Hungary is perceived throughout Central and Eastern Europe: long considered a shining example of stable right-wing populist rule in the EU, the country is now becoming an example of its susceptibility, as Péter Magyar’s TISZA party defeated Fidesz in the April 2026 elections, marking the end of Orbán’s sixteen-year rule.
Hungary as the End of Inevitable Progress
Over the years, Hungary has been one of the clearest examples of how far-right populism can not only win elections, but also turn into a sustainable model of governance. Orbánism has become not only a political style, but also a specific system that has transformed populist discourse: emphasizing national sovereignty and national interests, conflict with Brussels, Euroscepticism, cultural polarization, control over institutions, and presenting the government as a defender of the “people” from liberal elites.
The classic idea of Cas Mudde (2004) about the “populist zeitgeist” is useful here: populism has ceased to be a marginal phenomenon and has become part of the political mainstream, especially due to the confrontation between the “pure people” and the “corrupt elite” (Mudde, 2004). In the case of Hungary, this logic was not only used in election campaigns, but also transformed into a model of governance.
This is precisely why Ágnes Batory’s (2016) analysis of Fidesz as “populists in power” is particularly important: she demonstrates that the Hungarian case should be understood not only as an electoral success, but also as an institutional restructuring of the political system through constitutional majorities, party control, and the weakening of checks and balances (Batory, 2016). Zoltán Enyedi (2016) also helps us understand Orbánism more precisely: he shows that Fidesz combined populist rhetoric with paternalism and illiberal elitism—that is, it spoke on behalf of “the people” while simultaneously concentrating power in the hands of the ruling elite (Enyedi, 2016).
Therefore, Orbán’s defeat is significant not because it signifies the end of right-wing populism. Such a conclusion would be too hasty. Its significance lies elsewhere: it calls into question the idea of the political irreversibility of the Orbánist model. For a long time, Hungary demonstrated how right-wing populist power could become institutionally entrenched. Now it is showing that even such power can be challenged.
Regions Under Pressure
The significance of the Hungarian elections becomes clearer when viewed within the broader Central and Eastern European context. Andrea Pirro (2014) emphasizes that far-right populist parties in Central and Eastern Europe cannot be analyzed as mere replicas of Western European models: they are shaped by specific post-communist conditions, with distinct historical conflicts, party systems, and conceptions of the nation, the state, and sovereignty (Pirro, 2014).
Poland is the most important comparative case here. Under PiS (2015–2023), it was close to Hungary on issues of sovereignty, traditional values, criticism of Brussels, and conflict with the EU’s liberal mainstream. However, the Polish experience also shows that the defeat of a right-wing populist government does not mean the automatic restoration of liberal democracy. The institutional legacy of the previous government—a politicized media environment, judicial reforms, personnel appointments, and deep social polarization—continues to constrain the new government. This aligns well with Milada Vachudova’s (2020) analysis, which links ethnopopulism in Central Europe to democratic backsliding and the concentration of power (Vachudova, 2020).
Slovakia illustrates another aspect of regional dynamics. Robert Fico and SMER are not direct copies of Fidesz, but the Slovak case demonstrates the resilience of a political strategy built on criticism of liberal elites, a cautious stance toward supporting Ukraine, an emphasis on national interests, and conflict with parts of the European mainstream. This is important because it prevents us from interpreting Orbán’s defeat as the beginning of an automatic “post-populist” phase in the region. Rather, it shows that one center of right-wing populist power has been weakened, but the political demand for a sovereignist and anti-liberal agenda remains.
The Czech Republic adds another important component. Andrej Babiš and ANO represent a more pragmatic and less ideologically rigid form of populism than Fidesz. But ANO’s participation, alongside Fidesz and the Austrian FPÖ, in the creation of the Patriots for Europe alliance, formed in the European Parliament in June 2024, shows that Orbán’s influence spread not only through direct replication of the Hungarian model, but also through a shared political vocabulary: national sovereignty, criticism of Brussels, migration control, and the protection of “ordinary people.”
Although Austria is not part of Eastern Europe, it is important within the Central European context. The FPÖ demonstrates that far-right mobilization remains strong even in more established democratic systems. The FPÖ’s victory in the 2024 parliamentary elections showed that far-right parties in Central Europe retain significant electoral potential.
Therefore, Orbán’s defeat should not be interpreted as a regional decline of far-right populism. Rather, it may signal a shift in its political center: if Hungary is no longer the primary symbol of far-right populist resilience, momentum may shift to other actors—in Austria, Slovakia, or the Czech Republic.
What Comes After Orbánism?
The post-election period is important precisely because populism does not end the moment the votes are counted. Attila Bartha, Zolt Boda, and Dorottya Szikra (2020) propose analyzing populism not only as electoral rhetoric, but also as a mode of governance and political decision-making (Bartha et al., 2020). In this sense, the main question following Orbán’s defeat is not only how Fidesz lost power, but also to what extent the new government will be able to change the system built over the past sixteen years.
The Hungarian case allows us to draw three broader conclusions.
First, far-right populism in Central and Eastern Europe is not disappearing. Its social and political foundations remain significant: distrust of elites, economic uncertainty, cultural anxiety, migration policy, Euroscepticism, and tensions surrounding the war in Ukraine. These factors continue to create space for parties that base their politics on the opposition between “the people” and “the elites,” national sovereignty and external pressure.
Second, Orbán’s defeat weakens the aura of inevitability surrounding right-wing populist rule. If the most enduring example of such a model within the EU can be defeated at the polls, then this model is less stable than its supporters have claimed.
Third, the region’s future will depend not only on whether far-right populists win or lose elections. Equally important is whether democratic alternatives can translate electoral victory into sustainable institutional renewal. Poland has already demonstrated just how difficult this process can be following the departure of PiS. Hungary is now the next test.
For many years, Hungary has been viewed as a laboratory for right-wing populist rule. Following Orbán’s defeat, it may become a laboratory for post-Orbán transition. This does not mean the end of far-right populism in Central and Eastern Europe. But it may mean the end of its strongest illusion: the notion that once institutional dominance is achieved, it is irreversible.
(*) Nikoletta Syvak is a Graduate Student, Department of Political Science and International Relations, East China Normal University (ECNU). Email: syvaknikoletta@gmail.com
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References
Bartha, A., Boda, Z. & Szikra, D. (2020). “When populist leaders govern: Conceptualising populism in policy making.” Politics and Governance, 8(3), 71–81. https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v8i3.2922
Pirro, A. L. P. (2014). “Populist radical right parties in Central and Eastern Europe: The different context and issues of the prophets of the patria.” Government and Opposition, 49(4), 599–628. https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2013.32
In this provocative ECPS interview, Dr. Laurenz Guenther, Research Fellow at the Toulouse School of Economics, challenges dominant interpretations of populism, migration politics, and democratic crisis in Europe. Rather than viewing the rise of the populist radical right primarily as an external threat to liberal democracy, Dr. Guenther argues that it reflects deeper “representation gaps” between mainstream parties and large segments of European electorates, particularly on migration and cultural issues. He contends that European politics is undergoing a profound transformation in which “culture has, overall, become the more dominant dimension of political conflict.” Contrasting with many ECPS interviews emphasizing democratic backsliding and illiberalism, Dr. Guenther argues that liberal democracies can regain legitimacy not by suppressing cultural anxieties, but by responding to them more effectively within democratic and liberal constitutional frameworks.
At a time when much of the scholarly and public debate on populism focuses on democratic backsliding, authoritarian drift, disinformation, and the dangers posed by the populist radical right, Dr. Laurenz Guenther offers a strikingly different interpretation of Europe’s political transformation. Rather than treating right-wing populism primarily as an external threat to liberal democracy, Dr. Guenther argues that its rise reflects deeper failures within liberal-democratic representation itself. In this sense, his perspective stands in contrast to many previous ECPS interviews, which have largely emphasized the illiberal, exclusionary, and anti-pluralist dangers associated with populist movements.
A Research Fellow at the Toulouse School of Economics, Dr. Guenther has become an increasingly influential voice in debates surrounding migration politics, democratic responsiveness, cultural polarization, and the rise of the populist radical right in Europe. Through his research on “representation gaps” and issue voting, he argues that mainstream European parties have become “systematically more culturally liberal than large segments of their electorates,”particularly on immigration. According to Dr. Guenther, this disconnect has created fertile ground for populist challengers who successfully position themselves closer to voter preferences on culturally salient issues.
Central to Dr. Guenther’s argument is the claim that European politics is undergoing a profound structural transformation. As he puts it in this interview, “politics in the average European country has shifted from something like a 60–40 balance in favor of economic issues to perhaps 40–60 in favor of cultural issues. We may even be moving toward something like 70–30.” In his view, “culture has, overall, become the more dominant dimension of political conflict.” This diagnosis sharply departs from conventional analyses that continue to treat class, redistribution, or neoliberal economics as the primary organizing principles of political competition.
Throughout the interview, Dr. Guenther advances several arguments that challenge dominant liberal assumptions surrounding migration and populism. He contends that mainstream parties increasingly lose credibility when they dismiss or underrepresent concerns surrounding migration, demographic change, asylum policy, and cultural identity. “The main threat,” he argues, “comes from failing to represent people,” which can push voters toward increasingly radical alternatives. Unlike many scholars who interpret tougher migration policies primarily as democratic erosion, Dr. Guenther views the recent convergence of mainstream parties toward stricter border and asylum policies as, at least partly, a democratic response to voter preferences.
At the same time, the interview also explores some of the most sensitive and controversial questions currently shaping European politics: the relationship between migration and demographic transformation, the growing salience of Islam and civilizational identity, the future of multiculturalism, and the normalization of culturally conservative politics across Europe. Yet despite his stark assessment of Europe’s political trajectory, Dr. Guenther ultimately rejects the idea that liberal democracy and more restrictive migration policies are necessarily incompatible. “If handled intelligently,” he argues, “Europe does not necessarily have to choose between these two paths.”
Here is the revised version of our interview with Dr. Laurenz Guenther, lightly edited for clarity and readability.
When Mainstream Parties Fail to Respond, Populists Fill the Void
Demonstrators of the Austrian Identitarian movement form a guard of honor of flags in Vienna, Austria on June 11, 2016. Photo: Johanna Poetsch.
Dr. Guenther, welcome! To begin, in your work on “representation gaps,” you argue that mainstream European parties have become systematically more culturally liberal than large segments of their electorates, particularly on immigration. To what extent do you see the rise of populist radical-right parties as reflecting a broader crisis of democratic representation and political responsiveness within liberal democracies?
Dr. Laurenz Guenther: I think these representation gaps, and this “crisis of representation,” as you call it, are one major factor behind the rise of populism. They are certainly not the only factor, but I do think they have contributed significantly to populism’s growing appeal. The failure of mainstream parties to reflect the attitudes of many citizens has created space for new populist parties to step in and represent these voters by proposing policies that are closer to their preferences on issues such as immigration. When these issues then became much more salient — for instance, during the refugee crisis — this provided a shock that led many voters to reconsider their political choices and ultimately support populist parties instead.
