Professor Lane Kenworthy (Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Yankelovich Chair in Social Thought at the University of California, San Diego).
Speakers
“The 2026 Midterms in Comparative Perspective: Shifting Support for Trumpism and the Issues Reshaping the Electoral Landscape,” byProfessor Sheri Berman (Professor at Department of Political Science, Barnard College, Columbia University).
“Explaining the Socialist Revival in the US,” by Professor Michael Kazin (Professor of History, Georgetown University).
“Democratic Resilience Amid Pernicious Political Polarization,” by Professor Jennifer McCoy (Regent’s Professor Emerita of Political Science, Georgia State University).
“Beyond Washington, DC: American Federalism and the Midterms,” by Professor Andrew Karch (Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota).
Lane Kenworthy is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Yankelovich Chair in Social Thought at the University of California, San Diego. He studies the causes and consequences of living standards, capabilities, poverty, inequality, mobility, employment, economic growth, social policy, taxation, public opinion, and politics in the United States and other wealthy, long-standing democracies. His books include The Good Society (thegoodsociety.net), Is Inequality the Problem? (2025), Would Democratic Socialism Be Better? (2022), Social Democratic Capitalism (2020), How Big Should Our Government Be? (2016), Social Democratic America (2014), Progress for the Poor (2011), Jobs with Equality (2008), Egalitarian Capitalism (2004), and In Search of National Economic Success (1995). More information on his research and teaching is available at lanekenworthy.net.
Professor Berman: “The 2026 Midterms in Comparative Perspective: Shifting Support for Trumpism and the Issues Reshaping the Electoral Landscape”
The presentation will focus on the issues dominating the midterm elections and the reasons why support for Trump and Trumpist candidates has been shifting. It will also briefly connect these developments to comparative cases, possibly including the April elections in Hungary.
Sheri Berman is a professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research interests include European history and politics; the development of democracy; populism and fascism; and the history of the left. She has written about these topics for a wide variety of scholarly and non-scholarly publications, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and VOX. She currently serves on the boards of the Journal of Democracy and Political Science Quarterly. Her last book was Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Regime to the Present Day (Oxford University Press 2019). Her most recent book, The Political Consequences of Economic Ideas: Neoliberalism, the Left, and the Fate of Democracy is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Professor Kazin: “Explaining the Socialist Revival in the US”
Professor Michael Kazin will examine the roots of the contemporary socialist resurgence in the United States, tracing them back to the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s and the Great Recession of 2008–2009, which helped create the conditions that encouraged Bernie Sanders to run in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries. Professor Kazin will then assess the achievements of contemporary socialists, particularly those affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), while also considering the limits of their political appeal and constituency.
Michael Kazin is a Professor in the Department of History, Georgetown University. He is an expert in US politics and social movements, 19th and 20th centuries. His most recent book is What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) which was named an Editor’s Choice by the NY Times Book Review and one of the best ten books published on US history in 2022 by Kirkus Reviews. His previous book War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918 (Simon and Schuster, 2017) was also named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review and was awarded the Elise M. Boulding Prize for the best book in peace history by the Peace History Society. His previous books include American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (Knopf, 2011), which was named a Best Book of 2011 by The New Republic, Newsweek/Daily Beast, and The Progressive. Kazin is emeritus co-editor of “Dissent,” a leading magazine of the American left since 1954.
Professor McCoy: “Democratic Resilience Amid Pernicious Political Polarization”
Professor Jennifer McCoy will examine how Americans are responding to extreme political polarization and contentious midterm elections. She will also consider how polarization may evolve after the midterms under different electoral outcomes.
Jennifer McCoy is Regent’s Professor Emerita of Political Science at Georgia State University and Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as well as Senior Fellow at Cornell University’s Center on Democracy and a Research Affiliate at CEU’s Democracy Institute in Budapest. She was named a 2024 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, one of 28 scholars nationwide who explore political polarization as well as what might help tackle division and strengthen American democracy. A specialist on democratic erosion, recovery, and renewal; polarization and depolarization; mediation and conflict prevention; election processes and election observation; and Latin American politics, Professor McCoy has authored or edited six books and dozens of articles. Her forthcoming book is How to Depolarize: Remaking Global Democracies in the 21st Century, with Murat Somer, (Princeton University Press, May 2027). McCoy has been a visiting scholar at Koc University in Istanbul, Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, Italy, and both the Democracy Institute and the Institute of Advanced Studies at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. She was named a GSU Regent’s University Professor in 2023 (the highest honor bestowed by the University System of Georgia).
Professor Karch: “Beyond Washington, DC: American Federalism and the Midterms”
Professor Andrew Karch will examine the significance of the 2026 midterm elections beyond the national level. While most journalistic coverage focuses on partisan control of Congress, Professor Karch will emphasize that the stakes at the state level are also substantial. He will begin by reviewing recent trends in partisan control of state governments and discussing the state-level offices that will appear on the ballot. He will also highlight several significant ballot initiatives that voters in some states will consider.
The second part of Professor Karch’s presentation will examine the role of state governments at a moment of heightened partisan polarization. He will discuss how the Elections Clause of the US Constitution gives states a central role in administering elections, drawing congressional districts, and determining who is part of the American electorate. He will also examine how states have increasingly become sites of resistance, with state officials challenging national government policies and priorities. Professor Karch will argue that the significant impact of American federalism underscores the need to look beyond national-level results when assessing the midterm elections and their broader consequences.
Andrew Karch is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, where he has taught since 2010. His research centers on the political determinants of public policy choices in the contemporary United States, with a special focus on federalism and state politics. His most recent book, Responsive States: Federalism and American Public Policy, is co-authored with Shanna Rose of Claremont McKenna College and was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. His previous book, Early Start: Preschool Politics in the United States (University of Michigan Press), was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013. He is also the author of Democratic Laboratories: Policy Diffusion among the American States (University of Michigan Press, 2007). He is currently serving on the editorial boards of State Politics & Policy Quarterly, Policy Studies Journal, and Publius: The Journal of Federalism. He is also a fellow of the Center for the Study of Federalism, and he previously served two terms as Chair of the Executive Council of the Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations Section of the APSA.
Klaudia Koxha(Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Lausanne).
Speakers
“Populist Strategies of Normalizing Demographic Fears,” by Oscar Mazzoleni (Professor in Political Science and Political Sociology at the University of Lausanne).
“The Scientific Normalization of ‘the Great Replacement’ Conspiracy,” by Alberta Giorgi (Associate Professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bergamo).
“From Demographic Winter to Civilizational Struggle: Anti-Abortion Networks and the Global Radical Right,” by Carol Mason (Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities and Professor at University of Kentucky, US).
“Mestizaje, Backlash, and the Politics of Demographic Populism: Race and Gender in Latin America,” by Carlos de la Torre (Professor at the Centre for Latin American Studies, University of Florida).
“Anti-Muslim Mobilization: Demographic Change and Radical-Right Populism in Austria,” by Reinhard Heinisch(Professor of Comparative Austrian Politics at the University of Salzburg, European Studies Center associate at the University of Pittsburgh and visiting lecturer at Renmin University of China).
Klaudia Koxha is a Senior Researcher at the University of Lausanne, where she works on an international research project examining radical right populism and conspiracy theories across four European democracies. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Paris Lodron University of Salzburg and was a visiting researcher at American University in Washington, DC. Her research focuses on populism and the radical right, European integration and EU policy, gender equality, party politics, and comparative and multi-level politics. Alongside her academic work, she has contributed expertise to regional and international organizations on issues including gender equality and inclusion, integrity, and democratic governance. She regularly contributes to public and policy debates through invited talks, lectures, and expert commentary, with her work featured in outlets including EUobserver, El Mundo, The European Correspondent, and DeFacto. She is co-editor of The Radical Right and Demographic Populism (Manchester University Press, 2026), New Dynamics of Contestation in EU–Western Balkan Relations (Palgrave, 2026), and Perspectives on Populism (Nomos, 2024). Her recent research appears in Government and Opposition journal, with further work accepted for publication in Comparative European Politics and forthcoming with Presses de l’Université Laval.
Oscar Mazzoleni is a professor in political science at the University of Lausanne where he leads the Research Observatory for regional research. He has achieved an interdisciplinary educational path, with a degree in sociology and anthropology and a PhD in contemporary history between the universities of Lausanne and Turin. He has been visiting professor and research fellow at the Universities of Columbia, Cornell, Laval, Geneva, Groningen, Torino, Sorbonne-Panthéon- Paris, Science-Po-Paris, Valencia, Salzburg, European University Institute of Florence, La Tuscia, and Roma-Sapienza. His current interests are devoted on political parties, populism, nationalism, regionalism, electoral studies, and Swiss politics in comparative perspective.
Alberta Giorgi is an associate professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bergamo. Her work explores discursive boundaries and classifications, particularly at the intersection of politics, gender, religion, and science. She has recently co-edited with H. Eslen-Ziya, (Un)silencing Academia in Times of Epistemic Conflicts. Navigating Online Violence (Routledge 2026). She is co-editing with Pauline Cullen Mapping Political Sociology Ambiguities and Complexities for Unpredictable Futures (Routledge 2026)
Carol Mason is the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities and a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky, USA. She is the author of four books on various aspects of the rise of the Right since the 1960s. University of California Press published her latest monograph, From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary, in 2025.
Carlos de la Torre is a professor at the Centre for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. He has authored several manuscripts and edited volumes on populism. His most recent books are Populism and Fascism, Elements in the History and Politics of Fascism (Cambridge University Press, 2025); Global Populisms with Treethep Srisa-nga (Routledge Press, 2021); Populisms: A Quick Immersion (Tibidabo editions, 2019); and Populist Seduction in Latin America (Ohio University Press, second edition, 2010).
Dr. Reinhard Heinisch is a Professor of Comparative Austrian Politics at the University of Salzburg and head of the Department of Political Science. He received his academic training in the US where he completed his PhD at Michigan State University and then taught at the University of Pittsburgh from 1994 to 2009. Heinisch’s research focuses on the rise of the radical right, populism, democracy, and political parties. Dr. Heinisch is the author of over 40 research articles and more than 50 other scholarly publications including 14 books. His research appeared in journals such as Journal of European Political Research, Political Studies,Journal ofCommon Market Studies, Party Politics, West European Politics, Democratization, Representation, and many others. His book publications include Understanding Populist Party Organization: The Radical Right in Western Europe (Palgrave 2016); The People and the Nation: Populism and Ethno-Territorial Politics in Europe (Routledge 2019), Political Populism. A Handbook, Nomos (2021), and Politicizing Islam in Austria (Rutgers University Press 2024).
In an interview with the ECPS, Professor Damir Kapidžić examines Bosnia and Herzegovina’s October 4 elections through the intertwined lenses of ethnonationalism, democratic erosion, patronage, institutional paralysis, and foreign influence. He argues that the country’s principal democratic danger lies less in dramatic constitutional breakdown than in the “slow death” of institutions gradually weakened by illiberal practices, elite capture, and political incentives that reward dysfunction. Professor Kapidžić also highlights the durability of ethno-national patronage, the limits of civic alternatives, and the persistence of war memory and religious identity in structuring political competition. Looking beyond the elections, he cautions that Bosnia remains “stuck in the past,” with democratic renewal unlikely without changes in both domestic incentives and the wider external environment.
Bosnia and Herzegovina approaches its October 4 elections at a moment when the country’s post-Dayton political order is once again under pressure over statehood, entity autonomy, ethnic representation, and democratic legitimacy. The campaign is shaped less by a conventional left-right divide than by competing visions of citizenship, constituent peoples, sovereignty, and the future of the Bosnian state. Against this background of ethnonationalism, populism, democratic erosion, and geopolitical influence, the elections offer an important vantage point from which to assess not only who will govern, but also the deeper institutional structures that continue to constrain Bosnia and Herzegovina’s democratic development.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Damir Kapidžić, Professor of Comparative Politics at the Faculty of Political Science and Director of the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Sarajevo, argues that Bosnia’s most consequential democratic danger may not take the form of spectacular constitutional collapse. Rather, it lies in the gradual erosion and paralysis of institutions. “We do see the possibility of what I would not call a dramatic constitutional breakdown, but rather a slow death,” he warns, explaining that institutions can simply cease to function when government formation, regulatory bodies, or judicial appointments are left indefinitely unresolved. In his assessment, “the gradual normalization of illiberal practices is likely to continue,”while “a more likely scenario… would simply be a slow demise.”
Professor Kapidžić situates this institutional vulnerability within the contradictions of the Dayton system. While power-sharing has helped prevent renewed large-scale intercommunal violence, he argues that political elites have also “been able to capture the system for their own purposes.” The resulting elite consensus, he observes, has often centered not on effective governance but on “keeping the rule of law weak, not resolving wartime legacies, and capturing state institutions.”
These dynamics are reinforced by deeply embedded patronage networks. Coalition negotiations, Professor Kapidžić notes, are rarely programmatic; instead, they revolve around “the division of power and resources rather than the creation of policies.” Ethnonational parties therefore operate not only as guardians of identity but also as gatekeepers of material opportunity, presenting themselves as protectors of their communities’ access to “resources and employment.”