Europe’s Political Elites Often Misjudge Public Opinion on Immigration
Your analysis of Germany suggests that the AfD’s rise was driven not only by anti-immigration sentiment itself, but also by the perception that established parties were unwilling to openly engage with public concerns over migration. How can democratic societies address legitimate anxieties surrounding migration while resisting xenophobia, exclusionary nationalism, and anti-minority politics?
Dr. Laurenz Guenther: You are right that the key challenge for mainstream parties is to be very precise in how they approach these issues. Choosing the right policy is largely a matter of accurately assessing public opinion. You do not want to be too far to the right on immigration, but you also need to be sufficiently responsive to public concerns. At the same time, immigration is a multidimensional issue. A party may adopt a much tougher position on certain questions, such as the asylum system, while remaining more lenient on issues like skilled migration.
To find the right balance, parties need a very strong understanding — and reliable measurement — of where citizens actually stand on these questions. My impression is that many mainstream parties do not really have that understanding. There are studies asking politicians directly where they believe voters are positioned, and often even leading politicians misjudge what the majority position actually is. Without that understanding, parties cannot position themselves effectively.
Culture Has Become Europe’s Dominant Political Cleavage
Across your writings, you emphasize the growing salience of the “cultural dimension” of politics. Does this imply that traditional economic left-right divisions are increasingly being displaced by conflicts centered on migration, multiculturalism, identity, religion, and national belonging?
Dr. Laurenz Guenther: Yes, I think this is true to a large extent. As you suggest, the cultural dimension of politics has become significantly more important and, in my view, continues to grow in importance. The economic dimension is still relevant, of course, but its relative weight has declined. Over roughly the last 15 years, politics in the average European country has shifted from something like a 60–40 balance in favor of economic issues to perhaps 40–60 in favor of cultural issues. We may even be moving toward something like 70–30. So, while economics still matters, culture has, overall, become the more dominant dimension of political conflict.
Ignoring Voters’ Concerns Fuels Political Extremism
You argue that even conservative mainstream parties in Europe are often more culturally liberal than the median voter. How should liberal-democratic parties respond to cultural representation gaps without normalizing anti-immigrant rhetoric, Islamophobia, or hostility toward diversity and pluralism?
Dr. Laurenz Guenther: I am personally not convinced that these normalization effects are particularly strong in practice. I think the main threat comes from failing to represent people, which can lead them either to become more extreme in response or to support almost anyone who appears willing to represent their concerns, including the most extreme parties.
This goes back to your earlier question about how far mainstream parties should go in responding to these issues. I would reiterate that parties need a strong understanding of where public opinion actually stands and then position themselves in a way that fills the representation gap. In many cases, I do not think they do this effectively because they lack reliable measurements of public attitudes.
A second point I would emphasize is that mainstream parties need to have some trust in their own voters and in the broader public. One concern I often hear from politicians is that voters may be highly extreme, deeply Islamophobic, or otherwise illiberal, such that representing their views could itself become anti-liberal. But when I look at survey evidence and at what people actually say when asked about their attitudes toward Islam or related issues, I do not get the impression that most people hold highly extreme views. On the contrary, most people have fairly reasonable preferences.
And if you want democracy to function successfully, you ultimately have to trust people to some extent. Even liberal democracy, with all its institutional checks on majority rule, ultimately depends on the assumption that majorities will vote in a broadly reasonable way. If you believe that people are fundamentally unreasonable and should not be represented, leaving large representation gaps open, then it becomes difficult to sustain a genuine democratic outlook. So, even for the sake of democratic consistency, politicians need to trust people at least to some degree and take their preferences seriously.
Europe May See the Rise of Economically Left but Culturally Conservative Parties
Illustration by Lightspring.
In your work on the decline of Die Linke and the rise of Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW, you suggest that culturally conservative left-wing politics may become increasingly electorally viable. Could Europe be entering a new political configuration in which economic redistribution is increasingly combined with restrictive migration and culturally conservative agendas?
Dr. Laurenz Guenther: Yes, I think this could certainly happen. Wagenknecht’s party is a good example. In the beginning, it was quite successful. Although its momentum has weakened somewhat since then, its first result in a German national election was still a considerable achievement for a newly established party. It narrowly missed entering parliament.
In Germany, it is actually very rare for a new party to enter parliament in its first national election. So, compared to other parties — even compared to the AfD or the Greens in their early stages —the BSW performed very well. To me, this demonstrates the electoral potential of combining these kinds of policy positions.
Moreover, in most European countries, we still do not really have parties that combine economically left-wing policies with culturally conservative positions in a consistent way. But I do think this combination has significant potential. As political competition becomes more intense and fragmented, we are seeing more new parties emerge, and I think some parties adopting this formula could become very successful.
Europe’s Migration Shift Reflects the Growing Power of Populist Parties
Many mainstream European parties have recently adopted tougher migration policies, including externalization agreements, stricter asylum rules, and expanded border controls. Do you interpret the EU’s recent migration pact as an attempt to restore democratic legitimacy and public trust—or as evidence that populist radical-right actors have successfully shifted European politics toward a more restrictive and securitized migration paradigm?
Dr. Laurenz Guenther: I think it is more the latter. It appears to me that mainstream parties are primarily responding to pressure from populist right-wing parties, as well as to broader public demands — in other words, to these representation gaps — rather than making an independent decision to become more representative or responsive. The growing electoral strength of populist right-wing parties may have pushed mainstream parties to reconsider their own positions and reflect on whether they made strategic mistakes by adopting such liberal stances on migration. But overall, this shift is driven mainly by political necessity.
In the European Parliament, for example, populist parties have become strong enough that centrist parties are increasingly compelled to cooperate with them on certain issues. I see the new migration pact as a reflection of this broader development, and I suspect this trend will continue.
At the same time, this places mainstream parties in a very difficult position. Even though they are now implementing more restrictive migration policies, they are not especially well-positioned to benefit from them electorally. Many voters are unlikely to reward them because these policy shifts are perceived as responses to populist pressure rather than as genuine convictions.
From the perspective of mainstream parties, this creates the worst of all worlds. They are unable to pursue the policies they would actually prefer — because many mainstream politicians still personally favor more liberal migration policies — yet they also fail to gain significant electoral advantages from adopting tougher measures. To benefit electorally, they would either have needed to shift earlier or would now need to adopt a much stronger repositioning.
Uncertainty About Demographic Transformation Drives Migration Anxiety
Pakistani or Indian migrants in Copenhagen, Denmark, September 22, 2017. Photo: Dreamstime.
Your research suggests that immigration has become one of the most politically salient issues driving right-wing populist growth across Europe. Why do you think migration possesses such extraordinary mobilizing power compared to issues such as inequality, housing, or climate change, which many critics argue are themselves deeply shaped by capitalism and broader structural economic forces?
Dr. Laurenz Guenther: All of the issues you mention are very important, and they matter greatly to voters as well. It is not that issues such as inequality, housing, or climate change are unimportant; rather, immigration appears to matter even more to many voters. One reason for this — and I think this is something that is still not openly discussed, though I suspect it will become a major debate in the future because it touches on very sensitive questions — is that immigration is closely connected to demographic change.
The migration Europe is experiencing is not random. A significant share comes from non-European regions such as the Middle East, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa. If these migration patterns continue over a long period of time, they could fundamentally reshape the demographic structure of European societies in the long run.
This raises a number of important questions that, in my view, are often not openly addressed because of political sensitivities. Liberal democracies tend to understand people primarily as individuals, and discussions about ethnicity or the ethnic composition of societies are often viewed as potentially dangerous, especially given Europe’s historical experiences with exclusionary nationalism and discrimination.
At the same time, this reluctance to engage with such questions means that many concerns people consider legitimate are not openly discussed. As a result, citizens often do not clearly understand where political parties stand, nor do they easily find what they regard as reasonable research about how demographic changes may affect society over time. This creates a considerable degree of uncertainty, and when people face uncertainty, they often become highly risk averse. I think this uncertainty is one of the key factors driving much of the fear or caution surrounding immigration.
Migration Politics Is Reshaping Traditional Party Loyalties
In your writings, you argue that voters increasingly engage in “issue voting,” particularly on migration and cultural questions. Does this trend weaken traditional party loyalties and create structurally favorable conditions for populist outsiders, anti-establishment movements, and increasingly polarized democratic politics?
Dr. Laurenz Guenther: Yes, it currently does have those implications. But in principle, it would not necessarily have to. In my view, the reason issue voting produces these effects today is precisely because of the representation gaps we discussed earlier. Take, for example, a voter who historically had strong ties to the SPD but now votes primarily based on immigration policy. That voter may no longer feel able to support the SPD because, on immigration, most people hold positions that are considerably more conservative than those of the party itself. So, issue voting weakens traditional party loyalties under these conditions, but only because parties such as the SPD have positioned themselves in a comparatively liberal way on these questions.
Liberal Democracy Can Respond to Migration Concerns Without Becoming Illiberal
One of the central arguments advanced by liberal-democratic parties is that populist radical-right actors threaten institutional checks and balances, minority protections, and democratic pluralism once in power. Yet you argue that this critique loses credibility if mainstream parties appear unwilling to acknowledge issues voters consider important. How can democracies balance responsiveness to majority concerns with the protection of liberal norms, human rights, and minority communities?
Dr. Laurenz Guenther: I think this question is very similar to issues we discussed earlier, especially regarding where exactly the line should be drawn. That, in many ways, is the central challenge. One more concrete point I would make is that anti-immigration attitudes among many citizens are, in my view, largely driven by attitudes toward asylum seekers specifically. If you ask people whether there should be fewer or more asylum seekers coming into the country, most people tend to say fewer rather than more. But when you ask about other forms of immigration — and most migration actually takes place outside the asylum system — the responses are often much more moderate. Many people say they are generally fine with it, or that they might prefer slightly more or slightly less immigration, but there is no comparably strong tendency. So, when people describe themselves as “anti-immigration,” what they often mean in practice is that they want fewer asylum seekers.
For that reason, I think that a much more restrictive asylum system — for example, limiting asylum numbers to levels similar to those of 20 years ago, or designing an asylum framework that operates primarily within Europe — would likely appease many citizens and close a large part of the representation gap without necessarily being anti-liberal.
After all, this was effectively the kind of system many European countries had in the past. Before the signing of the New York Protocol, asylum systems limited largely to Europe were common across the continent. And if you look at Germany 20 years ago, the asylum system was considerably more restrictive than it is today. Germany experienced an asylum crisis in the 1990s during the Yugoslav wars, and afterward the constitution was amended specifically to prevent a similar situation from recurring.
The constitutional framework that emerged was extremely restrictive and essentially stated that anyone arriving from a safe country — which in practice applied to almost everyone entering Germany — would not qualify for asylum. Later, under Merkel, it was argued that international agreements such as the Geneva Convention overrode this constitutional interpretation. According to many critics, including some legal scholars in Germany, it was this reinterpretation that made the asylum system much more liberal in practice and created broader opportunities for migration.