Looking beyond October 4, Professor Kapidžić remains cautious about the prospect of democratic renewal. Bosnia, he argues, is “very stable, but also stable in a negative sense,” with progress occurring “either very slowly or not at all.” The deeper problem is a political order “stuck in the past”—not simply the wartime past, but “the past 30 years of very little changing.” Without altered domestic incentives and a transformed external environment, Bosnia risks remaining trapped in what he describes as a recurrent political loop, “without clear signposts, clear guidelines about the possibilities, or a clear path forward.”
Here is our interview with Professor Damir Kapidžić, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Bosnia’s Elections Reflect Deeper Ethno-Political Divisions Over What the State Is and Should Become
A voter casts a ballot against the backdrop of the flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo: Oleg Kachura / Dreamstime.
Professor Kapidžić, welcome! Bosnia and Herzegovina enters the October 4 elections amid renewed disputes over statehood, entity autonomy, ethnic representation, and democratic legitimacy. Looking at the campaign as a whole, is this primarily an election about who governs—or, more fundamentally, about what kind of state Bosnia and Herzegovina should be?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: In its basic sense, the election is about who will govern for the next four years. But in a broader sense, it is also about competing visions of what the country actually is and what it should become in the future. These visions usually do not collide directly because the parties are not competing for the same voters; they primarily seek support within their own ethnic groups. It is something that I call a sub-divided party system with sub-groups, where competition actually takes place between parties representing the same ethnic group.
Within each group—among Serbs, Croats, or Bosniaks—there is relatively little dispute over the broader vision of how the state should be organized. The major disagreements lie between the three groups, but they are not competing for the same electorate. So, essentially, what we see in the electoral arena is a manifestation of the deeper ethno-political divisions within society.
Power-Sharing Preserved Peace but Failed to Produce the Elite Compromise Bosnia Needs
In your work, you argue that the Dayton system brought peace but failed to overcome tensions generated by ethnic patrimonial elites, weak rule of law, and unresolved wartime legacies. Three decades later, has power-sharing become part of the problem it was originally designed to solve by institutionalizing ethnicity as the principal language of political competition?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: Yes, this is a trick question, because power-sharing has both positive and negative sides, and weighing them against each other can be complicated. Let’s just recap. It has been more than three decades since the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina ended and the Dayton system was put in place, and during that time we have not seen a single major incidence of violence between communities. There has been lived violence, but not known physical violence. This is largely due to the power-sharing system.
At the same time, however, elites have been able to capture the system for their own purposes. This is a key element of consociationalism, the type of democracy established through the Dayton Peace Agreement in Bosnia-Herzegovina: elites are needed to represent the interests of their own groups. But the thinking behind this is that those elites should also be willing to compromise with one another, and that is what we have not seen.
The only compromise that has happened is exactly along the lines you mentioned and that I have written about: keeping the rule of law weak, not resolving wartime legacies, and capturing state institutions. There is agreement among elites on that, but not on how to govern the country effectively or how to make compromises. That is the element of the Dayton system that has never really come forward. Because if elites had the ability to compromise, they would also be able to address the first question: what kind of state do you want Bosnia-Herzegovina to become?
Bosnia’s Populist Polarization Operates Within Ethnically Defined Voter Groups
Would you describe the dominant form of populism in Bosnia and Herzegovina as essentially ethnonational populism? In other words, is the classic populist division between “the people” and “the elite” transformed here into a more dangerous distinction between “our people,” rival ethnic communities, domestic elites, and allegedly hostile foreign actors? And during the current campaign, how important is the invocation of external patrons or enemies in reinforcing these narratives?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: Yes, this is definitely not a typical form of populism in Bosnia. I would probably describe it as a hybrid ethno-national populism, because the main adversary of “us” or “our people” is not so much the other group—although they are also part of it—but rather enemies within our own group.
So, populism here is threefold. It operates within each of the ethnic party groups and is directed not so much against the other groups themselves as against the ideas those groups represent. It is not aimed specifically at politicians or citizens living in other parts of the country. Rather, it targets the “traitors within our own ranks,” so to say. This kind of populism uses the ethnic narrative to polarize within one’s own group, because that is where the electorate is.
You can see this happening among Croats, Bosniaks, and Serbs at the same time. The polarization is there, but it does not transcend these ethnically defined voter groups.
Republika Srpska Still Operates as a Form of ‘Competitive Authoritarianism-Lite’
Milorad Dodik greets supporters in Pale, Bosnia and Herzegovina, following a meeting and referendum on Republika Srpska’s National Day, September 25, 2016. Photo: Vladimir Stanisic / Dreamstime.
Your research on subnational competitive authoritarianism shows how executive dominance, economic power, patronage, informal party networks, and ethnically bounded political competition can produce uneven autocratization within Bosnia and Herzegovina. To what extent does Republika Srpska under the SNSD still represent the clearest example of this model ahead of the 2026 elections?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: Yes, within Bosnia-Herzegovina, it still represents the clearest example. There has been some reduction in the elements of competitive authoritarianism, mainly due to several court cases that have limited certain powers of the Republika Srpska parliament and government, as well as some backroom deals, with the help of the United States, that have rolled back some of these elements.
However, the system still exists, and Republika Srpska remains the clearest example. We could still characterize its subnational regime as a kind of competitive authoritarianism-lite. This is also reinforced by external patrons and actors that emphasize the ability, or the need, of the Republika Srpska government to retain as much autonomy as it can muster. Of course, this also shapes the way the current SNSD government uses these external patrons to justify the capture of some of these institutions.
Much of Dodik’s External Support Now Comes from the Trump Administration
Milorad Dodik is not himself a candidate, yet his political influence remains central to the SNSD’s campaign and to its framing of Republika Srpska as being under pressure from Sarajevo and international actors. How important is this personalized form of leadership for the persistence of ethnonational populism, and can the SNSD reproduce the same political model without Dodik formally holding office? To what extent can external support—from Serbia, Russia, Hungary, or other actors—help sustain this political strategy during the election period?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: You are correct: Milorad Dodik is not running in these elections, but if you look at the SNSD billboards, he is always there. That reflects the aura he still carries and his ability to influence politics. He remains one of the most relevant politicians in the country, and his narrative is still taken seriously by voters in Republika Srpska.
That said, he no longer has the same institutional influence. There has to be another form of leadership, including personalized leadership among other politicians. He is not going to be the one speaking for the government. So, there is a trajectory in which Milorad Dodik is slowly becoming less present in the country’s politics. It is very likely to follow a similar scenario to Poland under Kaczynski, where taking a backseat from politics allows others to make use of the power they now have.
External support has always been important, but currently Milorad Dodik and the SNSD are no longer receiving support from Hungary, luckily. They are receiving only limited support from Russia, because Russia is focused on other issues. The same goes for Serbia, which is in the midst of its own electoral campaign with an unclear outcome.
But Milorad Dodik has been able to do something that nobody thought was possible: gain support from the United States of America. Much of his external support now actually comes from the Trump administration, including inviting Trump Jr. to Banja Luka, the capital of Republika Srpska, and trying to create both business and political connections with the United States. That can definitely create support for the SNSD, but also for Milorad Dodik personally.
Being in Opposition Does Not Make a Party Less Nationalistic in Republika Srpska
At the same time, the opposition in Republika Srpska challenges the SNSD over corruption, patronage, institutional degradation, and personalized rule without necessarily rejecting a strong Serb national framework. Does this mean that the central contest inside Republika Srpska is less between nationalism and post-nationalism than between competing claims about who can most credibly represent Serb interests?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: Exactly. This is also what I’ve been talking about: competition and polarization take place within these ethnic groups, particularly around issues of corruption and patronage. These are among the main issues driving polarization: the “traitors” who are stealing from us as a people versus those who promise to bring in a clean slate. Nationalism remains present. Being in the opposition does not make a party less nationalistic; the difference lies in the kinds of policies it defines and sets out within its nationalist agenda.
Religion Versus Secularism Remains the Central Cleavage Distinguishing Bosnia’s Party Families
Muslims gather for a funeral in Maglaj, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 2016, with an effendi wearing a turban visible among the crowd. Photo: Damir Đuhera / Dreamstime.
On the Bosniak side, the political spectrum ranges from the SDA’s national-conservative and state-protective discourse to the more civic and social-democratic language of the SDP, Naša stranka, and other actors. How meaningful is this ideological distinction when virtually all major Bosniak-oriented parties operate within a political environment in which the survival and integrity of the Bosnian state remain highly salient?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: They are still ideologically distinct. Both Bosniak nationalist parties and the more civic-oriented social-democratic and liberal parties cater to a very similar electorate. Their main distinction concerns secularism and the role religion should play in politics. The SDA takes a moderate position, viewing religion as important—much like the German Christian Democrats—and as a foundational element of politics. This is clearly rejected by the SDP and Naša stranka, who see the only way forward as a clearly secular state.
They are therefore brought together by the idea that Bosnia-Herzegovina must continue to exist as a unified state, probably even a more centralized one than it currently is. But they are divided by this secular cleavage, which is the main cleavage in the country’s party politics. This distinguishes Serb, Croat, and Bosniak parties on the basis of religion, while also distinguishing the civic, social-democratic parties as the secular element—the fourth element—within this party landscape.
Individual Equality Collides with Collective Representation in Bosnia’s Political System
The Croat political debate continues to revolve around “legitimate representation,” particularly the argument that Croats should be able to determine their own member of the state Presidency. How should we understand this dispute theoretically: as a legitimate minority-protection demand within a consociational system, as ethnonational entrenchment, or as a conflict between two defensible democratic principles—individual equality and collective representation?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: The last element is very important here because individual equality—the equality of voters and candidates themselves—collides with the idea of collective representation of a group as such. For example, this whole debate about collective, “legitimate representation,” as it is called, emerged from voting patterns showing that the Croat representative in the current Presidency did not receive his votes primarily from areas with Croat voters. Territorially, his support was more closely aligned with a Bosniak electorate.
This goes against the principle of collective representation, according to which peoples should be able to vote for their own representative. On the other side, you have individual equality, which means that, as a citizen of the country, ethnicity is very fluid. You can redeclare yourself within a limited timeframe, especially as a politician, and you are not required to vote for your own ethnic group.
So, these two principles—individual equality as personhood and the ability to choose one’s identity—collide with the rigid institutional framework of collective representation. The Croats, who are the smallest constituent people, are the ones who have lost out in this contest. You have to see this from their perspective: as being outvoted, or as a form of majoritarization of institutions that, according to the country’s institutional framework, would belong to them. Individual equality here does not translate into representation, which creates the theoretical problem that something needs to change for the system to work, because in its current form it disadvantages the Croats in particular.
In Bosnia’s Ethnically Divided Party System, Demographics Is Destiny
This leads to a broader paradox in Bosnia’s civic politics. Advocates of a stronger citizenship-based state see civic democracy as a way beyond ethnocracy, while many Croat and Serb actors perceive the same project as a vehicle for Bosniak majoritarianism. Is there a politically viable model of civic democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina that can overcome ethnic segmentation without weakening the security guarantees of smaller constituent peoples?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: Again, this is mostly a trick question, because in ethnically divided societies such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, demographics is destiny, especially when the political party system is so clearly divided along ethnic lines. The problem is that Bosniaks are now a majority in the country. As in any democratic system with a clear majority, you can define and lead politics in the way you want. Even with minority protections, this would create enormous tensions, because we are not speaking about minorities; we are speaking about almost half the population, which does not agree with what the other 53 or 55 percent would vote for.
The other problem is that these ethnic differences are territorially concentrated. You have areas with clear Croat or Serb dominance, which makes a civic system of majoritarian rule almost impossible.
The only country that has been able to overcome this kind of ethnic gridlock is the Netherlands. Its consociational system began to be dismantled when the main dividing lines between Protestants and Catholics became weaker. As religion receded from public life in the Netherlands, other cross-cutting cleavages became more important.
We are not there in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and I do not know if we ever will be. Religious lines here are more clear-cut than those between Catholics and Protestants. So, as for when this might change, it is probably not going to happen soon.
Religious Identity Is Becoming More, Not Less, Important Among Younger Bosnians
Religion is closely intertwined with national identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina—Islam with Bosniak identity, Serbian Orthodoxy with Serb identity, and Catholicism with Croat identity—yet theological questions themselves are rarely the main electoral issue. How does religion function politically today: primarily as faith, as a marker of ethnonational belonging, or as a symbolic resource that political actors can activate during periods of heightened insecurity? And how significant are transnational religious, cultural, and political networks linked to Serbia, Croatia, Turkey, or Russia in shaping these identities during election campaigns?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: Yes, identity is clearly salient in Bosnia, and in our research we track it over time. It is not becoming less important; if anything, it is becoming more important among younger people and younger voters. So, it remains a clear element of personal identity.
We speak here of what we call an identity package, and you mentioned these pairings: Islam with Bosniaks, Serbian Orthodoxy with Serbs, and Catholicism with Croats. We also add a third element, which is language. These languages are mutually very close, almost indistinguishable, but they are called differently and therefore also belong in this identity basket.