So, in Germany’s case, a different interpretation of existing law alone could significantly tighten the asylum system again. It might not even require major new legislation and would, in effect, return the country to a situation more similar to that of 20 years ago. And 20 years ago, Germany was still a liberal democracy, just as it is today. It was not a hostile or oppressive environment for migrants.
Therefore, I do think it is possible to strike the right balance — one that avoids anything resembling fascism or authoritarianism while still responding to public concerns. Again, the reason I believe this is possible is that, if you actually look at what Germans and other Europeans say about immigration, very few people hold genuinely extreme views. Many of the concerns they express are, from their perspective, relatively reasonable.
Many Europeans Increasingly View Migration Through a Civilizational Lens
For right-wing populists in the Western world, “the others” primarily include immigrants but also extend to “welfare scroungers,” regional minorities, individuals with “non-traditional” lifestyles, communists, and others. Photo: Shutterstock.
Across Europe, debates over migration increasingly intersect with concerns about Islam, security, demographic change, and national identity. To what extent do you believe contemporary anti-migration politics should be understood as part of a broader civilizational and cultural backlash against multiculturalism and demographic diversity?
Dr. Laurenz Guenther: We touched on this a little earlier, and I do think this is a key component of the debate. It is important that you raise this point, because I do not think it is discussed often enough. What we are witnessing in many European countries is significant demographic and ethnic change driven by patterns of immigration, the regions migrants are coming from, and differences in birth rates. Many people — on both sides of the debate — interpret these developments as part of a broader civilizational or cultural struggle. In many European societies, populations of African and Middle Eastern descent are growing, and Muslim communities are becoming more numerous as well.
Given Europe’s long history of conflict between civilizations and religious groups, these developments make many people uneasy. For that reason, the issue needs to be discussed openly and addressed seriously.
One point I have written about is the importance of political parties communicating a clearer sense of where they believe these developments are ultimately leading. The population of North African and Middle Eastern countries exceeds one billion people — larger than Europe’s population combined — and these regions generally have much younger populations, whereas Europe is aging rapidly.
There is also a strand of liberal thinking that argues borders should effectively be abolished and that people should be free to move wherever they wish. I do not think most political parties explicitly advocate such a position, but these ideas are present in public debate, and ordinary citizens encounter them regularly in newspapers and political discussions.
If such policies were ever fully implemented, Europe would, over time, become majority Muslim and majority composed of people of African and Middle Eastern descent. Many Europeans would strongly oppose such an outcome. If people begin to feel that this is the direction developments are heading, then the political reaction could become far more intense than the current rise of right-wing populism.
So, the question many people are asking is: where is this process ultimately leading? How much demographic and ethnic change is expected? Is there some kind of endpoint, or are these demographic shifts expected to continue indefinitely? If current trends persisted over many decades, then in some countries Muslims could eventually become a majority among younger generations.
The problem is that liberals often do not openly address these long-term questions. It is extremely important to have a serious discussion about them, supported by realistic projections and rigorous research examining the potential social consequences of demographic change.
At the same time, this is also a very difficult topic for researchers. Conducting serious research on these issues can be extremely challenging because, if findings portray ethnic change negatively or identify tensions associated with it, publishing such work while maintaining one’s academic career may become very difficult.
Europe’s Populist Right Has Become a Stable Electoral Force
In your analysis of the European Parliament elections, you argue that culturally conservative parties are likely to continue rising until the “cultural representation gap” narrows. Does this suggest that the normalization of populist radical-right politics is becoming a long-term structural feature of European democracy rather than a temporary protest phenomenon?
Dr. Laurenz Guenther: Yes, I think so. In the beginning, many mainstream parties were effectively betting that right-wing populism was simply a temporary bubble that would eventually burst. But that expectation has clearly failed. By now, survey data also show that supporters of right-wing populist parties are often among the most loyal voters — people who say they will continue voting for these parties no matter what happens. So, I think these parties are now very firmly established within European politics.
Migration Politics Now Mirrors Everyday Public Sentiment
Your work highlights how mainstream parties increasingly converge toward tougher migration positions, citing figures such as Mette Frederiksen, Emmanuel Macron, and Friedrich Merz. Do you see this convergence as democratic adaptation to voter concerns—or as evidence that populist radical-right narratives are increasingly hegemonizing European political discourse?
Dr. Laurenz Guenther: It is, in many ways, both. I certainly see populist actors as the main driving force behind this shift. They succeeded in making migration and cultural issues far more politically salient, and public debate has increasingly moved closer to the way populists initially framed these questions.
Part of the reason may simply be that populists often discuss these issues in a language that resembles how many ordinary people talk about them in everyday life — whether in informal conversations, bars, or other social settings. And at some point, media debates and broader public discourse inevitably adapt to public preferences and concerns. From that perspective, the response of mainstream parties can also be interpreted as a democratic adaptation — an attempt to respond to shifting voter priorities and broader public sentiment.
Democratic Stability Depends on Taking Citizens’ Concerns Seriously
Much contemporary debate frames populism primarily as a threat to liberal democracy. Yet your work suggests populist success may also reflect unresolved failures within liberal democracy itself. Do you think European democracies can regain stability and legitimacy without fundamentally rethinking representation, participation, and democratic responsiveness on culturally divisive issues such as migration and integration?
Dr. Laurenz Guenther: Yes, it is definitely possible. And this ultimately comes back to my understanding of public opinion: namely, that the concerns many people — indeed, most people — have are generally reasonable, and that it is entirely possible to build political systems and adopt policy solutions that respond to those concerns. In fact, I would argue that, only a few decades ago, many European countries already had systems and policy frameworks that functioned in this way. So, in a sense, we already know how to do it. There are also countries today that have immigration policies which are broadly popular while still remaining clearly within liberal-democratic boundaries and far from anything extreme. Mette Frederiksen’s Denmark would be one example, and Sweden’s recent policymaking would be another.
Europe Can Strengthen Borders Without Abandoning Liberal Democracy
And finally, Dr. Guenther, looking ahead, do you believe Europe is moving toward a new political equilibrium in which migration restriction, stronger borders, and culturally conservative policies become normalized across both mainstream and populist parties—or do you still see the possibility of a renewed democratic consensus grounded in pluralism, human rights, diversity, and inclusive multicultural citizenship?
Dr. Laurenz Guenther: If handled intelligently, Europe does not necessarily have to choose between these two paths or treat them as mutually exclusive. I certainly believe we will see stronger borders and more restrictive asylum policies in the future. At the same time, I do not think that other forms of immigration necessarily need to be restricted, nor do I see a strong electoral incentive for parties to target them more broadly.
So, I think immigration policymaking can become much more specific and targeted, focusing primarily on restricting those forms of immigration that are perceived as having negative effects on European societies. Immigration can, of course, have both very positive and very negative effects, and much depends on who immigrates.
In my view, Europe is currently experiencing some forms of immigration that do have negative consequences, but if we look at immigration overall, I think these cases still represent a relatively small share. Addressing them therefore requires a very specific and carefully targeted policy response. And I think doing so is entirely compatible with the broader principles you mentioned. It is consistent with liberal values in general. So, while I do expect Europe to move toward more conservative immigration policies in certain areas, I still believe liberal democracy has a strong chance of being preserved.
In this ECPS interview, Dr. Aaron Winter examines how the 2026 UK elections reveal not simply electoral volatility, but the accelerating mainstreaming of far-right discourse within British political life. Reflecting on Reform UK’s rise, anti-immigration politics, Brexit, Islamophobia, and the crisis of democratic legitimacy, Dr. Winter argues that Britain is increasingly witnessing “the mainstreaming of the far right” through narratives once considered politically marginal. Drawing on his scholarship on racism, populism, and “reactionary democracy,” he warns that anti-migrant politics now functions as a broader vehicle for exclusionary nationalism, white victimhood, and democratic erosion. The interview explores the normalization of “liberal racism,” the racialization of the “left behind,” and the growing convergence between establishment politics and reactionary nationalism in contemporary Britain.
The 2026 local and devolved elections in the United Kingdom unfolded amid mounting concerns over democratic legitimacy, political representation, and the accelerating normalization of far-right discourse within mainstream public life. Against a backdrop of Labour’s declining support in key constituencies, the electoral rise of Reform UK, intensifying anti-immigration rhetoric, and growing polarization around nationalism and belonging, Britain increasingly appears caught in what many scholars describe as a broader crisis of liberal democracy. It is within this context that the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) speaks with Dr. Aaron Winter, Senior Lecturer in Sociology (Race and Anti-Racism) at Lancaster University and Research Associate at the University of the Witwatersrand, whose influential scholarship has long examined racism, populism, Islamophobia, reactionary politics, and the mainstreaming of the far right.
In this wide-ranging interview, Dr. Winter argues that contemporary British politics cannot be understood simply through the language of protest voting or electoral fragmentation. Rather, he contends that Britain is witnessing “the mainstreaming of the far right,” in which immigration, racism, and reactionary politics have increasingly become “the focal points of political discussion and ‘debate’” across both establishment and insurgent political actors. According to Dr. Winter, what is especially striking is not merely the electoral growth of Reform UK, but the extent to which “politics is now increasingly conducted from the center-right through the use of ideas that originate with the far right.”
Drawing on his collaborative work with Aurelien Mondon, Dr. Winter examines how overt forms of racism historically associated with fascism and white supremacy have increasingly been replaced by “liberal, colorblind racism and Islamophobia” articulated through the language of free speech, women’s rights, national security, and the protection of liberal values. He warns that this process has steadily expanded the political legitimacy of exclusionary nationalism while simultaneously hollowing out democratic alternatives. “We have hollowed out the left while simultaneously accelerating the trajectory toward authoritarianism and fascism,” he argues.
Particularly significant in this interview is Dr. Winter’s analysis of how the discourse of the “white working class” and the “left behind” has functioned as a vehicle for racialized nationalism after Brexit. He contends that contemporary British politics increasingly revolves around a much more explicit form of ethno-nationalism: “What we witnessed this weekend in London with the rallies,” he states, “is the emergence of a much more overt white supremacist and ethno-nationalist discourse operating irrespective of, and far beyond, class.”
The interview also explores the intersections between Brexit, Islamophobia, austerity, anti-migrant politics, and democratic decline, situating Britain within broader international patterns visible in Trumpism, European radical-right populism, and authoritarian nationalism. Throughout the conversation, Dr. Winter repeatedly emphasizes that the crisis facing Britain is not simply electoral, but structural: a crisis of capitalism, democracy, and political imagination itself. Yet he also insists that alternatives remain possible—provided democratic politics moves toward “radical reform, anti-racism, and opposition to inequality.”
Here is the revised version of our interview with Dr. Aaron Winter, lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Britain Is Mainstreaming the Far Right
Kill the Bill protesters gather in Parliament Square, London, on July 5, 2021, opposing the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which critics argued would expand police powers over public protests in the UK. Photo: Dreamstime.
Dr. Aaron Winter, welcome. To begin, the 2026 local and devolved elections exposed what many analysts describe as the long-term fragmentation of British politics, with Labour’s support collapsing in key areas while Reform UK consolidated backing through anti-immigration rhetoric, anti-establishment anger, and broader cultural grievances. How do you interpret these elections within the framework of your work on “reactionary democracy”? Do they represent a temporary cycle of protest politics, or evidence of a more durable restructuring of British political culture?
Dr. Aaron Winter: That’s a very good question. I do not tend to see this, broadly speaking, as a protest vote, although there are certainly elements of protest voting within it, nor do I necessarily see it as fragmentation at this stage. Rather, I think it reflects a number of overlapping factors and processes unfolding simultaneously. We are still letting the dust settle after the election, and we are still witnessing battles over the leadership of Labour, along with a number of other developments. So, I do not think we can yet conclusively determine where things are heading before further developments take place.
What I do think we are witnessing, however, is what I have described in my work as the mainstreaming of the far right. Immigration, racism more broadly, and other far-right ideas have increasingly become the focal points of political discussion and “debate”—I use the term somewhat ironically—between the two establishment parties, Labour and the Conservatives, as well as newer far-right parties such as Reform UK and Restore Britain, which is positioned even further to the right.
We do not necessarily see this from the Greens, who appear to be presenting an alternative to this kind of politics. Although they have made gains, much of the attention and many of the electoral gains have instead gone to Reform. I think this development has deep roots. It reflects the way in which protest voting, grievances with the system, crises of democratic trust, and growing inequality have all been absorbed into a narrative that positions Reform and the wider far right as the authentic voice of protest and political alternatives.
Yet, if we look closely, these movements actually uphold virtually every aspect of the status quo—the racial status quo, the social status quo, the political status quo, and the economic status quo. They do not challenge capitalism, inequality, or the racism, nationalism, and white supremacy embedded within the system.
Real Protest Is Treated as Extremism
So, I would not describe them as a protest vote, even though they have certainly been framed that way, which I find very interesting. By contrast, the Greens have not been positioned in this manner and have instead faced sustained attacks on various grounds, including allegations of antisemitism and accusations directed at their leader, Zack Polanski. Meanwhile, Reform has not faced the same level of sustained scrutiny for fascist statements, Holocaust denial, or rhetoric that implicitly supports both structural and physical violence.
I find this contrast very revealing because it demonstrates how the system perceives protest differently depending on who is making it. Those who genuinely challenge the system—such as the Greens or pro-Palestinian solidarity movements, as we saw during the Nakba Day rally alongside the Unite the Kingdom far-right march—are labeled extremists, supporters of terrorism, antisemites, or racists. But when the far right mobilizes, it is instead framed as expressing the legitimate concerns of “the people.”
So, protest becomes something that can be domesticated and democratized if it aligns with the broader status quo and dominant political agenda. But if it genuinely threatens the system, it is treated as extremism. And that is deeply ironic at a moment when we are witnessing the mainstreaming of the far right.
Far-Right Ideas Now Shape Mainstream Politics
Nigel Farage speaking in Dover, Kent, UK, on May 28, 2024, in support of the Reform Party, of which he is President. Photo: Sean Aidan Calderbank.
In your work on the mainstreaming of the far right, you argue that the boundary between mainstream conservatism and reactionary politics has become increasingly porous. To what extent did the 2026 elections demonstrate not merely the rise of Reform UK, but the deeper normalization of far-right discourses across the broader political spectrum?
Dr. Aaron Winter: Just to begin by referring back to the previous question, when you asked where I think we are heading, I would say that—worse than the fragmentation of politics—we are moving further down the road toward the mainstreaming of the far right and fascism.
I think this is a product of the blurring of political boundaries. In my work with Aurelien Mondon, we have argued that traditional forms of racism—what is generally understood as overt and explicit racism—had historically been publicly denounced. In their place emerged forms of liberal, colorblind racism and Islamophobia that claim to target culture and ideas rather than race itself.
This discourse often presents itself as an effort to fight illiberal racism by expressing such concerns in more manageable, liberal, and socially acceptable terms. So instead of openly calling for deportations, there are calls for stricter bordering policies. Instead of explicit exterminationist rhetoric, there are calls for deportation and the construction of supposedly moderate and liberal bulwarks against the far right entering government or taking to the streets to commit harassment and violence.
Yet over time, this liberal framework—which simultaneously portrays the far right as illiberal and incompatible with liberal democracy—often ends up treating Muslims and migrants in ways remarkably similar to the far right itself. The difference is that Muslims and migrants do not possess the kind of white or right-wing privilege that can be normalized and represented by establishment parties claiming to be liberal, tolerant, or mainstream conservative.
What has happened over time is that liberal tropes surrounding free speech, women’s rights, and the need to represent the so-called “silent majority” or the “left behind” have increasingly legitimized these ideas. By repeatedly legitimizing them, the far right has been able to co-opt this liberal racism and expand within the political space opened up by a mainstream that believes—or pretends—that it is opposing them.
As a result, the far right has become increasingly mainstream, increasingly legitimate, and increasingly emboldened. We are seeing this reflected not only in electoral polling, but also in far-right mobilization on the streets.
Liberal Racism Expanded the Overton Window
I often reflect on a quote from Hillary Clinton in The Guardian in 2018, where she argued that the only way to stop “right-wing populists”—by which she essentially meant the far right—was to control immigration. I have returned to this quote repeatedly in both my teaching and my research. What exactly is it about the far right that establishment figures find objectionable? It is clearly not simply racism or xenophobia. Rather, it is the threat these movements pose to establishment power.
Their ideas, however, remain acceptable to a certain degree. The concern among establishment actors is that they will lose political ground, that party systems will fragment, and that established parties will decline in support, funding, power, and influence. There is also the argument that if openly far-right actors come to power, conditions for migrants will become even worse. But that is not really a meaningful choice for migrants—to ask whether they prefer things to be bad or even worse.
What is largely absent from these discussions are questions of rights, dignity, freedom, liberation, and the ability simply to live without constantly being treated as a scapegoat or proxy for all of society’s problems.
So, what worries me is that liberal racism, combined with the exceptionalization of the far right, has steadily shifted the political center further to the right and expanded the Overton window. Politics is now increasingly conducted from the center-right through the use of ideas that originate with the far right.
We have hollowed out the left while simultaneously accelerating the trajectory toward authoritarianism and fascism. And people are being harmed in the process. To me, that is far more important than whether establishment parties lose power or whether the political system changes. The system does need to change—but it requires radical reform, not the co-option, pandering, and parroting of far-right politics.
Racism Became Compensation for Inequality
Anti-racism demonstrators march through central London during the National Demo for UN Anti-Racism Day, protesting racism and Donald Trump’s policies. Photo: John Gomez / Dreamstime.
Reform UK’s electoral appeal appears strongly rooted in anxieties over migration, asylum, and national identity. Some analyses identified “anger over immigration/asylum” as one of the major “recruiting sergeants” for Reform voters. How should we understand the relationship between economic insecurity and racialized nationalism in contemporary Britain? Is immigration functioning less as a policy issue than as a symbolic vehicle for wider civilizational anxieties?
Dr. Aaron Winter: That is an extremely important issue and question. What we hear in this narrative—and part of the reason why far-right ideas and constituencies perceived as leaning toward the far right can become valuable and acceptable to establishment parties, particularly Labour—is the claim that this represents a cry against class inequality or an expression of a desire to re-engage with the political system. The problem with that argument is that, even if people are experiencing socioeconomic inequality, it is not only white people or right-wing constituencies who are affected. And those inequalities are not going to be solved by scapegoating migrants or by turning toward far-right parties that ultimately serve capitalist interests. Capitalism, rather than migrants, is responsible for much of the socioeconomic inequality people are experiencing.
It is also very revealing how political rhetoric focuses on “small boats.” The phrase itself emphasizes how small and vulnerable these boats actually are. Yet there is no comparable effort to confront banks, corporations, or the larger systems and structures of power.
What has happened, particularly since 2010, is that Britain experienced austerity alongside deepening cuts to the welfare state, benefits, labor rights, wages, pensions, healthcare, education, and many other areas. These developments have made life extremely difficult for many people.
Some individuals may respond to these conditions by blaming migrants, but many of those affected are themselves migrants or the children of migrants. Others are demanding a left-wing political alternative capable of addressing structural socioeconomic inequality and the inequalities produced by neoliberal capitalism, corporatism, militarism, and racism.
The politics of the right is not going to solve these problems. At a certain point, what happened was that the far right—initially through the Conservatives and now increasingly through Labour—effectively offered racism as compensation to largely white populations experiencing poverty, socioeconomic insecurity, and inequality. Or, at the very least, they claimed that racism was what these constituencies wanted. But that does not solve the underlying problems. Instead, it undermines solidarity between the white working class and the racialized working class, who are also British. This is a very serious, dangerous, and damaging form of divide-and-rule politics that will only intensify socioeconomic, racial, and regional inequalities.
I think we really need to confront this narrative because, too often, when people challenge the idea of the “left-behind white working class,” they are accused of ignoring “the people.” Yet the discourse surrounding populism frequently treats this constituency as though it represents the entire demos, rather than recognizing it as one increasingly valuable political constituency that has been—and likely will continue to be—neglected by economic and political policy.
So, we urgently need to get a handle on this, because racism is becoming worse while socioeconomic inequality is not improving. And that is why we need to understand both the far right and this broader narrative as functional rather than descriptive.
Cultural Anxiety Replaced Material Politics
A “Stop the Boats” Union Jack flag displayed on a building in Weston-super-Mare, North Somerset, England, on August 27, 2025. Photo: Andre Whaker / Dreamstime.
In “Whiteness, Populism and the Racialisation of the Working Class,” you critique the construction of the “white working class” as the authentic embodiment of “the people.” Did the 2026 elections reproduce this same racialized populist narrative? And how has the language of the “left behind” continued to legitimize exclusionary politics after Brexit?
Dr. Aaron Winter: That was a dominant narrative around Brexit. It had actually been a significant narrative in the 2000s, when the British National Party (BNP) was rising in former industrial and deindustrialized areas, including parts of East London.At the time, the Labour government, under Community Secretary John Denham, argued that if these identities, celebrations, and cultural concerns were not addressed and prioritized in the same way as those of other groups, their grievances could become dangerous. It was, in many ways, a kind of anti-multicultural reversal.
This was not only a BNP narrative; it was also reflected in far-right studies and political science literature that emphasized demand-side explanations, arguing that people feared ethnic competition and becoming the “losers of modernity,” and so on. What struck me at the time—I had just finished my PhD—was watching academics and the BNP effectively using the same narrative: one diagnostically, though functionally, and the other strategically. As a result, the “white working class” and “left behind” narrative came to dominate political discourse throughout Brexit and continued to do so until quite recently. It was somewhat less pronounced in this most recent election.