All of this becomes much more pronounced during elections, and religion functions in all the ways you mentioned. It is very much faith-focused and very much individual. As an individual, you would not necessarily use it for political purposes. At the same time, however, it is a marker of belonging, so people may perform more religious rituals—whether Sunday Mass or Friday prayer in the mosque—during periods of electoral campaigning. You want it to be seen as a marker of who you are. The same applies to politicians. All of a sudden, you see them becoming more religious in their practice.
Religion also functions as a symbolic resource, because politicians sometimes revert to old narratives of insecurity and threat, talking about churches and mosques that were destroyed during the war and about rebuilding and protecting them. These elements all come together, with religion used both as a personal marker and as a political campaign resource.
What has changed to a large degree, though not completely, is that religious authorities are no longer directly part of political campaigning. That was more common in the past, when they would play a more active role in suggesting—which they could not do openly—which parties would be in the best interests of a particular ethnic group.
When it comes to transnational players, this is much less present. You mostly see it through cultural identity ties, so not so much through religion itself, but through cultural connections, including folklore groups. From Russia, for example, we had biker gangs a few elections ago with a great deal of Christian Orthodox iconography attached to them. But this is relatively minor compared with the way individuals use religion to signal their own belonging and identity to voters.
War Memories Remain a Key Component of Political Mobilization in Bosnia
Ratko Mladić is depicted on a Serbian flag during a political rally in Belgrade, Serbia, on May 29, 2011. Mladić is a former Bosnian Serb military leader. Photo: Dreamstime.
Your work stresses that unresolved memories of the 1992–95 war continue to segment society. How important are Srebrenica, competing narratives of victimhood, the commemoration or glorification of wartime actors, and memories of ethnic cleansing in reproducing contemporary political boundaries? Are these memories still genuinely decisive for voters, or are political elites strategically keeping them alive because they remain effective instruments of mobilization, as seen during Ratko Mladić’s funeral?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: They are a key component of mobilization, in the sense that they serve a purpose when political elites need them. However, I would not say they are genuinely decisive in themselves; rather, the absence or negation of some of these memories can be decisive. For example, a Bosniak politician cannot play down Srebrenica and still expect to be elected. Likewise, a Serb politician cannot place Ratko Mladić firmly in the category of war criminals and still expect to be elected.
In that sense, keeping these figures and events at least in a neutral, and sometimes positive, light becomes an important performative element of campaigning. They also serve to mobilize very specific segments of the electorate. So, political actors need to know who their voters are and strategically when and where these narratives can be used.
Some practices, such as the glorification of war criminals, are prohibited under the laws of Bosnia-Herzegovina, so politicians also have to be careful about how far they go; otherwise, they may face removal from the electoral roll. All of this is therefore used very strategically.
That said, most voters still see key moments and individuals from the war as important in a broader sense. They may be more inclined to support a politician who lays flowers or gives a commemorative speech at a memorial to a person or place that is meaningful to them, whether in Croat-majority areas or elsewhere in the country. So, there is a strong performative dimension, but mobilization also takes shape around these smaller, local sites of memorialization.
The More Likely Scenario for Bosnia Is a Slow Institutional Demise Rather Than Sudden Authoritarianism
You have argued that democratic erosion in Southeast Europe often occurs incrementally: elections continue, but governing parties weaken constraints, dominate institutions, exploit patronage, and tilt the playing field. In the Bosnian context, should we therefore be more concerned about dramatic constitutional breakdown—or about the gradual normalization of illiberal practices within formally competitive elections?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: I would argue both. Primarily, my work analyzes how institutions are gradually weakened over time so that they can be more easily captured. This gradual normalization of illiberal practices is still ongoing, and it is reinforced by a political system that sometimes rewards inefficiency.
However, there is also a flip side to Bosnia’s consociational system: it introduces another layer of checks and balances—ethnic checks and balances—which means that no single politician or party can dominate the entire political system. There are always other ethnic groups that keep that in check. You can see this, for example, at the state level. These institutions are not the main or strongest institutions, but they are almost impossible to capture because other groups are always trying to keep their foot in the door as well.
At the same time, we do see the possibility of what I would not call a dramatic constitutional breakdown, but rather a slow death. Institutions can simply stop functioning because some aspects of government formation, regulatory bodies, or judicial appointments are not strictly defined by time. So, you can simply allow these institutions to slowly die out.
We also have not talked much about the Office of the High Representative, the international body that essentially oversees the implementation of Dayton. It has been weakened to the extent that it cannot intervene effectively if these kinds of political practices intensify.
So, essentially, the gradual normalization of illiberal practices is likely to continue, but only up to a certain point before it becomes authoritarian. A more likely scenario, however, would simply be a slow demise.
Ethno-National Patronage Is Central to How Bosnia’s Dominant Parties Survive
How important are patronage, control of public resources, public-sector employment, party-linked media, and informal economic networks compared with ideology in explaining the durability of Bosnia’s dominant parties? Does ethnonationalism survive partly because political parties have successfully fused identity protection with material dependence on party-controlled institutions?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: Yes, very much so. You can clearly see that patronage is important for most parties. There have very rarely been programmatic coalition talks, even after elections. Most coalition negotiations are about the division of power and resources rather than the creation of policies.
So, you can definitely see that elements such as control over public procurement and the ability to employ people in state-owned enterprises have shaped how parties survive and how they are able to withstand the passage of time and other pressures.
There is, therefore, this element of ethno-national patronage that is clearly important, because patronage itself is also defined within the three groups. Parties see themselves not only as protectors of a group’s identity, but also as protectors of the group’s ability to distribute resources and employment.
Foreign Disinformation Remains Present, but Bosnia’s Fragmented Electoral System Makes Large-Scale Interference Difficult
Your recent work places Bosnia and Herzegovina’s democratic trajectory within a wider geopolitical and transatlantic context. As the country approaches the October 4 elections, how should we distinguish legitimate foreign influence from more problematic forms of electoral interference? What roles are the European Union, the United States, Serbia, Croatia, Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and China playing through diplomacy, party networks, media, religious and cultural ties, economic leverage, lobbying, or disinformation? Are some external actors merely supporting preferred domestic partners, or are they actively reshaping the electoral playing field and reinforcing ethnonational or illiberal politics?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: Here we do see this shifting electoral landscape. I mentioned already that even the support of the United States is shifting in terms of the parties and actors it supports. The most steadfast and clear support has actually come from the European Union, although it is much weaker and more diffuse than that of some of these other actors.
In terms of the type of foreign influence we can see, most of it is very unofficial. It operates through media channels, control of media publishing houses, and the way certain events are framed. Most of these actors are not particularly interested in what happens in Bosnia and Herzegovina, perhaps with the exception of Russia, which still wants to maintain a place where it can gain some influence. But even that has weakened compared with several years ago.
Most of the actors simply see this as a contest in which they can exert influence through what I would mostly call cheap means. If it involves generating online disinformation and specifically tilting the electoral playing field slightly toward one candidate or one party, then they might do that. But again, the problem here is that, in order to govern, you need to tilt several electoral playing fields at the same time within these ethnically defined voter groups, which in itself is a complex problem. Specifically, if we think about how the country is governed, it is not worth it.
It is not a clear yes-or-no situation, such as, for example, in Romania, where you could exert a lot of influence to get a Russia-friendly candidate elected. Here, it would take much more effort across several different voting groups, with sometimes a not-so-clear outcome.
In this sense, a lot of it is simply about supporting particular actors rather than trying to influence the process directly, but you do still see the element of foreign disinformation present.
Citizens Are More Willing Than Politicians to Compromise
Men play on a giant chessboard in a park in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo: Henrique Weiss / Dreamstime.
You have also written about citizens’ assemblies and other democratic innovations as possible responses to democratic deficits, polarization, and citizens’ exclusion from decision-making. In a society where representative institutions are heavily structured by ethnicity, could deliberative mechanisms create meaningful cross-ethnic political space—or would they remain too weak to challenge the deeply institutionalized power of ethnonational parties?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: Yes, there were several democratic innovations in the country, including citizens’ assemblies at both the local and national levels. At a very basic level, you could see that citizens, when deliberating among themselves, do not agree on everything, but they are much more willing to compromise and to arrive at solutions that represent a step forward—something that reflects compromise among all the sides involved. So, they are much more willing to do the work that politicians are not willing to do.
This takes place at the level of ordinary citizens: randomly selected groups that mirror the population distribution of the country in terms of ethnicity, age, gender, and so on. But you also mentioned the element of power, and the citizens here, essentially, even though they were sometimes called by city governments or the national parliament to deliberate, do not have the power to challenge these deeply institutionalized rules of governance.
So, their results and recommendations are transferred to decision makers once the citizens are done. In a sense, the citizens do not make the decisions; they create an avenue for decision-making, whether in Parliament or by government, allowing decision makers to legitimately draw on these recommendations in cases where the policy would make the country better as such.
So, in a sense, yes, they can provide a way out of political gridlock. But they themselves do not have the power to do so without institutional support from already existing institutions.
Bosnia Is Stuck in a Loop Without Clear Signposts or a Clear Path Forward
And finally, Professor Kapidžić, looking beyond October 4, what trajectories do you see as plausible for Bosnia and Herzegovina over the next several years? Could these elections open space for more functional cross-ethnic bargaining and democratic renewal, or are the country’s institutional incentives, ethnonational party structures, geopolitical pressures, foreign influence, and unresolved historical divisions more likely to reproduce the existing pattern of recurrent crisis? And what would have to change—domestically and internationally—for Bosnia to become less vulnerable to external interference and move decisively beyond what you have described as being “stuck in the past”?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: I think, by themselves, these elections won’t bring too much change. You might see different parties in government, and this is also one of the good things about the Dayton political system: transfers of power between governing and opposition parties have happened in the past without producing crisis or conflict. So, that might happen. However, a different mode of governing, non-ethnic politics, or even democratic renewal is highly unlikely.
In a political sense, Bosnia is very stable, but also stable in a negative sense, in that progress happens either very slowly or not at all. In a sense, this is best described as being stuck in the past. The past here is not so much the wartime past, but rather the past 30 years of very little changing.
So, what would need to happen for this to change? Mostly, there would need to be a change in the external environment and in the incentives for politicians to act differently. We have not seen any meaningful change in the external environment over the past 20 years, even though globally there have been massive changes, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the rise of China, AI, and the United States moving more toward nationalist politics.
But for the region itself, not much has changed, and this is what produces this pattern of recurrence in Bosnia-Herzegovina. You don’t see a clear way forward, whether toward the European Union or elsewhere. There are very few alternatives. You’re stuck in a loop, trying to figure out in which direction you want the country to develop, without clear signposts, clear guidelines about the possibilities, or a clear path forward.
In this ECPS interview, Professor Wolfgang Merkel examines the rise of the AfD, the weakening of Germany’s traditional political center, and the broader crisis of representation reshaping the party system. He warns that mainstream parties risk strengthening the far right when they adopt its positions: “If mainstream parties try to outflank right-wing parties by adopting their positions, they risk legitimizing them.” Professor Merkel also criticizes the Brandmauer as “a political mistake” and rejects an AfD ban as an attempt “to save liberal democracy by illiberal means.” At the same time, he emphasizes the resilience of German democracy, urging greater confidence in institutions and civil society. His conclusion is clear: “We Democrats need to be more optimistic.”
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Wolfgang Merkel, Director at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and Professor of Political Science at Humboldt University Berlin, reflects on the transformation of Germany’s party system, the rise of the AfD, the weakening of the traditional political center, and the challenges these developments pose for democratic resilience. A leading scholar of democracy, polarization, political conflict, and institutional resilience, Professor Merkel situates recent electoral shifts within a broader erosion of the integrative capacity of Germany’s traditional Volksparteien and the growing centrifugal pressures affecting both the right and the left.
Our conversation comes at a moment of profound transformation in German politics. The far-right AfD has achieved major victories in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, while Die Linke has emerged as the strongest party in Berlin, exposing growing pressures on Germany’s traditional political center and on Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU. These developments raise fundamental questions about populism, representation, socioeconomic and cultural cleavages, the Brandmauer, militant democracy, and the resilience of liberal institutions.
At the heart of the conversation is the question of how mainstream democratic parties should respond to the rise of the far right. Professor Merkel is particularly skeptical of strategies that seek to neutralize radical-right competition by adopting parts of its political agenda. “If mainstream parties try to outflank right-wing parties by adopting their positions, they risk legitimizing them,” he argues. Such a strategy, in his view, effectively communicates that these parties “were right” and that mainstream parties are merely “correcting their own policies and following their lead.” His conclusion is unequivocal: “I do not think this is a winning strategy.” Instead, democratic parties, he insists, should remain firmly anchored in constitutional principles and clearly defend democratic red lines against racism, xenophobia, and anti-pluralism.
Professor Merkel nevertheless rejects a purely defensive conception of democracy. He describes the Brandmauer—the informal exclusion of the AfD from political cooperation—as “a political mistake,” arguing that it has allowed the party to remain comfortably in the role of protest opposition without having to demonstrate whether it can govern effectively. He is equally critical of proposals to ban the AfD, warning that such a move would amount to an attempt “to save liberal democracy by illiberal means” and could intensify rather than diminish political polarization.
The interview also examines the deeper social foundations of Germany’s changing political landscape. Professor Merkel discusses how socioeconomic insecurity, cultural conflict, migration, regional grievances, and weakened cross-cutting cleavages are increasingly reorganizing political competition into antagonistic camps. He distinguishes cosmopolitan, municipal-communitarian, and chauvinist conceptions of belonging, while emphasizing that the crisis of representation extends beyond the right and is also visible in the resurgence of Die Linke.
Yet Professor Merkel’s analysis ultimately resists democratic pessimism. Germany, he argues, should have greater confidence in its institutions, civil society, and decades of democratic development. “We Democrats need to be more optimistic,” he concludes. Democratic resilience requires not only resistance to anti-democratic pressures, but also the capacity to adapt, govern, rebuild trust, and actively shape political circumstances.
Here is our interview with Professor Wolfgang Merkel, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Germany Is Seeing Both Deeper Representation and Greater Democratic Risk
Photo: Shutterstock.
Professor Merkel, welcome. Let me begin with the broader question of how we should interpret recent state election results in Germany. Your work distinguishes legitimate democratic conflict from pernicious polarization. After the AfD’s 44 percent victory in Saxony-Anhalt, its 38.3 percent in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and Die Linke’s victory in Berlin, are we seeing neglected conflicts gaining political representation—or a deeper fragmentation of German democracy?
Professor Wolfgang Merkel: The clear answer is that we are seeing both. There is a deeper representation of neglected interests. Very clearly, especially at the wings of the party system, the once-big parties have moved steadily toward the center, leaving political space open. They did not represent this space—on the one side, on the right, and on the other side, on the left.
So, what we are seeing now is a stronger Left Party and, especially, a very strong right-wing populist party on the right. Both are representing people who were not represented before. On the one hand, therefore, there is a deepening of representation, but this does not automatically mean that it is good for democracy. This is an ambivalent effect. What is not good for democracy is that we have, especially on the right, a party that is not completely democratic.
At the same time, we are seeing a centrifugal tendency toward the wings. In the classical political science literature, this has always been considered an alarming sign, because the center of the party system can become, to some extent, open and no longer properly represented. I do not think we are at that stage at the moment. Nevertheless, we have to think about these ambivalent effects: better representation, but also greater risks for the centrist parties as stable pillars of democracy.
The AfD Is Not a Homogeneous Party—Important Conflicts Run Through It
You argue that contemporary politics is increasingly structured by the interaction of socioeconomic and cultural cleavages. Does the AfD’s strength in eastern Germany show how effectively it has fused material insecurity with migration, identity, sovereignty, and belonging?
Professor Wolfgang Merkel: They have been very successful in mobilizing around all the issues you mentioned, particularly migration and the gender debate in Germany and Western Europe. In that respect, they have clearly been successful. But I would hesitate to say that they have fused these issues with socioeconomic concerns. In my view, the party’s positioning is highly ambivalent.
On the one hand, in socioeconomic terms, the AfD represents the lower strata of society and, to a large extent, the working class. In that sense, it has become the working-class party. That role is no longer played by the Social Democratic Party; it is now increasingly occupied by the AfD.
But if we look at the party’s economic program, we see strong neoliberal language, a clear neoliberal orientation, and an emphasis on the market. This contradicts, to some extent, its sociocultural and socio-structural positioning in elections. So, again, the AfD is not a homogeneous party. Here too, we can see important lines of conflict running through it.
Social and Economic Insecurity Can Create a Search for Scapegoats
AfD demonstrated with slogan “Stop Islamization” in Rostock on May 14, 2018. AfD, Alternative for Germany, is a right wing political party in Germany.
In your work, socioeconomic conflicts are often more negotiable than cultural conflicts rooted in identity and moral absolutes. Has migration become precisely such a conflict in eastern Germany, particularly after the AfD’s victories in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania?
Professor Wolfgang Merkel: Again, it’s both. We see a party that has been very successful in mobilizing around migration—more precisely, migration from societies and cultures that the AfD regards as culturally different. The party is not opposed to migration from countries such as Canada—although, by the way, Canadians are not coming to Germany in large numbers. It is, however, very strongly opposed to migration from Muslim countries. This is one of the central issues around which the AfD mobilizes, at times not only in xenophobic but also in racist terms.
This is where cultural and economic issues begin to merge. When social and economic insecurity grows, those who feel affected by that insecurity may look for scapegoats. They look for people whom they can blame for their own difficult personal situation.
So, there is a fusion of cultural and economic concerns, especially in situations of growing socioeconomic insecurity. In objective terms, the situation in Germany is not completely dramatic, but this sense of insecurity has nevertheless become part of the mindset of quite a few people.
Catch-All Parties Are Becoming a Dying Species
Your work also addresses the weakening of the traditional Volksparteien. What does the contrast between the AfD’s victories and the CDU’s collapse to 4.9 percent in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania tell us about the declining integrative capacity of Germany’s center-right?
Professor Wolfgang Merkel: I would immediately say that this is not only a problem for the center-right. It concerns both the center-right Volksparteien, or catch-all parties, as they are called in Anglo-Saxon terminology, and the center-left. In fact, the process began earlier on the center-left.
The classical Volkspartei, the Social Democratic Party, has been losing votes for almost two and a half decades. In that sense, the SPD has already ceased to function as a traditional catch-all party. That stage has been passed.
The Christian Democrats, by contrast, long assumed that this was primarily a problem for the Social Democrats. They saw themselves as the real catch-all party, the real centrist force, and did not expect, even five years ago, that the same process would affect them. But it has.
This development has affected the Christian Democrats just as it has affected traditional catch-all parties across Europe, especially in Western Europe. So, this is no longer merely a German phenomenon; it is a broader European one.
I would also stress one further point: highly fragmented and polarized societies do not provide fertile ground for catch-all parties. It is very difficult for such parties to survive in this kind of social and political environment.
That era has largely passed. These parties dominated the second half of the 20th century, but they are no longer dominant. They are becoming a dying species. What we are witnessing is the decline of catch-all parties on both the center-right and the center-left.
There Is Still Trust in Democratic Principles
Friedrich Merz called the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania result a “disaster” but insists on continuing his reform agenda. In light of the earlier Saxony-Anhalt defeat, is the CDU confronting a problem of policy performance—or a more fundamental crisis of political representation?
Professor Wolfgang Merkel: Again, it’s both. This is fundamentally a challenge of political representation. The CDU has lost its former dominance among lower-income voters, including traditionally Christian working- and lower-class constituencies where the party was once quite strong. It has also lost more liberal voters, some of whom have moved toward the Greens.
Merz is therefore right to describe the elections in East Germany as a disaster. But this cannot be explained simply by weak policy performance. It also reflects a deeper dissatisfaction among a growing share of the population with the political system as a whole. People are critical, and they are becoming increasingly so.
At the same time, the basic principles of democracy remain strongly supported: around 90 percent of people still consider democracy preferable to any authoritarian alternative. This distinction is crucial. There is still broad trust in democratic principles, but there is no longer the same degree of trust in the functioning of democratic institutions.
People Have Lost Trust in the Way Political Elites Govern
CDU Chairman Friedrich Merz speaks at a campaign event ahead of the North Rhine-Westphalia state election on May 15, 2022. Photo: Paul Ruesing | Dreamstime
Merz argues that economic and social reform can act as an antidote to authoritarianism. From the perspective of your work on democratic resilience, can effective problem-solving still rebuild trust when dissatisfaction is increasingly directed at the political system itself?
Professor Wolfgang Merkel: I think I have already partly answered this question. People have lost trust in the way political elites govern. In that sense, their dissatisfaction is directed more toward what the Italians call the classe politica—the political elite—than toward democracy itself. There is deep distrust of political elites, but, as I have said, there is still trust in democratic principles. So, again, we have to distinguish clearly between these two different things.
Democratic Parties Should Stand on Constitutional Principles
You have warned against excessive moralization in politics while also recognizing racism, xenophobia, and anti-pluralism as democratic red lines. The CDU moved rightward on immigration, yet the AfD continued to advance. Does mainstream adaptation contain the radical right—or risk legitimizing its political frame?
Professor Wolfgang Merkel: I think the evidence on this question is not entirely clear, but I would lean toward your second interpretation. If mainstream parties try to outflank right-wing parties by adopting their positions, they risk legitimizing them. In effect, they are saying that these parties were right and that mainstream parties are now simply correcting their own policies and following their lead.
I do not think this is a winning strategy. It can legitimize political positions that cross important democratic red lines and become racist or xenophobic. Democratic parties therefore need to be clear about where those boundaries lie. Rather than trying to bypass right-wing extremist parties, they should stand firmly on constitutional principles and use the Constitution as a guide for concrete politics and policies.
So, my advice would be not to try to outflank these right-radical or far-right parties. That strategy is likely to fail. In the end, it can damage democracy while also contributing to the decline of the mainstream party itself. This is a risk that the Christian Democratic Party does not always fully recognize.
The Social Democrats Have Lost Representative Capacity to the Left
The Berlin Wall, a guarded concrete barrier that divided East and West Berlin from 1961 until its opening in November 1989. Built by East Germany, it became one of the most powerful symbols of Cold War division. Photo: Dreamstime.
Berlin offers a contrasting form of political dissatisfaction. Die Linke won under Elif Eralp, while the AfD also increased its support. Does this suggest that the erosion of centrist representation can produce very different forms of radical or populist mobilization depending on the social structure and dominant grievances of the electorate?
Professor Wolfgang Merkel: Without the decline of the center and the weakening of catch-all parties at the center of the party system, we would not see the growing electorates of Die Linke on one side and the AfD on the other. This is one major reason why parties on both wings have been able to grow.
Berlin, however, is a quite unique case in Germany. It has always had a substantial leftist political culture, more so than many other places. A significant part of the population has traditionally seen itself as clearly to the left of center. In that sense, this is part of Berlin’s normal political landscape and its historical identity.
Nevertheless, there are moments when this leftist potential can be particularly strongly mobilized, and we are seeing such a moment now. The AfD’s 18 percent in Berlin is clearly below its national average. By contrast, a leftist party winning 25 percent of the popular vote sends a very clear message to the Social Democratic Party: you have lost representative capacity because you are no longer pursuing sufficiently leftist policies. You have become a rather bourgeois party, positioned in the center but without a clear profile, and you are failing to recognize social grievances in society. As a result, you lose, while the Left gains.
One additional factor is that Die Linke has a different habitus and political style. Its representatives are less pessimistic, more optimistic, younger than much of the established political elite, and they appear fresh. So, it is not particularly difficult to understand why they won in Berlin. But again, Berlin is Berlin. In Munich, the situation would already be quite different.
The Left Emphasizes Inclusion; the Right Seeks Exclusion on Ethnic Grounds
Elif Eralp, the daughter of Turkish asylum seekers, mobilized strongly around housing and inequality. How should we distinguish this form of left-wing populist or radical-left mobilization from the AfD’s nativist populism in terms of equality, inclusion, and conceptions of “the people”?
Professor Wolfgang Merkel: By the way, Selçuk, I’m not entirely sure I would describe this Left as genuinely populist. If it is populist, then you are right that we need to distinguish it from the AfD’s right-wing, nativist, chauvinist, and nationalist populism. I would say the cardinal difference is that the Left seeks to integrate people, at least in theory. It is integrative. The right, by contrast, seeks to discriminate against and exclude people on ethnic grounds.
So, one side emphasizes inclusion—integrating poor people, the lower classes, and those who find it difficult to achieve a successful life course. This is fundamentally different from the right, which seeks to exclude migrants and does not want these people to be part of society. The Left is also much more socioeconomically oriented toward the lower classes and seeks to integrate them even under capitalist conditions.
The Desire for Heimat and Belonging Is Not Necessarily Based on Ethnicity
EU elections campaign of Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Munich, Germany in May 2019. German nationalist, right-wing populist and Eurosceptic AFD is the largest opposition party in Bundestag. Photo: Shutterstock.
Your work on cosmopolitanism, communitarianism, and political borders is particularly relevant here. Do Berlin and the AfD-dominated eastern states now represent competing answers to the question of who belongs to contemporary Germany?
Professor Wolfgang Merkel: Yes, very much so. These are two different worlds within Germany. On the one hand, cosmopolitanism is dominant in Berlin’s political culture, perhaps more so than in any other German city. On the other hand, you have rural regions, especially in East Germany, where people understand belonging to the community in a different way. They are less focused on cosmopolitan values and more focused on community.
I see two distinct streams centered on the political community. One is nationalist. It seeks to create a nation in which people feel they belong, and certainly a more ethnically homogeneous nation. Here, we are talking about conceptions of the nation based on ethnic grounds.
But there is also another form of communitarianism, which is conservative. People want what Germans call a Heimat. They want to live among people who share similar customs, and they want to feel that they count and belong. This is not necessarily based on ethnicity.