This election was different in certain respects. And I should add that this discussion also connects to arguments made by figures such as Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford, as well as Arlie Hochschild in the United States, about fears of change and threats to identity. These arguments were often framed as socioeconomic in nature. But they largely ignored elites. They ignored abstention among those below the poverty line and lower on the socioeconomic scale. And what they also did was to substitute material conditions with cultural anxieties. Those are not the same thing.
What I think has happened more recently—particularly what we witnessed this weekend in London with the rallies—is the emergence of a much more overt white supremacist and ethno-nationalist discourse operating irrespective of, and far beyond, class. At the same time, we saw something else that is part and parcel of this normalization. I always believed that the “white working class” narrative used white inequality as a proxy and shortcut toward a broader white victimization narrative, which the far right has long embraced.
What has happened now is that this discourse has become so normalized that it is framed around ideas such as “our right to be British,” “our flags,” and similar themes. Simultaneously, there is a deliberate highlighting of racialized and migrantized participants in the Unite the Kingdom rally in order to claim: “See, we’re not racist.” And then they accuse the opposing side at the rallies—not in a simple binary sense, but those on the other side—of antisemitism and hate. In effect, they reverse the accusation, declass the issue, and attempt to balance overt white nationalism and fascism with a populist narrative centered on “ordinary people.”
I am not saying class has disappeared. I think Labour continues to make these arguments because it remains one of the few remaining connections to its historical legacy of representing workers and the left. So, they continue to say: “We’re going to fix inequality” and “We’re going to address the cost-of-living crisis.”
Reform Thrived on Mainstream Narratives
A placard urging voters to support Reform UK candidate Richard Pearse during the UK general election campaign in Weston-super-Mare on July 4, 2024. Photo: Keith Ramsey / Dreamstime.
Much commentary surrounding Reform UK frames its rise as a revolt against metropolitan liberal elites. Yet your work suggests that such narratives often obscure the role of mainstream institutions, media, and political actors in legitimizing reactionary discourse. To what extent are Labour and Conservative elites themselves implicated in creating the ideological conditions for Reform’s success?
Dr. Aaron Winter: You asked earlier about Reform gaining votes, and I made the point about demand versus supply.We have an elite media and political ecosystem that has done little more than echo and parrot the far right. Academics, commentators, and political actors have repeatedly argued that this is what parties must do to survive, that this is where the votes are, and that this is what public opinion supposedly demands. So, it is hardly surprising that everyone is now talking about these issues and that Reform has benefited from it.
Part of the reason Reform has benefited is that, despite claims that it is “shaking up” politics, what we effectively have are two establishment parties and Reform, all advancing different versions of the same political agenda. That, in itself, represents a crisis of democracy rather than a genuine protest alternative, as I noted earlier.
What is also important is that many of these narratives are fundamentally false: the idea that this is purely a protest movement, that it is exclusively about the white working class, or that it is fundamentally rooted in socioeconomic inequality. There is also the recurring depiction of certain places as no longer “really” Britain or “really” England—places portrayed as mixed, lost, or transformed into so-called “no-go zones.” I hear this rhetoric constantly about London.
It is part of a strategy of divide and rule. But it also reflects an idea the far right has spent years carefully developing and refining: the notion that the “real people”—their constituency, largely white and sharing the same national identity as the nation itself—are perpetually under threat. Increasingly, this takes on an almost apocalyptic tone, expressed through “replacement” theories and related conspiratorial narratives.
Reform’s targeting of London is particularly revealing in this regard. They do not simply attack metropolitan elites; they portray London itself as a city that has been “taken over,” while simultaneously claiming that “real working-class Londoners” are now afraid to go outside. So, at the same time, London is represented as a place containing the last remaining white working-class communities who have supposedly “had enough.”
You can see the contradictions running throughout this discourse. It is similar to the idea that Nigel Farage is somehow a man of the people and a representative of the working class, despite being a private-school-educated former finance professional with considerable wealth, multiple jobs, and substantial property holdings.
Labour Cannot Outflank Reform
There is a constant deflection onto questions of socioeconomic inequality, elites, and “the people.” What is particularly striking is that tech billionaires, financiers, and media moguls are somehow excluded from the category of elites, while academics and migrants are cast in that role instead. Meanwhile, the white-only working class is framed simultaneously as both “the people” and “the left behind.”
It is a deeply distorted picture that ultimately makes very little sense. This is also why, when we talk about populism, we need to recognize that this is not a materialist analysis of power, nor is it a class analysis. It is a framing device that performs a political function while containing numerous contradictions.
Yet the media and political establishment seem unable to let go of it. They reproduce it rather than challenge it. And that is precisely why Reform is benefiting. Labour is never going to be as effective as the Conservatives at being Conservative, and neither Labour nor the Conservatives will ever be as effective as Reform at being far right.
As a result, they are losing their own constituencies. I worry particularly about Labour because the left has been hollowed out. We can already see this reflected in the leadership contest now developing. The problem is not only that Labour is losing support to Reform by trying to imitate Reform, but that it has also alienated much of the left and many of its traditional supporters. Aurelien Mondon and I have been arguing this for more than a decade now. The problem simply keeps reproducing itself and becoming worse.
Islamophobia Was Recast as Liberalism
Muslim worshippers gather for Eid al-Adha prayers at Plashet Park in Newham, London, on June 24, 2023. Celebrations marking the Islamic holiday included communal prayers, feasts, and public festivities. Photo: Abdul Shakoor / Dreamstime.
In your analysis of Islamophobia, you distinguish between “illiberal” and “liberal” articulations of anti-Muslim racism. How was this distinction visible during the 2026 election campaigns? Did anti-Muslim rhetoric emerge primarily through overt far-right language, or increasingly through securitized and culturally coded mainstream discourse?
Dr. Aaron Winter: That is a really important question. When we first started working on this, we framed it as liberal versus illiberal racism. In some of our earlier work, we examined the claimed rejection of traditional forms of racism—fascism, race science, segregation, and other explicitly illiberal forms—in favor of more liberal forms that appeared socially acceptable.
The logic was to denounce the far right while allowing more acceptable forms of racism to remain. Islamophobia became the central case study because Islamophobes often insist: “We are not against people; we are against ideas.” In other words, they claim: “We are liberal, they are illiberal.”
The far right in France, Britain, and many other countries used this strategy to shed the baggage and stigma associated with fascism and Nazism—the most overtly illiberal forms of racism within our framework. They would say things such as: “We support gay rights, women’s rights, and free speech.”
At the same time, this was also connected to a kind of free-speech opportunity model and to the claim that there was a so-called “woke conspiracy” preventing right-wing voices from appearing in the media. That is another contradiction within the Farage, Reform, or Tommy Robinson-style narrative: “We’ve been cancelled, we’ve been silenced,” while repeating those claims constantly on national television. They have not been cancelled. Again, it is an opportunity structure and a business model.
Security Politics Enabled Anti-Muslim Racism
But liberals often fell for this logic because they argued: “We must protect free speech, even if we dislike the ideas. Otherwise, pressure will build, and eventually fascism will emerge electorally, institutionally, and on the streets.”Ironically, we largely arrived at this situation through that very liberal approach.
Islamophobia has often been articulated through issues such as women’s rights and gay rights. We see a version of this in the way Israel “pinkwashes” the occupation and genocide. More recently, we have also seen how issues such as grooming gangs and the murder of young girls in the Southport attack have been mobilized as opportunities to target hotels housing asylum seekers or to justify demonstrations framed around “taking back the streets” and “protecting our women.”
These are presented as forms of liberalism and progress. But they clearly draw on a long history of patriarchal protectionism and the use of the “defense” of white women to attack racialized individuals and communities. Historically, we can trace this back to the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings in the United States.
We therefore have to understand this election, the previous election, and the riots that occurred in between as part of a broader process in which Islamophobia and anti-migrant racism are justified through the language of protecting liberal democracy. The far right does not actually want liberal democracy, while establishment parties want to preserve it. But both are increasingly focused on the same supposed threat, albeit in relation to different political ideals.
In that sense, both are doing tremendous harm to migrants and Muslims. And they are not actually protecting democracy because a democratic system would have to represent people equally, rather than representing some at the expense of the dehumanization of others treated as collateral damage.
What has also happened is that, although the United Kingdom is represented through the language of ordinary people, flags, patriotism, nationalism, pride, fear, and anxiety about migration—particularly “illegal migration”—the discussion very quickly shifts from migration in general to Muslims specifically.
There were horrific scenes of Islamophobia at that march. And we have to remember that the other rally was Nakba 78. Pro-Palestinian protest and solidarity movements have increasingly been treated through both liberal and illiberal forms of Islamophobia: they are accused of antisemitism, of rejecting democracy, and of opposing free speech. Yet those marches are not Hamas. They include Jewish people, left-wing people, people of all faiths and none, and participants from many different communities.
But you can see how quickly politics shifts from overtly illiberal rhetoric to liberal securitized responses: “We are going to crack down, proscribe organizations, securitize, ban, accuse, and arrest.” You see a very different political response toward movements supporting racialized communities associated with Muslims than toward movements associated with Islamophobia, racism, and highly narrow and exclusionary definitions of Britishness.
The contrast has been shocking. One thing we may now be starting to see, however, is somewhat more criticism of Unite the Kingdom than in previous moments. I think that may indicate that many people are increasingly frightened by the electoral consequences, rather than genuinely defending the communities being targeted.
Brexit Was About Identity and Belonging
Brexit suporters, brexiteers, in central London holding banners campaigning to leave the European Union on January 15, 2019.
Following Brexit, many expected anti-immigrant politics to lose salience once Britain formally left the European Union. Yet migration appears even more central to political mobilization in 2026. What does this tell us about Brexit itself? Was Brexit ever fundamentally about sovereignty and economics, or was it always primarily about race, identity, and belonging?
Dr. Aaron Winter: I think it was about the latter. On one hand, the fact that Brexit was fundamentally about immigration and certain very particular, ill-formed ideas about sovereignty says a great deal. I say “ill-formed” because the focus was placed almost entirely on the EU as the central power structure, while offering little or no critique of internal structures of power. There was no serious reflection on domestic systems of governance, rights, or law. That is why you ended up with judges being labeled traitors.
What is also interesting is that Brexit did not ultimately “solve” migration. Partly, this is because the immigrants initially being targeted included white European migrants. But once European migration slowed, the speed with which the discourse shifted toward Muslims and Africans—and became overtly racialized—revealed how this politics had already been gradually whitewashing and mainstreaming itself.
Brexit emboldened these politics rather than satisfying them, and that is a very important point. I remember that when Jo Cox was murdered, I thought the country might stop and reflect. Instead, what we witnessed was a shift from individualizing and exceptionalizing a far-right actor and murderer to normalizing the ideas he expressed. Not the violence itself, but the rhetoric and worldview underpinning it.
That made me worry that there would be no real restraints on these politics, no stopping point, and that they would simply continue escalating. What has remained constant throughout has been the anti-immigrant argument, which has become far more extreme and widespread over time. The media bears part of the responsibility for this, as does the political establishment, both of which embraced the idea that immigration was the defining issue shaping public concern and electoral behavior. Yet I never believed that everyone voting in Britain was anti-migrant or racist.