So, I distinguish between nationalist communitarianism and a more community-based communitarianism rooted in local communities and in the completely legitimate desire to count and to belong. In that sense, we do not have only two worlds; we have three: the cosmopolitans, the municipal communitarians, and the chauvinist communitarians.
The Brandmauer Was a Political Mistake
The Brandmauer becomes more difficult to sustain when the AfD wins 44 percent in Saxony-Anhalt and more than 38 percent in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. At what point can democratic exclusion itself become a source of populist grievance, even if it is intended to protect constitutional democracy?
Professor Wolfgang Merkel: The Brandmauer was a political mistake. It helped the AfD expand the electorate it could mobilize, while also shielding the party from having to prove that it was capable of governing. Because of this conventio ad excludendum—the party’s informal exclusion by the democratic parties—no one wanted to cooperate with the AfD or form a coalition with it.
As a result, the AfD was able to remain a protest party. It could criticize the democratic parties—sometimes rightly—without ever having to demonstrate that it could govern more effectively. I have serious doubts about whether it could. If I look at its personnel, its program, and the habitus it presents to the public, I think it would fail badly in government.
But as long as we—the democratic forces and parties—continue to exclude the AfD, it can remain comfortably behind the Brandmauer.
Therefore, although there are risks, I would let the AfD govern in Saxony-Anhalt. The state accounts for only 2.5 percent of Germany’s population, and a state government there would have no influence on foreign policy. There are risks, no doubt about that, but such an experiment could also demonstrate the vitality of civil society and of those working in public administration.
So, I would not be overly afraid. We have to let them govern in order to see whether they are actually capable of governing.
Banning the AfD Would Mean Trying to Save Liberal Democracy by Illiberal Means
Photo: Shutterstock.
This connects directly to your warnings about the “pitfalls of militant democracy.” Does the AfD’s growing electoral strength strengthen the case for constitutional containment—or make measures such as a party ban more democratically hazardous?
Professor Wolfgang Merkel: In my understanding of pluralist democracy, there is no place for banning political parties. Doing so would restrict the range of pluralism that democracy requires. A pluralist system must accommodate political forces with different interests, worldviews, and Weltanschauungen. For that reason, I am, in principle, opposed to banning political parties.
If a party wins 25 percent or more of the vote nationally and becomes the strongest party in electoral terms, and the Constitutional Court then declares, “This is a party you are not allowed to vote for. You—25 percent of the democratic sovereign, part of the German people—may vote for any party except the one you actually want to vote for,” then I would describe that as an attempt to save liberal democracy by illiberal means.
There is also a pragmatic argument. If the AfD were banned, let us say in Saxony-Anhalt, where it is by far the strongest party, its representatives would not simply say, “Yes, we accept the ruling. We will go home, take our notebooks, and leave Parliament and the municipal councils.” I once calculated that more than 10,000 people across Germany would have to give up mandates to which they had been elected.
That would represent another turn in the spiral of polarization. I simply cannot imagine such a development occurring without major political turmoil and violence.
Economic Decline Alone Does Not Explain AfD Support in East Germany
You have argued that citizens who repeatedly experience themselves as political or socioeconomic losers may turn toward anti-system parties. How far can post-reunification inequality, demographic decline, and lack of recognition explain AfD support without reducing nativism and ethnonationalism to economic grievance?
Professor Wolfgang Merkel: I wouldn’t say that, in objective terms, this is a clear case of economic decline. People in East Germany are clearly better off than they were before 1989. It is more a question of mentality. They felt overrun and overtaken by Western capital and Western political elites and, to some extent, discriminated against in their own country.
This is very much a psychological grievance. Yet this alone does not explain why they are more inclined than the West German population to vote for the party. They still feel more excluded and more uncertain about the future course of their lives. In that context, racist and xenophobic attitudes can fall on fertile ground, and here we see a clear combination of factors.
But I would say that, at the outset, there was this sense of being taken over by the West, which made racist and xenophobic attitudes, as well as scapegoat thinking, much more widespread in East Germany than in West Germany.
Germany Is Moving Toward a Carl Schmittian Division Between Friend and Foe
Your work on polarization stresses the danger of multiple cleavages collapsing into a single antagonistic divide. Are conflicts over migration, inequality, housing, national identity, climate, and regional inequality in Germany increasingly reinforcing rather than cross-cutting one another?
Professor Wolfgang Merkel: There is no longer the same degree of cross-cutting among cleavages—religious cleavages, cleavages between capital and labor, or cleavages between rural and urban populations. These cross-cutting divisions normally help moderate polarization, but they no longer function as effectively when society becomes polarized and increasingly reorganizes itself into political camps.
On specific issues, you now often see clearly opposed camps. On migration, for example, people may be strongly in favor because they are cosmopolitan, or strongly against it because they are nationalist. The same applies to climate, the war in Ukraine, and the Russian question: these issues immediately encourage people to identify with their respective camps.
As a result, a dominant cleavage emerges that divides society into two camps whose members no longer communicate with one another, or do so only in hostile terms. In that sense, this resembles a Carl Schmittian division of society into friend and foe. The overlapping and cross-cutting nature of multiple cleavages is therefore no longer functioning as a moderating force in society.
Politics Must Not Only Adapt to Changing Circumstances, It Must Shape Them
Your resilience framework distinguishes between the capacities to withstand, adjust, and recover. After Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and Berlin, which capacity is most urgently needed in Germany today: institutional defense, adaptation of political representation, or recovery of public trust?
Professor Wolfgang Merkel: From my understanding of democratic resilience, you clearly need all three, and you need them simultaneously. But if I had to emphasize one, I would say that politics must not only adapt to changing circumstances; it must also shape those new circumstances. Active policy is therefore needed to create a more communicative situation and, especially, to demonstrate that political actors are able to govern and to shape the future of citizens.
So, you need to withstand challenges to democracy from both outside and inside. You have to adapt to and shape changing circumstances. And when authoritarian politics has already damaged democracies, civil society and political elites have to recover from the damage caused by challenges to liberal democracy.
We Democrats Need to Be More Optimistic
Finally, what would a genuinely comprehensive strategy of democratic resilience require in Germany today? How can mainstream democracy respond simultaneously to far-right ethnonationalism, radical-left critiques of inequality, and the erosion of centrist representation without suppressing legitimate conflict and dissent?
Professor Wolfgang Merkel: I smile a bit because this is such an encompassing question, and throughout our conversation we have approached it from different angles. But I will not completely avoid the question. I would say that we Democrats need to be more optimistic.
We should have greater confidence in our institutions, in the power and vitality of civil society, and in 75 years of democratic development. We are—and I say this with some Republican-Democratic joy—now among the 12 best democracies in the world in terms of democratic quality. That is not something insignificant that we should overlook.
In history, there has been no single society or democratic system that collapsed after having existed for more than 40 years. We now have 75 years of democratic experience. So, again, we should be more self-confident and more optimistic, and we should not follow the classical right-wing—and sometimes left-wing—populist tendency to focus only on criticism.
We should also look for opportunities. A critical citizen is important, no doubt about it, but an optimistic citizen is equally important for our future. So, let’s shape the discourse critically, but also optimistically.
In this ECPS interview, Assistant Professor Sofie Blombäck examines the Sweden Democrats’ electoral setback alongside the continuing normalization of ideas long associated with the radical right. She argues that some voters may feel they have already “gotten what they wanted” on migration, even as SD itself remains partly stigmatized. Dr. Blombäck also highlights a darker post-election development: debate over whether Sweden’s newest citizens, particularly Muslim immigrants, are treated as legitimate political actors. “In my personal view, the debate has become quite ugly,” she says. More broadly, she situates the election within a changing party system shaped by normalization, bloc realignment, strategic voting, weakened parliamentary norms, and shifting boundaries of political legitimacy.
Sweden’s 2026 general election has brought into sharp relief a paradox that has been developing for more than a decade: the Sweden Democrats (SD) may lose electoral ground while continuing to shape the ideological and policy environment in which other parties compete. In this interview, Assistant Professor Sofie Blombäck, Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Mid Sweden University, examines this paradox through the lenses of radical-right normalization, party-system realignment, political stigma, representative democracy, and the changing relationship between voters and political elites. Her analysis places particular emphasis on the extent to which ideas associated with SD have become embedded in mainstream political competition even as the party itself continues to carry a degree of stigma.
Dr. Blombäck argues that some voters who previously turned to SD because they wanted tougher migration policies may now feel that “they have now gotten what they wanted,” since the current policy direction has been “heavily influenced by the Sweden Democrats.” In her view, this helps explain how an electoral setback can coexist with deeper ideological influence: restrictive migration policies have become sufficiently entrenched that voters may no longer need to support SD itself in order to secure them. At the same time, she stresses that normalization remains incomplete. Although “the cordon sanitaire is gone,” and the stigma surrounding SD “is not as universal as it was four years ago,” the party is “not quite fully accepted into the mainstream.”
The interview’s most striking discussion concerns the post-election controversy over immigrant participation and the political legitimacy of Sweden’s newest citizens. Dr. Blombäck notes that rising turnout in socioeconomically vulnerable areas with significant migrant populations has been portrayed by some actors on the right as threatening. This, she argues, has shifted debate toward a more fundamental question: whether immigrants, “and especially Muslim immigrants,” are treated as “a potential problem or legitimate political actors.” Reflecting on the tone of the post-election debate, she states plainly: “In my personal view, the debate has become quite ugly over the past week or two.” She adds that Sweden is “a country of immigrants,” and warns that political mobilization which questions the legitimacy of such citizens as political actors carries particularly significant implications.
Beyond immigration, Dr. Blombäck situates the election within a broader restructuring of Swedish party competition. She argues that the party system has “tilted diagonally” along the GAL–TAN dimension, while the composition and ideological content of Sweden’s traditional blocs have changed. The result, she suggests, is not simply polarization, but a transformation in how parties compete, cooperate, stigmatize one another, and define the boundaries of political legitimacy in contemporary Sweden.
Here is our interview with Assistant Professor Sofie Blombäck, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Sweden Is Unlikely to Return to the Migration Policies It Had Ten Years Ago
Sweden’s 2026 general election produced a narrow parliamentary majority for the red-green parties, with 176 seats compared with 173 for the Tidö parties. The Social Democrats remained the largest party with 28 percent of the vote, followed by the Moderates at 19.8 percent and the Sweden Democrats at 17.5 percent. Source: SVT.
Professor Blombäck, welcome! Let me begin with the most striking paradox of the September 13 election. The Sweden Democrats fell from 20.5 percent in 2022 to 17.48 percent and lost ground for the first time since entering Parliament, yet many policies and frames associated with SD—particularly on immigration, integration, crime, citizenship, and deportation—have become considerably more mainstream. How should we distinguish between an electoral setback for a populist radical-right party and the longer-term success of its political agenda? Can a party lose votes while simultaneously winning the ideological argument?
Dr. Sofie Blombäck: It’s still a little early to determine exactly what caused this setback in the Sweden Democrats’ electoral fortunes. The party itself tends to blame strategic voting, arguing that some of its supporters voted for the Liberals. I’ve also seen suggestions that it lost some votes to parties even further to the right that failed to enter Parliament.
But I believe another factor is that some voters supported the Sweden Democrats because they wanted tougher migration policies and a tougher approach to crime. In a sense, they have now gotten what they wanted. On migration, parties across the political spectrum, including the Social Democrats, are essentially campaigning to maintain the current policy direction, which has been heavily influenced by the Sweden Democrats.
So, for voters who supported the Sweden Democrats in the last election because they wanted tougher migration policies, those policies are now largely in place. They may not want to go as far as the Sweden Democrats do, but they are perhaps fairly confident that another government, whether led by the Moderates or the Social Democrats, would not return to the migration policies Sweden had 10 years ago, or even four years ago.
The Cordon Sanitaire Is Gone, but the Stigma Around the SD Has Not Disappeared
Your research with Niklas Bolin and Stefan Dahlberg found a persistent “stigmatization effect”: voters evaluated identical proposals less favorably when they were told that the proposal came from SD, even after the party had grown substantially and its political isolation had weakened. After four years in which SD exercised extensive influence through the Tidö agreement, what would you expect that stigma to look like today? Has SD finally acquired something closer to a “reputational shield,” or might voters still distinguish sharply between accepting SD-inspired policies and accepting SD itself?
Dr. Sofie Blombäck: One of the most memorable moments from the election-night coverage was when the Sweden Democrats’ party leader, Jimmie Åkesson, went on stage before the cameras and said that their voters no longer needed to feel ashamed. From the party’s perspective, this seems to have cemented its status as a party like any other.
It would be really interesting to run the same experiments now, after four years with a government influenced by the Sweden Democrats. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to do that. There is probably still some stigma attached to the Sweden Democrats, but it is not as universal as it was four years ago. All the parties on the right are now on the record saying that they would be willing to include the Sweden Democrats in a government. So, the cordon sanitaire is gone; it is no longer in effect. But among voters on the left, the Sweden Democrats remain highly stigmatized.