What is also important is that migration and Islamophobia are deeply interconnected. The migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees who are most heavily targeted are often targeted precisely because they are Muslim.
So yes, Brexit was always fundamentally about migration, race, identity, and belonging, even if those concerns also served to obscure broader political and economic dynamics operating behind the scenes. At the same time, Brexit was imagined as something that could “solve” migration in ways it never realistically could. Refugee and asylum flows have continued, whereas many people seemed to believe Brexit itself would somehow end them. But these movements continue for many reasons, including ongoing wars and global crises that people are trying to escape.
I also think that the mainstreaming of racism and far-right politics has depended heavily on the demonization of migrants while simultaneously insisting that this is not racism, but simply a “legitimate concern.” It is framed through rhetoric such as: “Surely we must be able to protect our own borders.” That rhetoric continues to carry political salience regardless of whether the far right itself rises electorally or not. Unless someone directly challenges and delegitimizes that argument, it will continue to grow. But that has not happened, partly because the issue still functions as a distraction from the multiple crises that political institutions are either mismanaging or failing to manage altogether.
Brexit Exposed Britain’s Internal Divisions
The elections also revealed strong territorial fragmentation across the United Kingdom, with Wales, Scotland, and England moving in increasingly divergent political directions. How does the rise of English nationalism intersect with contemporary right-wing populism? And does Brexit continue to deepen centrifugal pressures within the Union?
Dr. Aaron Winter: We saw, particularly in the 2010s and in response to the Scottish independence referendum, the emergence of a form of unionism alongside calls for an English parliament and a stronger English nationalism. In part, this was an attempt to compete with devolution, but it was also driven by the perception that “we,” as English people, had somehow lost out.
At the same time, when we talk about Britain and Brexit, we often obscure the very real and significant differences within the United Kingdom itself. One important point is that, if Brexit had truly been a straightforward expression of white working-class alienation, disenfranchisement, and socioeconomic inequality, then Scotland, proportionally speaking, would also have voted for Brexit. But that simply did not happen.
Scotland has articulated a form of nationalism framed in much more progressive terms compared to English nationalism and to dominant forms of British nationalism more broadly. But that does not mean there are no problems in Scotland, Wales, or elsewhere regarding growing anti-immigrant sentiment.
In some places, particularly Scotland, there have been attempts to clamp down on and address these developments. But we have to watch this carefully, and we need to avoid overgeneralizing. At the same time, we also need to avoid portraying certain places as entirely exceptional, as though Scotland somehow has no such problems at all.
Likewise, we should not assume that the so-called “red wall” in the north of England is, by definition, uniformly working class and racist. We need more localized analysis, we need to actually speak to people, and we need to move beyond polling designed purely for political utility, electoral strategy, or tactical advantage. We need to understand people more seriously while also challenging narratives that scapegoat others.
Capitalism and Democracy Are Both in Crisis
Photo: Iryna Kushnarova.
The 2026 elections appear to reveal not simply partisan volatility, but a deeper crisis of democratic legitimacy, trust, and representation. Do you see parallels between Britain today and wider international trends visible in Trumpism, European radical-right populism, and authoritarian nationalism elsewhere?
Dr. Aaron Winter: Yes, I do, and I think this is fundamentally a crisis of both capitalism and democracy. The problem, however, is that the solutions currently being offered are not more egalitarian or genuinely democratic alternatives, but rather more unequal forms of capitalism alongside a model of democracy in which political representation increasingly exists only through different variations of bordering politics, conservatism, or pro-business agendas. I think, that is extremely dangerous, both for the people at the sharp end of these politics and for democracy itself. It is not a healthy democratic condition. In fact, democracy is being further degraded in response to the crisis.
Part of this is also tied to how protest and the “protest vote” are framed. We are seeing something somewhat different in the United States, where there has long been a very narrow political spectrum, consisting essentially of a centrist party and a right-wing party that has moved even further to the right. Since the Clinton era, the Democratic Party itself has also shifted rightward.
We have seen something similar with Labour in Britain, although Labour did briefly move back toward the left under Jeremy Corbyn. We do not really see an equivalent development within the Democratic Party in the United States.
So, while the crisis of polarization is certainly real in terms of how politics is experienced, performed, and articulated, it is not necessarily reflected in a major ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans on a range of issues, whether concerning Israel or the welfare state, for example.
I also think the crisis of democracy will not be resolved if political systems continue offering different versions of essentially the same politics, without creating space and oxygen for genuine forms of protest—whether on the streets, through elections, within party politics, or at local and national levels.
And we are seeing similar tendencies across the world. At the same time, we still need to distinguish between the different contexts in which these developments are unfolding. I do not particularly like framing this as a singular “populist wave.” What I do see, however, is the ongoing mainstreaming of far-right ideas. At the same time, in many cases, the status quo is being reaffirmed rather than challenged, while democracy is being degraded rather than revitalized. And I think that is a very clear international pattern.
Britain Needs Radical Democratic Reform
And lastly, Dr. Winter, your recent work argues that the mainstreaming of reactionary politics depends not only on extremist actors, but on the normalization of their discourse within public life. Looking ahead to the next UK general election, do you believe Britain is approaching a moment in which reactionary nationalism becomes hegemonic—or do you still see the possibility for a genuinely pluralistic and anti-racist democratic alternative to emerge?
Dr. Aaron Winter: It is an excellent and very important question. I certainly want such an alternative to emerge. But I think that, unless politics becomes centered around radical reform, anti-racism, and opposition to inequality, things are not going to change.
I am deeply worried about the movement toward both reactionary democracy and increasing authoritarianism and fascism. At the same time, however, I have consistently argued in my work with Aurelien Mondon, as well as in my broader scholarship, that we cannot simply fearmonger about these developments while ignoring the fact that the political center itself wants to hold. And it wants to hold without fundamentally changing anything.
I am even hearing terms now such as “radical centrism” and the “radical middle,” and I think these are currently very dangerous ideas because they effectively suggest that the choice is between fascism or more of the same—only slightly worse because we are told it is necessary in order to fight fascism.
But that is not a political trajectory that supports radical reform, structural transformation, anti-racism, or equality in any meaningful sense. We really have to push for those things. We need a healthy democracy, we need a genuinely critical alternative, and we need to stop not only the march of racism, reactionary politics, and fascism, but also the continued reaffirmation of the narratives that brought us to this point. That includes mainstream narratives about the “left behind,” about liberalism versus illiberalism, about the so-called “populist wave,” and about the idea that we must further compromise an already compromised system simply to prevent something worse, while preserving a political order that is increasingly no longer fit for purpose.
In this piece, Dr. João Ferreira Dias examines how the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has increasingly been transformed within Europe into a broader struggle over identity, immigration, Islam, nationalism, and political belonging. Focusing on Nakba Day mobilizations in London, Dr. Dias argues that Gaza now functions as a symbolic battlefield onto which competing ideological camps project their anxieties, fears, and moral claims. For parts of the progressive left, Palestine represents anti-colonial resistance and counter-hegemonic struggle; for the radical populist right, it reinforces narratives of Islamization, multicultural crisis, and civilizational decline. The article ultimately warns that when international conflicts are absorbed into domestic culture wars, liberal democracy itself becomes increasingly polarized, emotionally charged, and politically fragile.
On May 16, 2016, London became the stage of a culture war made material, as pro-Palestinian demonstrations and anti-Muslim, anti-immigration mobilizations occupied the same symbolic and physical space. Nakba Day thus became more than a moment of historical remembrance: it fueled social, ideological, and affective polarization.
One may discuss the historical, legal, geopolitical, religious, and humanitarian dimensions of Gaza and the wider Middle East: the long dispute over land, identity, sovereignty, security, and regional spheres of influence. Yet in Western societies, especially in Europe, the Israeli-Palestinian question is increasingly translated into a different grammar: left versus right, oppressor versus oppressed, civilization versus threat, emancipation versus replacement.
For much of the radical and progressive left, the Palestinian cause has become part of a Gramscian counter-hegemonic struggle on behalf of the “silenced voices of the oppressed.” In this framework, Palestine operates as a symbolic capsule of progressivism, anti-colonialism, and resistance, while Israel is cast as the embodiment of the great oppressor: capitalism, colonialism, militarism, and Western domination.
For ultraconservative movements, and especially for the radical populist right, this is precisely the “woke” and “leftist” narrative they claim to be fighting. In their reading, multiculturalism is not a liberal framework for coexistence, but a Trojan horse for Islamization, Sharia, and the so-called “great replacement” of Western societies. The argument is blunt: the left lost its traditional voters and is now replacing them with immigrants, especially Muslims — its new “proletariat.”
This is where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ceases to be merely an international crisis and becomes an internal struggle over the moral boundaries of the political community. Gaza becomes a mirror. Each side does not only see the Middle East; it sees itself, its enemies, and the future it fears.
The real battle, therefore, is not only over territory, sovereignty, or security. It is over narrative. Who is the victim? Who is the oppressor? Who speaks for humanity? Who threatens civilization? And, above all, who has the authority to define the moral meaning of the conflict?
Liberal democracy is weakened when every external conflict is immediately absorbed into domestic identity wars. The tragedy of Gaza becomes, in Europe, a proxy battlefield for unresolved anxieties about immigration, Islam, colonial memory, antisemitism, multiculturalism, and national decline. The more each side claims moral purity, the less space remains for political judgement.
As democracies worldwide confront populism, democratic erosion, and authoritarian normalization, Hungary remains one of the clearest examples of contemporary illiberal transformation. In this interview with the ECPS, Stefania Kapronczay—former director of strategy at the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU)—analyzes how Viktor Orbán’s regime hollowed out democracy while preserving its formal facade. She argues that Orbánism relied not only on institutional capture, but also on reshaping citizens’ “sense of possibility” and portraying human rights as foreign and disconnected from everyday life. Reflecting on democratic repair under the new Tisza administration, Kapronczay insists that “democracy in Hungary must not simply return, it must return in a better form,” emphasizing participation, accountability, civic trust, and democratic renewal beyond mere restoration.
Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Stefania Kapronczay, former director of strategy at the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU) and one of the leading voices analyzing democratic backsliding, civic resistance, and authoritarian transformation in Central Europe, argues that Hungary’s future cannot simply be defined by a return to the pre-Orbán status quo. “My hope,” she says, “is that Hungary can become a case study not simply for returning to democracy, but for rebuilding democracy in a better form—one that not only functions better for people, but also makes people genuinely feel that it works for them.”
In this wide-ranging conversation with the ECPS, Kapronczay reflects on the political, institutional, and psychological legacy of sixteen years of Orbánism and examines what democratic repair may require after one of the most influential illiberal experiments in contemporary Europe. Drawing on years of frontline human rights advocacy under Viktor Orbán’s rule, she argues that Hungary should not be understood as a straightforward democratic collapse, but rather as a sophisticated process of “democratic hollowing-out,” in which “the facade of democracy—elections and even institutions—was preserved,” while institutions were gradually transformed into instruments designed to secure the regime’s long-term survival.