We do not yet know what the government will look like, but for the Sweden Democrats, being allowed to join a government after this election was supposed to be the final step into the political mainstream. At the moment, a left-wing government appears more likely, and the Sweden Democrats are not the largest opposition party. One outcome of this election, therefore, is that they are neither able to enter government nor become the default opposition leader by virtue of being the largest opposition party. So, they are not quite fully accepted into the mainstream, but the stigma has clearly decreased.
Countering the Party Does Not Necessarily Mean Countering the Ideas It Represents
Sweden Democrats’ Square Meeting in Umeå. Jimmie Åkesson speaks to the people on the city square where opposition left-wingers have formed a chain and protest in Umeå, Sweden on August 14, 2018. Photo: Shutterstock.
That distinction seems particularly important for understanding normalization. Should we analytically separate the normalization of a party from the normalization of its ideas? If mainstream parties adopt restrictive migration policies, assimilationist rhetoric, or tougher approaches toward citizenship while SD itself remains socially or morally stigmatized for some voters, are we dealing with partial normalization rather than full political mainstreaming?
Dr. Sofie Blombäck: That’s a strategy that parties across Western Europe have tried in response to SD and other parties in the same political family. There has been considerable debate among mainstream parties over what the most effective strategy should be. If the goal is to counteract the party as an organization, one option is to adopt some of its positions and policies. If voters can obtain the policy ideas associated with a right-wing party from another party that does not carry the same stigma, that may, of course, be more palatable to some of them.
Other voters, however, may actually be attracted to the anti-establishment rhetoric itself. But, as your question suggests, countering the party does not necessarily mean countering the ideas that the right-wing populist party represents. Those ideas can still become normalized. We know from research that voters take cues from party leaders. If the leader of the party you support says that a proposal or policy is good and acceptable, you are more likely to agree with it. By adopting the right-wing party’s policies and messages, other parties are therefore, in effect, contributing to the mainstreaming of those ideas.
That being said, one explanation political scientists in Sweden have offered for the rise of the Sweden Democrats is that the party was able to tap into ideas and preferences that were already present in the electorate. Immigration used to be one of the issues on which the electorate and elected representatives differed most. Members of the Riksdag (Swedish Parliament) were much more pro-immigration and more accepting of refugees than the average Swedish voter. In that sense, the Sweden Democrats helped align these two groups by becoming the party-political expression of an idea or preference that was already present in the electorate.
Sweden Is a Country of Immigrants
The 2026 campaign also exposed the continued importance of anti-immigration and, at times, explicitly anti-Islam politics. SD’s campaign included proposals concerning Islamic dress, while opposition mobilization was particularly strong in some immigrant-dense urban districts. How should we distinguish legitimate democratic debate over immigration, integration, and secularism from forms of political mobilization that turn Muslims or immigrants into collective objects of suspicion? At what point does cultural conflict become exclusionary or nativist politics?
Dr. Sofie Blombäck: This is one of the issues that has carried over into the post-election public debate. I mentioned earlier that one of the memorable moments from the election-night coverage was when the Sweden Democrats’ leader said that their voters no longer needed to feel ashamed. Another memorable moment came during the final party leaders’ debate before the election, when Jimmie Åkesson said that this could be the first election decided by the immigration that the other parties had allowed.
This has become a recurring trope over the past couple of weeks. There have been articles and media coverage from various outlets debating whether this election was won by Sweden’s newest citizens. Electoral participation increased in some of the most vulnerable, socioeconomically deprived areas, where many relatively recent migrants live and where some residents may not have been Swedish citizens four years ago. Of course, this has sparked a debate over whether this is a positive development. We generally want citizens to vote; that is regarded as democratic. Yet the Sweden Democrats and some other opinion leaders on the right have portrayed this participation as threatening.
The argument is that the parties on the left—the Left Party and the Social Democrats—have mobilized voters who do not really know what they are doing and are essentially voting the way they are told. This has been compounded by accusations of electoral impropriety concerning one particular candidate of Somali heritage in a small Swedish town.
So, this is still very much up in the air and further complicates the discussion. I realize I have not yet directly answered your question, but it connects to the same debate over immigrants, and especially Muslim immigrants, as either a potential problem or legitimate political actors.
The parties on the left would say that we should not be surprised that voters in these communities overwhelmingly support parties on the left, because parties on the right want to deport them and their neighbors. So why would you vote for a party that has said it does not want you to be here?
This is something Sweden is going to have to grapple with over the coming weeks and months. In my personal view, the debate has become quite ugly over the past week or two.
Sweden is a country of immigrants. A substantial share of the adult population has roots outside Sweden, including outside Europe, and this brings the issue to the forefront. When you have one party mobilizing against this group, even questioning their legitimacy as political actors, the implications become particularly significant.
So, it is not new. This has always been part of the Sweden Democrats’ electoral appeal, but it has been brought more clearly to the forefront, not least because I have seen others joining this discussion and accepting its premise. At the same time, you also see pushback from the left, arguing that you might just as well say that churchgoers decided the election, or point to various other groups that also account for roughly the 50,000-vote difference between the two blocs. You can identify such groups across many demographic categories, not just among new citizens.
Voters Judge the Same Policy Differently Depending on Who Proposes It
Politicians and campaigners engage with voters at the Sweden Democrats’ election hut in a city square in Uppsala, Sweden, on August 17, 2026, ahead of Sweden’s parliamentary elections. Photo: Krister Hägglöf / Dreamstime.
One implication of your stigmatization research is that party labels themselves function as powerful political cues. But what happens when policies first associated with the radical right are subsequently proposed by mainstream parties? Does the removal of the SD label make restrictive proposals more acceptable—and, if so, can mainstream parties become important agents in laundering or legitimizing ideas that were previously considered too radical?
Dr. Sofie Blombäck: That’s certainly what our results indicate. A proposal, regardless of its content, is seen more favorably when it comes from a party other than the Sweden Democrats, or from the voter’s own preferred party. So, this goes back to the idea of elite cues. If your preferred party proposes a policy, you are more likely to agree with it than if it is proposed by a party you disagree with. This is compounded by the stigma attached to a party like the Sweden Democrats.
For some voters, a proposal is never going to be acceptable if it comes from the Sweden Democrats, almost regardless of whether it involves free puppies and ice cream for everyone; they are going to regard it with suspicion. But the flip side is exactly what you are pointing to: the other parties, the more mainstream or established parties, want to neutralize the SD. They do not want to lose voters to the Sweden Democrats. The party grew to become the second-largest party and is now the third-largest party in the party system. Of course, the other parties want those voters back, and one way of doing that is by giving voters what they want in terms of policy. But that, of course, also removes some of the stigma.
There is other research by researchers such as Elisabeth Ivarsflaten that points to the fact that we have an internal stigma as well. We do not want to believe ourselves to be racist, for example. Nobody wants to be thought of by others as racist, but we also do not want to think of ourselves that way. So, we need some way of convincing ourselves that supporting a specific policy does not make us a bad person, a racist, or an elitist, or whatever the bad thing may be. If you can say that someone else who is not racist, not elitist—whatever the bad thing is—is also supporting this policy, then it becomes easier to believe that I’m not racist either. This can probably work in quite a few different ways.
The Mainstream Right’s Cooperation with SD Is a Double-Edged Sword
This raises a strategic problem for the mainstream right. The Moderates and other Tidö parties governed with SD support and adopted substantial elements of its agenda, yet SD still received 17.48 percent while the Tidö bloc narrowly lost its parliamentary majority. Does the Swedish case suggest that accommodation can simultaneously normalize the radical right and fail to neutralize it electorally? What does this tell us about the conventional assumption that mainstream parties can compete away populist radical-right support by moving toward its positions?
Dr. Sofie Blombäck: One way many political scientists in Sweden have tried to understand the other Tidö parties’ shift toward the Sweden Democrats is through basic electoral math. After the 2018 election, the Center Party (C) and the Liberals (L) signaled that, when forced to choose between a government dependent on the SD and one involving the Social Democrats—the traditional adversary of the parties on the right—they chose the Social Democrats.
That left the Moderate Party (M) and the Christian Democrats (KD) in a position where they could no longer see a viable path to government without the Sweden Democrats. If they could not rely on parties in the center of the party system to help them govern with SD support, they still needed the Sweden Democrats because the party was large enough that any Moderate-led government would at least require it not to actively oppose them. Mathematically, unless something changed significantly, that seemed to imply permanent opposition for the Moderates and Christian Democrats.
So, in that situation, the obvious option was to open up to collaboration. We have seen similar developments in other Western European countries, where mainstream parties on the right have included populist-right parties because they needed them electorally to gain office. In a sense, this is basic coalition theory 101.
But, of course, that also gives a party like the Sweden Democrats considerable leverage. They could demand policy concessions in 2022, and if a right-wing government were to be formed now—which does not appear to be the first option, though we do not yet know—they would demand inclusion as a full coalition member.
That, in turn, means that the other parties on the right are effectively signaling that the Sweden Democrats are not a pariah party and are no longer beyond the pale. This can limit SD’s growth, as I mentioned earlier, by allowing the other parties to win back voters who may be Moderates at heart but wanted stricter migration policy. Those voters can now return to the Moderate Party, potentially placing a ceiling on the Sweden Democrats’ support.
At the same time, however, this also signals to the perhaps 75 percent of Sweden Democrat voters who are hardcore party identifiers that it is acceptable to be a Sweden Democrat. They are no longer voting for a stigmatized party, and their party can exert real policy influence, so they are not, in that sense, wasting their vote. So, it is a double-edged sword, but coalition theory helps explain why the other parties still feel compelled to make this choice.
The Swedish Party System Has Tilted Diagonally
Swedish political parties intensified their campaigning ahead of the critical September 13, 2026 parliamentary election, setting up campaign stands in prominent public squares to promote their platforms and election promises. The image shows party campaign stands in the square connecting the two sections of Åkersberga Centrum in Österåker, Sweden. Photo: Bulent Kenes.
Your broader work on representative democracy emphasizes the importance of ideological contestation and the linkage between parties and citizens. If established parties increasingly converge on restrictive immigration and integration policies, while voters who disagree migrate toward V, MP, C, or other alternatives, could Sweden be witnessing a new form of realignment rather than simply a temporary swing between blocs? What would constitute convincing evidence that a new cleavage structure has emerged?
Dr. Sofie Blombäck: This has already taken place in Sweden, and I would go back to the 2018 election as the crucial point. If we think of left-right economic policy as one dimension and the GAL-TAN (Green, Alternative, Libertarian / Traditional, Authoritarian, Nationalist) cultural dimension as another—covering migration, environmental policy, and various other issues—the Swedish party system has tilted diagonally.
For several elections in the early 2000s, we had a quite rigid two-bloc system, with M, KD, L, and C on one side, and the Social Democrats (S), Greens (MP), and Left Party (V) on the other. This was stable enough that some of my colleagues compared Sweden to almost a two-party system because the two blocs were so dominant. Then the Sweden Democrats entered and disrupted this left-right division. The Sweden Democrats were mobilizing on the other dimension, the GAL-TAN dimension.
For a couple of elections, the other parties tried to pretend that SD was not there, isolating the party and carrying on with left-right politics as usual. But what happened in 2018 was that the two parties in the center, C and L, had both promised not to support or join any government dependent on SD because, in their words, SD was a racist party. The then-L leader even said, “I have promised my children that I will never do this.” At the same time, they had promised voters that they would not support a Social Democratic and left-wing government because they did not like its left-wing economic policies.
Then came the longest government formation in Swedish history. Usually, government formation takes a week. This time, it took months. In the end, despite the fact that both parties would have preferred some sort of centrist coalition, they were forced to choose because the other parties refused to go along with the idea of a grand coalition in the middle.
So, when it came down to it, C and L chose to align with the parties they agreed with on the GAL end of the GAL-TAN scale rather than with the parties they agreed with on the economic right. This marked the first step toward what we are now beginning to see as a new two-bloc system, where the parties on the right-TAN side have included SD, while the Center Party has remained on the left-GAL side and the Liberals have moved back. They have now let go of their red line on the Sweden Democrats.
So, it is not that this is supplanting the way Swedish politics usually works. We tend to like bloc politics, apparently, but the content of the blocs has changed, both in terms of the parties involved and their ideological content.
The Left Party Is Not Guaranteed a Place in a Left-Wing Government
The Left Party (V) increased its support to 8.40 percent and 30 seats. In your earlier research on V, you argued that the party’s position in the party system depends heavily on how other parties, especially the Social Democrats, relate to it. Does the 2026 result strengthen V as an autonomous pole of the Swedish left, or does its influence still depend fundamentally on whether Social Democrats treat it as a legitimate governing partner rather than merely a parliamentary support party?
Dr. Sofie Blombäck: This is another issue that remains very much up in the air. Right now, the main stumbling block for Magdalena Andersson, the Social Democratic Party leader, is that she has been asked by the outgoing parliament speaker to try to form a government. But she would need support from the Left Party and the Greens, as well as the Center Party, and the Center Party is not at all a fan of the Left Party. They have basically ruled out collaborating with them. They say they do not want to cooperate with either of the extremes in the party system: not the Left Party and not the Sweden Democrats.
The Left Party, meanwhile, is once again saying that it will not support a government in which it is not included. They have tried this before with the Social Democrats but have never succeeded. In the end, they have had to settle for budget cooperation and basically trade their parliamentary support for policy influence.
When we speculate about this around the coffee table at work, we tend to think that the Left Party may once again have to give in, because the Center Party is in a stronger negotiating position. It has more options. The party would still prefer some kind of centrist grand coalition, although that does not seem likely at the moment.
In a sense, they are in the same situation they faced in 2018. They either have to accept left-wing economic policies or accept the inclusion of the Sweden Democrats in government. So, my money is still on some form of left-wing government, but the Left Party is not guaranteed to be included in it. The accusations of electoral impropriety that have come to the forefront over the past week have not helped. Nor has the fact that, before the election, the Left Party had to basically expel some candidates who had been caught making statements considered anti-Semitic or too supportive of Hamas.
There have also been signals from the Social Democrats that they are not sure whether the Left Party is ready to be a governing party. The question, then, is what the Left Party will do. Unless the Social Democrats, in particular, can persuade it to change its position of refusing to support a government without being included in the coalition, the Left Party will probably be left with two options: either tolerate a right-wing government dependent on the Sweden Democrats or force an extra election.
That is something that simply does not happen in Swedish politics. All the parties are convinced that voters will not be happy if they fail to form a government and will punish whoever is perceived to be responsible. That being said, there is a scenario in which the Left Party might calculate that left-wing voters would appreciate a principled stand and that it might be able to peel off some additional voters from the Social Democrats. But I think that is unlikely.
Voters Can Move to the Left Party or Greens to Signal Disagreement with the Social Democrats
The Social Democrats remained the largest party but fell to 28.02 percent, while V and the Greens gained. How should we interpret this redistribution within the left? Could it indicate that S’s attempts to adopt more restrictive positions on immigration have weakened its ability to monopolize the progressive electorate, creating political space for parties that articulate clearer alternatives on migration, welfare, climate, or civil liberties?
Dr. Sofie Blombäck: In one sense, the decline of the Social Democrats reflects a long-running and geographically widespread trend that we have seen across many Western European countries. There is also a demographic challenge for the party. Many of its most loyal supporters are elderly, and the very old tend to vote at lower rates than younger citizens. Once you get past the age of 85, for example, making it to a polling station may simply become less of a priority.
At the same time, Swedish bloc politics has a long tradition of voters identifying more strongly with a political bloc than with a particular party. So, there is a group of voters who see themselves primarily as left-bloc voters. These voters may move between the Social Democrats, the Greens, the Left Party, and perhaps even the Feminist Initiative, depending on the election.
Part of that choice can be strategic. There is a long tradition of voting in ways that help keep all the parties in a preferred bloc above the electoral threshold. That has not really been an issue on the left in this election. It mattered much more on the right, where the Liberals were expected perhaps not to reach the 4 percent threshold but ultimately made it to around 5 percent.
Another form of strategic voting within the blocs is to signal the direction in which voters want the bloc to move. If you are a broadly left-wing voter but disagree with the Social Democrats’ attempt to neutralize the immigration and law-and-order issues by moving quite close to the Moderate Party, you can vote for the Left Party or the Green Party to signal that disagreement. Similarly, if you are particularly concerned about what the government has done with Swedish climate policy, you might move to the Green Party. You are still supporting a change of government, and you are still expecting Magdalena Andersson to become Prime Minister, but you are also signaling that you want the government to tilt more toward the green side.
So, this is a challenge for the larger parties in both blocs. They tend to compete for the median voter while simultaneously facing pressure from parties on their flanks. This is simply part of how Swedish politics works.
Both SD and V Are Now Firmly Entrenched in Swedish Parliamentary Democracy
The parliament (Riksdag) building in Stockholm, Sweden. Photo: Dreamstime.
This produces an interesting symmetry. SD challenges the mainstream from the radical right, while V seeks influence from the left. From a party-system perspective, what are the analytical dangers of treating the populist or radical right and the radical left as equivalent phenomena? Which dimensions—attitudes toward liberal democracy, pluralism, minorities, political equality, capitalism, nationalism, or institutional constraints—should scholars use to distinguish different forms of anti-establishment politics?
Dr. Sofie Blombäck: It depends somewhat on why we are interested in studying the symmetry. From a purely coalition-formation and bloc-politics perspective, the symmetry is quite clear. Both sides of the political spectrum have struggled with similar problems: each has a party on the flank that the more centrist members of the coalition do not like. This was even more pronounced in 2022, when the Liberals were still on the fence about the Sweden Democrats. This time, they climbed down off the fence on the Sweden Democrats’ side.
From that perspective, the challenge is quite similar. In terms of what this says about politics or political attitudes, however, they are very different parties. Both have problematic pasts, and this is often brought up, especially by politicians on the right and other opinion makers, when discussing the Left Party. It used to be the Communist Party many decades ago and was not regarded as a reliable party. During the national government in World War II, for example, the communists were excluded. They were not seen as trustworthy when all the other parties formed a joint coalition.
There is a history there. But it is, of course, much further back in time than the history of the Sweden Democrats. You then have people disagreeing over what the bigger problem is: communist roots or skinhead neo-Nazi roots. That is one part of the debate: are these equally bad or not? The other part concerns what the parties have done to rehabilitate themselves.
Both parties have had scandals involving candidates or local politicians who have been excluded for saying or doing things, often through posts on social media. That seems to be the downfall for many of these candidates because it is there in print. But I would say this has been more prevalent among the Sweden Democrats.
Of course, the argument from parties on the left—that it is ridiculous to compare the two—is not helped by instances during this election in which they have seemed not to really know who is on the ballot, particularly candidates placed quite far down the ballot in various parts of the country. This is usually something parties try to address by vetting candidates quite thoroughly.
But we also have the problem in Sweden, as in other countries, of declining party membership. Parties increasingly struggle to find people willing to stand for office, especially local office, in many smaller municipalities. If you are faced with having no candidate at all or with a candidate you do not know very well, you might opt to give that person a chance. This is a problem that many smaller parties struggle with.
The final point I would make is that I do not think we can really regard either of these parties as anti-establishment anymore. They have both been part of governing arrangements, even if they have not formally been in government. This is especially true of the Left Party, which has played such a role for decades.
They are also trying very hard to become governing parties. In that sense, they are no longer mobilizing around the idea that “all the other parties are equally bad, and we are the ones here to shake up the system and do something new.” It is more that they are positioned at the ideological extremes, while both are nevertheless firmly entrenched in Swedish parliamentary democracy.
The SD Could Survive Isolation, but Governing Remains the Final Threshold
Your research on new political parties emphasizes that their long-term success depends not only on voter demand but also on political opportunity structures, established-party acceptance, leadership, and institutional conditions. Does SD’s trajectory illustrate how decisive established-party acceptance can be? To what extent did the transformation from cordon sanitaire to formalized parliamentary cooperation alter SD’s position more fundamentally than additional electoral growth would have done?
Dr. Sofie Blombäck: Most of the research I’ve done on this has focused on new parties in the context of the European Parliament, but I think it also translates to the national level. What I found was that acceptance by mainstream parties was very important, with populist radical-right parties being something of an exception to this rule. There are several cases across Europe in which such parties have managed to survive despite being isolated and placed behind a cordon sanitaire by other parties.
This is more speculative, but I would imagine that this is because they have been able to tap into voter demand for a particular type of policy among people who may be angry or dissatisfied enough that they are not deterred by knowing their party is unlikely to exercise much policy influence in the short term.
Of course, it is difficult to know what the counterfactual would have been if this invitation into the mainstream from parties on the right had not occurred. But the Sweden Democrats had contested elections for more than 10 years before they were first elected to Parliament, and for more than 20 years before they were first invited into the Tidö cooperation. Clearly, the party was capable of surviving on its own.
When we study new parties, however, we tend to think of their lifespan in terms of crossing different thresholds, and the Sweden Democrats have not yet crossed the final threshold of actually governing. They have not done so at the national level, although they have at the municipal level in some cases. In a way, that is the final hurdle to becoming a fully institutionalized part of the party system.
We Need to Look at Both What a Party Says and What It Actually Does
Sweden’s Social Democrats campaign ahead of the general election in Malmö, Sweden, on September 2, 2022, in support of then-Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson’s bid for a second term. Photo: Francis Joseph Dean / Dreamstime.
At the same time, the election raises a broader question about extremism. SD has spent years attempting to distance itself from its historical extremist origins while becoming an established parliamentary actor. What criteria should political scientists use when deciding whether a formerly extremist party has genuinely moderated, merely professionalized its communication, or instead succeeded in moving the boundaries of acceptable politics around itself?
Dr. Sofie Blombäck: We would need to look at both what the party says and what it does, but also at what the electorate thinks and does. This is quite straightforward to study. You can take the election manifestos and party programs of a party like the Sweden Democrats and trace the moderation of its positions, the shift in language from overtly racist rhetoric to more dog-whistle-style language, and some broader moderation of its stances.
Another example, unrelated to immigration, is the party’s position on Swedish EU membership. It was the last party to shift toward being, if not supportive, at least accepting of Swedish EU membership. That was a precondition for being invited to cooperate with the Moderates, who consider it very important that a partner be reliable on foreign policy.
That is one shift you can observe both in what the party says and in what it does. It no longer opposes Swedish negotiating positions in the EU. These positions have to be presented to Parliament, and the Sweden Democrats used to hold a record for the number of times they disagreed and argued that Sweden should take a different position on various issues of EU policy. Now they have joined in supporting what the government has done.
So, this is a case of the party saying something and then following through in the way it votes and acts. Of course, the final hurdle would be to see what the party would actually do if it were given the post of Minister for Migration, which is something it very clearly wanted and expected to receive if the Tidö side won.
That is one way of looking at it. Another is to examine what voters think of the party. Stefan Dahlberg, my colleague with whom I co-authored the piece on stigmatization, has continued this line of research with other colleagues, looking at shifts in voter attitudes toward migration and support for the Sweden Democrats. In a recent paper, they identify some changes in the general level of acceptance for anti-migration attitudes at the very local level.
So, I would hesitate to identify a single criterion. In my own research, I tend to pay attention to what parties say they want to do and what they believe, but also to what they are actually willing to do. This is especially important when it comes to compromise, because it does not seem to be on the cards that the Sweden Democrats will gain a majority on their own. Nor does it seem likely that any party will do so in Sweden. We have eight parties in Parliament, after all.
So, it is not just a matter of what you say you believe, but also what you are willing to compromise on. In the Tidö agreement, the Sweden Democrats did not have to compromise much on their core issues. Because they were not allowed to join the government, they were given a great many policy concessions. If they were included in a coalition, I would imagine that the other parties might push back more. But that remains to be seen.
Migration and Identity Are More Difficult Areas for Broad Compromise
Your recent work on elite deliberation finds that political actors can engage in respectful, common-good-oriented discussion even when partisan commitments and economic constraints limit the space for genuine accommodation. Could deliberative mechanisms of this kind help reduce polarization around migration and identity, or are such conflicts qualitatively different because they involve moral boundaries, belonging, religion, and national identity rather than primarily distributive disagreements?
Dr. Sofie Blombäck: It’s a good question. We conducted our research at the local level, where many of these issues are simply not present. Local politics in Sweden often revolves around questions such as how to organize schools or elder care, or how to attract more business to the area, whereas issues of migration and nationality are firmly situated at the national level.
A further complication in simply transposing what we found at the local level to the national level is that scrutiny is much more intense in national politics. One of the key elements of this more deliberative style of decision-making is that all parties are willing to sit down and have these kinds of discussions, and that they are willing and able to do so without negotiating through the media. These are meetings held behind closed doors, and even in the municipality where we conducted our study, you could see a clear difference between how politicians spoke in public council meetings and how they interacted in non-public deliberative meetings.
More broadly, this ties into the debate on affective polarization, which is very much at the forefront these days. There is this question of who you can still talk to in the sense of, “I may disagree with your stances, but I still respect you as a person.” And I don’t think election campaigns are really the best place to look for that.
The flip side is that the Swedish Parliament has a long tradition of reaching broad consensus. But, as your question suggests, many of those broad agreements concern economic and redistributive issues where compromise is possible. Halfway between 0 and 100 is 50, but halfway between permanent residence permits and no permanent residence permits—there is no such thing as a half-permanent residence permit.
For that reason, these questions may be more difficult when it comes to forming broad agreements. But even here, there is historical precedent. Back in 2010, the then-Alliance government on the right formed an agreement with, among others, the Green Party on migration policy in order to neutralize the Sweden Democrats. They preferred to collaborate with parties on the other side of the bloc in order to neutralize the issue.
That agreement did not hold—or rather, positions shifted—but such arrangements are not unheard of.
The 2026 Election May Be More a Story of Continuity Than Dramatic Change
Sweden has often been portrayed as a high-trust, consensus-oriented democracy. Yet the rise of SD, sharper conflicts over Islam and immigration, and growing bloc fragmentation seem to challenge that self-image. Does the 2026 election suggest a weakening of the traditional Swedish consensus model—or could stronger ideological contestation actually improve representative democracy by giving citizens clearer alternatives rather than producing the depoliticization that your work on party linkage warns against?
Dr. Sofie Blombäck: It’s a double-edged sword. Normatively, we want voters to have choices. One way of looking at the Swedish tradition of bloc politics is that it tries to do both: you have broad blocs within which parties can cooperate, while voters can still choose among the different parties within those blocs.
I think it’s too early to draw firm conclusions from the 2026 election. One early interpretation that many political scientists have pointed to is that, despite a highly contentious campaign—particularly in the final couple of weeks, since the summer itself was relatively calm—the overall shifts in the election results were not that dramatic.
It can, of course, be politically dramatic if there is a change from a right-wing to a left-wing government. But the difference between the two blocs is only around 50,000 votes, and it was something similar in the previous election. So, in terms of voter movement between the blocs, the shift is not especially large. One story we are already seeing, therefore, is one of continuity rather than dramatic change.
Another point is that, since the Sweden Democrats emerged as an electoral force at the subnational level—in municipalities and regions—we have seen an increase in cross-bloc cooperation, often aimed at neutralizing the Sweden Democrats or other political challenges that established parties do not like. We have around 150 local parties, ranging from very pragmatic to highly populist, across Sweden’s municipalities.
In the last electoral period, almost 50 out of 290 municipalities were governed jointly by the Social Democrats and the Moderates, something that would be almost unthinkable at the national level today. Two elections ago, it was also unusual at the local level, but it has now become quite normal.
So, it is far too early to say that these developments will necessarily lead to increased polarization and the erosion of the Swedish collaborative model. They might weaken it. But one development I find more worrying is not the election result itself, but what has happened in the Swedish Parliament during the last parliamentary period.
Several of the informal norms that help Parliament function have weakened. For decades, the parties had an arrangement whereby, if a politician from one side of the aisle was sick or had another official duty—perhaps attending a meeting of the Council of Europe or the UN—a politician from the other side would abstain from voting in order to preserve the balance of power.
During the last parliamentary period, the Sweden Democrats were included in this system because they were part of the government side in Parliament. They then broke with the agreement on a vote concerning migration. They argued that they had reasons for doing so, but the result was that the other parties, particularly those on the left, said that if they could no longer trust the Sweden Democrats to uphold the bargain, they could not continue to abide by it either. It is essentially a kind of prisoner’s dilemma.
Another example concerns the Committee on the Constitution, which handles complaints against government ministers. It was unable to agree on a unified statement regarding this year’s list of complaints. That tradition is much less long-standing, but the process had gradually become less politicized. Several parliaments, and especially several speakers of Parliament, had tried to make it less political and more almost judicial in character.
That development has now also fallen away. It may simply be a temporary blip because this was an election year, but it is indicative of a less deliberative and less consensus-oriented form of parliamentary conduct. No-confidence votes have also increased, and so on.
So, I will be very interested to see what happens once the new Parliament is seated.
On Security and International Cooperation, Sweden Still Presents a United Front
Your research with Thomas Karv shows that Swedish public opinion toward the EU has evolved significantly and that major external shocks can reshape political attitudes. In an era of war in Europe, NATO membership, migration pressures, and heightened security concerns, could security politics displace immigration as the principal terrain of radical-right mobilization—or might the radical right increasingly connect external security, borders, anti-Islam, migration, and national sovereignty into a single political narrative?
Dr. Sofie Blombäck: This is a good example of traditional Swedish consensus politics. The issues of security and international cooperation have been fairly effectively neutralized by the fact that both the Social Democrats and the Moderates strongly supported Sweden’s application to join NATO in 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Both potential governing parties, or prime ministerial parties, have been very clear that politics stops at the water: on these issues, Sweden presents a united front.
There is also the fact that the Moderates have demanded that the Sweden Democrats not rock the boat when it comes to European cooperation and related matters. That has been a precondition for considering the party a possible partner in a coalition or other form of government cooperation.
It is also the case that the Sweden Democrats are perhaps less Russia-friendly than some of their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, even though there was a scandal shortly before the election involving a Sweden Democrat politician and their partner being potentially connected to the Kremlin. So, the issue remains problematic in that sense.
In the previous election, however, there was an almost securitization of immigration and crime through the wave of shootings and bombings linked to organized crime, which the Sweden Democrats and others very strongly connected to immigration.
In a sense, this has created a “be careful what you wish for” situation for the government parties, because these incidents have declined. Of course, the Tidö parties want credit for reducing the number of shootings and bombings, but voters are now effectively saying, “Yes, I don’t care about bombings and shootings anymore; now I care about something else. I want a better economy or something.”
So, the government parties are not really being rewarded for bringing those incidents down, and as a result, that argument has been much less visible in this election.
SD Entering Government Would Mark the End of Its Pariah Status
And finally, Professor Blombäck, looking beyond one election, what indicators should we watch to determine whether September 13 represents a durable turning point or merely a temporary interruption in Sweden’s long-term political realignment? Would the most revealing signs be SD’s future vote share, the persistence of its policy influence, continued mainstream adoption of its positions, the strength of V and other alternatives, changing attitudes toward immigrants and Muslims, or the ability of mainstream parties to rebuild stronger representative linkages with citizens?
Dr. Sofie Blombäck: I think what could really mark a shift is if the government formation turns out to involve neither of the two teams or blocs that we have discussed throughout this election cycle. There have been persistent attempts by some parties to form a more centrist type of government that is not dependent on either V or SD.
If that were to happen, it would change the balance within the party system and would probably also have electoral repercussions next time around. So, in terms of the Swedish political system as a whole, that would probably be the most momentous development that could emerge from this election.
In terms of what this says about SD and the attitudes and policies associated with it, if, for some reason, we end up with a new Tidö agreement—it is not completely out of the question, even if it is not the most likely scenario—and SD is included in government, that would probably be what we remember from this election. It would mark the end of the party’s pariah status and could also have repercussions across a wide range of policy areas.
In this ECPS interview, Associate Professor Karl Loxbo of Stockholm University examines Sweden as an increasingly striking case of radical-right mainstreaming. He argues that the Sweden Democrats’ electoral decline should not be confused with diminishing political influence, since the party’s rhetoric and policy positions—especially on immigration—have become widely normalized. Assoc. Prof. Loxbo stresses that Sweden has moved “from one extreme to the other,” with SD incorporated into the right-wing bloc and restrictive migration policies broadly accepted across mainstream politics. He also discusses changing boundaries of political acceptability, elite cues, the “bandwagon effect,” Social Democratic accommodation, and the wider European consequences of legitimizing the radical right. Ultimately, he links these developments to “the declining legitimacy of mainstream politics.”
Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Associate Professor Karl Loxbo, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science at Stockholm University, argues that Sweden has become an unusually far-reaching case of radical-right mainstreaming. For Assoc. Prof. Loxbo, the Sweden Democrats’ electoral setback in the September 13 election should not be read as evidence that their political influence has receded. On the contrary, he stresses that the party’s ideas, rhetoric, and policy preferences have become deeply embedded in Swedish political competition. “Sweden is a special—or I would even dare to say extreme—case,” he says, pointing to the speed with which the Sweden Democrats have been incorporated into the right-wing bloc and accepted by other parties.
The central paradox of the interview is therefore the growing distance between electoral support and ideological influence. Although SD lost votes, Assoc. Prof. Loxbo argues that the party has helped transform the boundaries of acceptable political debate, particularly on immigration. Sweden, he notes, has moved from a comparatively liberal migration regime to a radically more restrictive one, a transformation that is “largely due to the SD.” More significantly, he observes that there is now “no opposition in principle to this among the mainstream parties.”
This process, in Assoc. Prof. Loxbo’s account, goes beyond policy convergence. Restrictive positions on immigration have become “highly normalized throughout the political debate and in the media,” while SD’s “rhetoric and policy positions have been extensively normalized in Sweden.” The result is not simply that the radical right has entered the mainstream, but that the mainstream itself has shifted.
Assoc. Prof. Loxbo also emphasizes how dramatically the boundaries of political acceptability have changed. “What would not have been considered acceptable 10 years ago certainly is today,” he says, adding that these boundaries have been “completely erased and redrawn.” In his view, this transformation is reinforced when mainstream elites adopt positions previously associated with the radical right, creating what he describes as a “bandwagon effect” in which citizens either shift their views or become more willing to express preferences they already held.
The Swedish experience, Assoc. Prof. Loxbo warns, carries broader European implications. Once mainstream right parties legitimize the radical right, he argues, “the party system can be reshaped beyond recognition.” Sweden’s incorporation of SD into the right-wing bloc has already produced long-term changes that, while perhaps not fully permanent, now appear deeply entrenched.
Ultimately, Assoc. Prof. Loxbo situates radical-right mainstreaming within a wider crisis of representation. The radical right, he argues, is “just a symptom of a broader phenomenon: the declining legitimacy of mainstream politics.” The democratic challenge, therefore, is not merely whether SD loses votes, but whether mainstream parties can once again develop distinctive agendas and reclaim the capacity to shape political conflict on their own terms.
Here is our interview with Associate Professor Karl Loxbo, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
SD’s Decline Reflects a Shift in Voters’ Political Priorities
Sweden’s 2026 general election produced a narrow parliamentary majority for the red-green parties, with 176 seats compared with 173 for the Tidö parties. The Social Democrats remained the largest party with 28 percent of the vote, followed by the Moderates at 19.8 percent and the Sweden Democrats at 17.5 percent. Source: SVT.
Professor Loxbo, welcome! Let me begin with the recent election result and what it may tell us about the Sweden Democrats’ position. After years of growth, SD fell to around 17.5 percent in the September 13 election, while the centre-left bloc won a very narrow majority. How should we understand this setback? Has SD reached an electoral ceiling, or is this more likely a temporary decline linked to its role in supporting the Tidö government?
Assoc. Prof. Karl Loxbo: It’s difficult to say, but what is clear is that the issues they own, especially the immigration issue have not been that salient among the electorate during this election campaign. In fact, the electorate has turned back to more traditional materialist and redistributive issues during this election. This is one of the reasons why the focus has not been on the urgency of the topics they raised and, as a result, on which they had increased their support in all elections so far since 2010. I guess there is a perception among the electorate that these issues are not as important as they were in the last election.
That result also raises an important question about the difference between electoral support and political influence. SD lost votes, but many of its positions on migration, integration, deportation, crime, and assimilation have become more mainstream. Should we therefore distinguish between electoral loss and ideological success? Can a radical-right party lose support because other parties have adopted parts of its agenda?
Assoc. Prof. Karl Loxbo: Sweden is a special—or I would even dare to say extreme—case, in the sense that, in a very short time, the Sweden Democrats have been incorporated into the right-wing bloc as almost a full member. They are now fully accepted by all of the other parties, including the Liberals, and I am not really aware of a similar situation elsewhere.
Their current position, and what you referred to as the mainstreaming of their issues, has to be understood in light of that. The mainstreaming of their agenda is closely connected to their incorporation as a completely normal part of the right-wing bloc. In a very short period—roughly four years—it is almost like moving from one extreme to the other.
Sweden’s Immigration Policy Has Gone from One Extreme to the Other
This connects directly to your research on how radical-right parties shape political debate. You describe SD as an “issue entrepreneur” that helped make immigration more central to Swedish politics. If immigration is now firmly established on the agendas of mainstream parties, has SD become less necessary to voters? Can a party lose ownership of the issue it helped make dominant?
Assoc. Prof. Karl Loxbo: This again needs to be seen in light of the Sweden Democrats being incorporated into the right-wing bloc as a fully accepted part of it, and that also applies to their position on immigration. At the same time, the leading party on the other side, the Social Democrats, have also adopted this position, so in that sense, maybe the Sweden Democrats can lose ownership of the issue.
But when immigration is highly salient in an election campaign, they are bound to benefit from it. The thing is, it was not really a highly salient issue in this election.
Sweden stands out as a rather special case because immigration policy has gone from one extreme to the other. Before the refugee crisis, Sweden had a highly liberal immigration policy compared with many other European countries. This has changed completely, and it is largely due to the SD. And there is no opposition in principle to this among the mainstream parties. None.
This also raises the question of how mainstream parties react to SD’s success. When established parties adopt stricter positions on immigration to compete with SD, do they weaken the party—or do they instead help normalize SD’s language and way of defining political problems?
Assoc. Prof. Karl Loxbo: Going back to the previous question, you have to distinguish between the issue of immigration and the actor. Whereas the policy position of being strict on immigration is now highly normalized throughout the political debate and in the media, this was not always the case. The view of the actor itself—the radical right as a political actor—is different. The Sweden Democrats have been mainstreamed within the right-wing bloc, but there is still some tension surrounding the party itself. At the same time, it is certainly the case that their rhetoric and policy positions have been extensively normalized in Sweden.
Policy Influence Does Not Automatically Translate into Electoral Reward
Sweden Democrats’ Square Meeting in Umeå. Jimmie