Throughout the interview, Kapronczay emphasizes that Orbánism relied not only on institutional capture, but also on reshaping public consciousness and narrowing citizens’ sense of political possibility. “What fundamentally shifted,” she notes, “was people’s sense of possibility—the belief that, as citizens, they could have an impact on government decision-making.” In her view, the deepest damage inflicted by Orbánism was not merely constitutional or administrative, but cultural and psychological: the successful portrayal of human rights as “foreign,” externally imposed, and disconnected from everyday life.
Kapronczay also offers a powerful analysis of what she calls modern “legalistic authoritarianism,” a system in which “everything appears legal,” institutions formally remain intact, and constitutions are endlessly rewritten in order to preserve political dominance. From electoral manipulation and clientelist dependency networks to propaganda structures and the fusion of party and state resources, she demonstrates how authoritarian resilience can be embedded within formally democratic systems.
At the same time, the interview is not only an analysis of democratic erosion, but also a reflection on democratic recovery. Kapronczay argues that rebuilding democracy requires more than restoring pre-existing institutions. It demands confronting social polarization, rebuilding trust, and creating more participatory forms of democratic governance. “We cannot simply entrust elected representatives with making decisions on our behalf for four years at a time,” she argues, emphasizing the importance of participatory democracy, citizens’ assemblies, and broad civic involvement in constitutional reconstruction.
Importantly, Kapronczay situates Hungary within a broader regional and global context, warning that “authoritarians learn from one another,” while also insisting that civil society must learn to compete not only through principles, but through narrative power, emotional engagement, and citizen mobilization.
As democracies across the world continue to confront populism, democratic erosion, and autocratization; this interview offers both a sobering diagnosis of Orbánism and a compelling vision for democratic renewal beyond mere restoration.
Here is the revised version of our interview with human rights defender Stefania Kapronczay, lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Orbánism Kept Democracy’s Facade While Emptying It Out
Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister, arrives for a meeting with European Union leaders in Brussels, Belgium, on June 22, 2017. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis.
Stefania Kapronczay, welcome! To begin, after sixteen years of Orbán’s rule, should Hungary be understood as a case of democratic breakdown, democratic hollowing-out, or a more subtle transformation in which human rights were formally preserved while substantively emptied of enforceability? What do you see as the deepest and most enduring damage inflicted on Hungary’s human rights architecture—not only institutionally, but socially and culturally?
Stefánia Kapronczay: Thank you so much for this question. It is a very complex one and let me start with the first part: Hungary represents more than a case of democratic hollowing-out.It was very important for the Orbán regime to maintain the facade of democracy. This is also crucial to understanding why he eventually conceded, why elections continued to take place, and why he could ultimately be defeated electorally. Even though the playing field was incredibly uneven and it was extremely difficult to win against Fidesz in an election, significant sacrifices had to be made in order to achieve this result. There could only be one challenger, one contender, which, of course, meant that different voices could not enter the race if the opposition wanted to remove the Orbán regime.
So, this was a form of democratic hollowing-out in which the facade of democracy—elections and even institutions—was preserved, but all of them were adjusted in ways that served the regime’s interests, either through the appointment of political loyalists or through changes to the rules themselves. In the end, these institutions were transformed into mechanisms that allowed Orbán to remain in power for as long as he wished.
As for the second half of your question, I believe the cultural and psychological impact of these sixteen years is the most important. Not because the institutional damage was insignificant, but because the Orbán regime managed to convince ordinary citizens that human rights are not something that matters to them—that they are foreign, imposed from outside, and not something relevant to Hungarians. The regime promoted the idea that human rights have nothing to do with everyday life. By waging cultural wars around migration and LGBT rights, it portrayed human rights as something concerning only “other people,” never the average citizen.
Even though many LGBT people are themselves ordinary citizens, the regime succeeded in presenting human rights as something alien and externally imposed, disconnected from daily life. In reality, however, human rights emerged precisely from the understanding that protecting rights directly improves people’s lives. If individuals are not discriminated against, they have greater opportunities, and if the state is required to comply with human rights standards, this ultimately leads to a better life for citizens.
This cultural transformation will be even more difficult to reverse than the institutional damage. In my view, human rights should be considered whenever policy decisions are made. And we are still very far from that point today.
Everything Looked Legal, but Justice Became Impossible
In your analysis, Fidesz did not abolish democracy outright but hollowed it out through legal instruments, institutional capture, and narrative control. How should we understand this model of “legalistic authoritarianism” from a human rights perspective?
Stefánia Kapronczay: Yes, as I said before, it all seems legal. It appears to be merely a series of legal changes. The institutions are still there: there is an ombudsman, there is the Constitutional Court, and you can still bring your case before the regular courts. But whenever a case concerns a political question—and everything important to the government eventually becomes political—you have no chance of winning.
This is certainly true for migration and LGBT issues, as I mentioned earlier, but it also became true for freedom of expression cases and even for cases concerning disability rights, particularly when these issues appeared capable of generating public mobilization and when that mobilization, that citizen power, could potentially turn against the government.
So, the facade remains in place. Everything appears legal. They never technically break their own rules, so to speak. Instead, they simply modify the constitution, even for the fifteenth time. But at the same time, this cannot be regarded as compliance with constitutional standards, human rights standards, or international law.
Authoritarianism Depends on Mental Control as Much as Institutions
Viktor Orbán campaign poster ahead of Hungary’s 2026 elections. Photo: Bettina Wagner / Dreamstime.
In your writings, you emphasize that Fidesz’s authoritarian resilience rests not only on institutional capture, but also on shaping citizens’ expectations, incentives, and sense of political possibility. How did Orbánism turn human rights from a universal democratic language into something portrayed as alien, partisan, or elitist?
Stefánia Kapronczay: I think I addressed the second part of your question earlier, so I will focus a bit more on the first. This issue is extremely important. What fundamentally shifted was people’s sense of possibility—the belief that, as citizens, they could have an impact on government decision-making, whether at the local or national level.This was a key element in how Orbán managed to maintain his power. And it was especially powerful for two reasons. First, there was already a historical precedent for it. Before the regime change in 1989–1990, there was essentially a tacit pact between the socialist state and its citizens: you could have a relatively good life—especially compared to other countries in the region and particularly compared to the Soviet Union—but you had to stay out of politics. So, this was a political arrangement with which many people were already familiar.
Just as importantly, for a period of time Fidesz was able to sustain both sides of this arrangement. Economic prospects appeared relatively favorable, and people felt that they were moving ahead. Of course, this was not solely because of the government itself. Hungary received enormous—historically unprecedented—amounts of funding from the European Union, especially between 2010 and 2022.
Even though much of this money was used to enrich government cronies, and a significant share disappeared into corruption instead of being invested in public services such as healthcare or education, people nevertheless experienced improvements in their daily lives because of these funds and the relatively favorable global economy. Compared to their parents’ generation, they felt they had greater stability. Compared to neighboring countries, this was no longer necessarily true, but public opinion surveys and sociological research consistently show that most people do not compare themselves to people in other countries; they compare themselves to their parents’ generation.
After 2022, however, this arrangement could no longer be sustained by the Orbán regime. People increasingly felt in their everyday lives that they were no longer living better, that life had become far more uncertain, and that their livelihoods had become increasingly insecure. At the same time, they began to experience very directly the collapse of public services—whether in transportation, education, healthcare, or elsewhere.
Once this arrangement broke down, the Orbán regime also lost its ability to shape people’s sense of political possibility. More and more people began to feel that the situation was no longer sustainable or acceptable. Then someone emerged who convinced them that things could be different, and their sense of possibility began to shift.
It is very important to observe how something like this—something that is not discussed very often—can become so decisive. We speak a great deal about institutions and formal political structures, but we should pay much more attention to the ways in which the mental architecture of an authoritarian state is maintained. And this is precisely what began to crumble.
The Real Fraud Happened Outside the Polling Stations
Poster from political party Fidesz showing the opponents of Hungarian PM Viktor Orban surrounding billionaire philanthropist George Soros, Budapest, April 8, 2017.
You have described Hungary’s elections as a “special version of a stolen election,” where manipulation occurs less through ballot-box fraud than through an unlevel playing field. How should we rethink electoral integrity when abuse is legalized, normalized, and embedded long before election day?
Stefánia Kapronczay: Yes, elections do not happen only on election day. Usually, international institutions come to monitor only during that period—perhaps a few days before the election and a few days afterward.But in Hungary’s case, the manipulation and the systemic nature of how elections were effectively stolen operated every single day. It was not only about the media—how it was captured, how people were fed false information, and how certain information was withheld from them—but also about how Fidesz maintained a clientelist system in which citizens, especially in smaller towns and villages, became dependent on local power structures.
People relied on these structures for social services, for access to schools or nurseries for their children, or simply because they were employed by the local government. This created a system in which citizens were kept in conditions of dependency that could then be exploited. And this system was maintained continuously, every day.
This is something that is very difficult to capture when we discuss the fairness and integrity of elections. It also took civil society quite a long time to fully understand it, because for years much of the focus was on what happened inside the polling stations. But as we monitored the process more closely, we realized that the real fraud was taking place around the polling stations.
Already during the 2019 local government elections, there were initiatives aimed at identifying and disrupting the chain of voter manipulation occurring outside polling stations—practices involving the exploitation of citizens, vote-buying, organized transportation of voters, and various forms of coercion. By 2022, there were already widespread civil society initiatives dedicated to uncovering these practices. And in 2026, this became a major effort involving both civil society organizations and political party activists, as well as ordinary citizens who were present in all the districts where these practices were taking place.
We are still waiting for some of the data, but it seems that they were finally able to break the cycle I described earlier.
State Resources Became Tools of Party Politics
How has the fusion of party, state, public media, regulatory bodies, and state-linked economic networks damaged the practical meaning of political equality and equal citizenship in Hungary?
Stefánia Kapronczay: Just for the readers, what increasingly happened was that Fidesz began using state resources to advance its party-political goals. This became especially visible in 2020 and 2021 during the COVID pandemic, when people had to register in order to receive vaccinations, and later their email addresses were used by the government to distribute government or Fidesz propaganda.
It was also extremely difficult to remove yourself from those mailing lists. There is actually an interesting—perhaps even ironic—story about this. After Tisza came to power, while the old regime was still partially in place, we all received an email from the very same address that had previously been used to send propaganda, explaining how we could finally remove ourselves from the list. Suddenly, it had become very important.
That was an early example, but the practice reached another level during the election campaign. Even before that, there were Fidesz billboards displayed alongside billboards supposedly issued by the government, using the same language, colors, and visual style, making it extremely easy to confuse the two. And that was precisely the point.
Then, in 2026, this escalated even further, as government and state resources were deployed on a massive scale to support Fidesz’s campaign, including the organization of huge events across the country, each costing billions of Hungarian forints.
This is where the line between party and state becomes fundamentally blurred. Yes, citizens vote for a government—for a party that will form a government. But once a party assumes governmental power, it is supposed to represent all citizens, not only those who voted for it. By using government or state resources for partisan political purposes, the government breaks that trust and effectively communicates that it represents only those who agree with it.
But this is not surprising. Already in 2002, after losing the election, former Prime Minister Orbán delivered one of his most infamous speeches, declaring that “the homeland cannot be in opposition,” implying that his political camp alone represented the nation, while those voting for others somehow did not. So, this way of thinking has been present since at least 2002.
The Damage to Civil Society Runs Deeper Than We Realized
The Orbán government repeatedly portrayed NGOs and human rights defenders as “foreign agents,” “Soros mercenaries,” and threats to national sovereignty. How deeply did this stigmatization campaign damage the legitimacy, safety, and public reach of civil society actors? More broadly, how successful was Orbánism in eroding public trust in independent civic organizations, and what forms of democratic and social repair are now needed to rebuild that trust under the Magyar administration?
Stefánia Kapronczay: We are only beginning to understand how deep the damage went.From the everyday experience of civil society organizations, we could already see the effects very clearly. Local governments and schools—because of increasing centralization and because they required approval from the central government for nearly every decision—became unwilling to cooperate with civil society organizations. Even businesses became hesitant to work with NGOs, especially those that were critical of the government or engaged with contentious issues such as child protection.
So, the effects were already visible. Some civil society organizations were ultimately forced to stop operating because of the pressure and administrative burdens placed upon them. Others, such as my former organization, the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, managed to build a constituency during this period. Because we had resources, both financial and human, we were able to turn some of these attacks into opportunities to rethink our methods and reshape our communication strategies. But this was certainly not the typical experience. And now, after the system change, more and more stories are beginning to emerge.
We already knew that foreign intelligence-linked groups such as Black Cube had been used to discredit civil society actors before the 2022 elections. For example, fake job advertisements were used to lure civil society actors into staged interviews, where they were pressured and manipulated into saying negative things about civil society organizations. Then isolated snippets—sometimes only single sentences—were selectively used to discredit the entire sector.
But now even more troubling revelations are surfacing. Recently, a video emerged involving a very prominent civil society actor working with Roma communities, Roma children, and education. The video revealed that the actual State Secret Service had approached her in an attempt to obtain information about civil society organizations. In the Black Cube case, there has long been strong suspicion that the operation was commissioned by circles close to the government, or perhaps even by the government itself. But in this case, it was directly the State Secret Service that was involved.
This is why I believe a formal process is needed to uncover what happened. I am advocating for a process that draws lessons from Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. I think such a process is necessary for at least three reasons. First,what is currently happening is unfolding largely through media coverage and public debate, and not everyone follows these discussions. In my opinion, it is crucial to design a process that is participatory, that uses language accessible to ordinary people, and that brings these conversations into the places where people actually live and gather, so that society can develop a shared understanding of what happened. It should not remain a conversation limited to elites or to those who regularly consume political media.
The second reason is that there are still enormous numbers of Fidesz voters—at least one or perhaps two million people—who are now beginning to realize that they were misled. It is extremely important that they receive information and are not excluded from the political community. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission–type process could help bring as many of them as possible back into the political community, create a shared understanding of these sixteen years, and allow a society to move forward from there.
And last but not least, I believe such a process is necessary because so many people were harmed by this regime. A formal process could create ways to acknowledge and compensate for those harms, both symbolically and perhaps also in more material terms.
Orbán Went from Feared to Ridiculed
In your analysis of Hungary’s civil society crackdown, you link government attacks to older legacies of political passivity, low institutional trust, and suspicion toward public advocacy. Did Orbánism merely exploit these post-socialist inheritances, or did it actively deepen and weaponize them?
Stefánia Kapronczay: At first, it exploited them, but then it deepened and weaponized them even further. It was not simply a matter of winking at civil society and signaling, “Okay, this is how we are going to operate.” Through hate campaigns targeting certain groups, and more broadly through the demonization of anyone who criticized the government, these sentiments were actively intensified.
And it is very interesting to observe how this form of power actually functioned. Modern autocrats do not primarily operate through torture or enforced disappearances, but rather through the power of narrative. On the one hand, they cultivate fear, self-censorship, and self-correction. On the other hand, they strategically deploy state power—for example, by dismissing teachers who participated in protests in certain ways.
What I also find striking is how this kind of power structure that Orbán created—and that is so characteristic of modern authoritarianism—seemed to evaporate within just two months. He went from being feared to becoming almost ridiculous. And I think this is something we need to study much more carefully.
Democratic Repair Requires Dismantling the Entire System
Péter Magyar addresses supporters near a football stadium and miniature railway in Viktor Orbán’s childhood village, in a symbolic political gesture in Felcsút, Hungary on May 24, 2024: Photo: Dreamstime.
Now that Péter Magyar and the Tisza administration are in power, what should be the first-order priorities of democratic repair after sixteen years of Orbánism: dismantling propaganda structures, restoring judicial independence, reforming electoral institutions, rebuilding media pluralism, protecting civil society, addressing systemic corruption, or repairing public trust and democratic culture?
Stefánia Kapronczay: The difficult thing is that all of these issues are deeply interconnected. That is precisely why Orbánism functioned as a system.You cannot simply pull on one thread and expect the entire structure to unravel. You have to address all of these interconnected elements simultaneously in order for the system itself to break down. And this represents an enormous challenge for the current government.There is an immense amount of hope invested in them, and because of that, people are still relatively patient. But the government will need to demonstrate tangible results quite soon in order to sustain the hope, trust, and patience that citizens have placed in them.
Judging from the public discourse in the country, addressing propaganda is especially important for people, because propaganda was something everyone confronted daily through billboards, media coverage, and constant messaging. So, I think dismantling the propaganda machinery is one particularly urgent priority. Another key priority is demonstrating that public services—healthcare, education, transportation—can actually function better, and delivering visible progress in those areas. The government must also show clearly that it is not willing to compromise with the previous system, and that there will in fact be consequences for the harms that were committed.
These are among the most immediate priorities, although, of course, they touch upon all the issues you mentioned. At the same time, the government also has to rebuild public trust in institutions. So, they must pursue accountability without further damaging trust.
They also need to be extremely careful about polarization and avoid deepening it further. That is why I believe a carefully designed Truth and Reconciliation Commission–type process—one that brings these issues closer to ordinary people and actively involves them—could be extremely beneficial.
And then, in parallel—or at least soon afterward—we also need to begin thinking not only about the past, but about the future. What kind of state do we actually want to build now? What should these institutions look like?
I also believe this must be a deeply participatory process involving citizens as well as civil society organizations. It is not enough simply to hold a referendum at the end. We need people, each contributing according to their own expertise and experience, to participate throughout the process. That is why citizens’ assemblies could play a very important role within the constitution-making process.
Principles Alone Are No Longer Enough
Looking beyond Hungary, how has Orbánism functioned as a regional template for populist and illiberal actors in Central and Eastern Europe, especially in attacks on NGOs, independent media, minority rights, judicial checks, and foreign-funded organizations?
Stefánia Kapronczay: We often say that authoritarians learn from one another, and we can clearly see how certain Russian laws were copied by Hungary and then adapted to the realities of Hungary’s membership in the European Union. I also hear from Slovak and Czech activists that they recognize strong similarities between what their governments are now proposing and what Hungary has already experienced.
The similarities are visible not only in the policies themselves, but also in how these processes begin: first with smear campaigns and public attacks, followed by the use of familiar narratives of stigmatization. The rhetoric is almost always about foreign funding, sovereignty, and alleged external influence. These patterns are very recognizable across the region.
I think NGOs throughout Central and Eastern Europe can learn a great deal from the Hungarian experience, and I believe there are two particularly important lessons.
The first is that strength lies in unity. We were able to resist many of these laws and attacks because, at an early stage, we began working together. It was a difficult process, and our first attempts at coalition-building were not always successful. But we learned from those earlier efforts and eventually succeeded in creating effective alliances. That cooperation allowed us to combine our strengths instead of remaining fragmented. Those who were strongest in advocacy focused on advocacy; those skilled at mobilizing citizens concentrated on organizing; others handled communications; and others prepared administrative or legal responses.
The second lesson is that we must understand how crucial citizen mobilization and narrative-building have become in contemporary politics. This is very visible today. If there is at least one similarity between the Tisza and Fidesz governments, it is that both understand the importance of narrative power. Tisza even refers to this as “absolute cinema.” They frame their actions in ways that are easily consumable, emotionally engaging, and rich in symbolism—ways that ordinary citizens can immediately connect with.
And civil society must also recognize this reality. The power of principles alone is not enough. Civil society also has to succeed on the emotional level, through compelling stories and by demonstrating how its principles affect people’s everyday lives. It also has to become more effective at using narrative strategies. I do not think this is something entirely new for civil society. I often look at the American civil rights movement as, in many respects, the first human rights movement. And it used exactly these kinds of tools, adapted to its own historical moment. So, we simply need to recognize that this is not manipulation. It is part of our strength and part of our democratic power.
Democracy Must Return in a Better Form
Finally, if Hungary evolves from being a cautionary tale of democratic backsliding into a case of democratic repair, what would genuine recovery require—constitutionally, socially, and morally—to restore pluralism, civic courage, and belief in human rights after years of normalized illiberalism? Moreover, what lessons could Hungary’s experience offer to other societies confronting populism, democratic erosion, and autocratization?
Stefánia Kapronczay: I would begin from a broader perspective. It is undeniable that democracy is currently in crisis. According to Freedom House, this is now the nineteenth consecutive year in which the number of democracies worldwide has declined.
At the same time, research consistently shows that democracies deliver better outcomes for people and that people genuinely live better in democratic societies. So, while democracy is clearly facing a profound crisis, I remain convinced—not only on a principled level but also based on empirical evidence—that democracy is worth fighting for because it ultimately provides a better quality of life for citizens.
What happened in Hungary in 2010, when Fidesz came to power, also teaches us an important lesson: democracy as it existed at the time—with its institutions and structures—was already struggling to meet citizens’ expectations. That means we have to think seriously about how democracies can function better. I would not consider it a success if, in 2026, Hungary simply returned to the pre-2010 status quo, because that version of democracy was also failing to provide the kind of outcomes people deserved. Economic inequality, for example, still prevented many people from participating meaningfully in public life, which meant that equal citizenship did not truly exist in practice. So, my hope is that Hungary can become a case study not simply for returning to democracy, but for rebuilding democracy in a better form—one that not only functions better for people, but also makes people genuinely feel that it works for them.
Moreover, one of the key elements in this process is participation—participatory democracy. We cannot simply entrust elected representatives with making decisions on our behalf for four years at a time. Expanding participation and deepening citizens’ involvement are essential, because this is how people build relationships with institutions and, consequently, develop trust in them. At the same time, participatory systems allow citizens’ needs, concerns, and aspirations to be incorporated more directly into political decision-making. So, I envision democracies recovering and becoming more resilient if they succeed in creating more meaningful forms of participation and rely less exclusively on the traditional model in which elected officials merely represent citizens from above.
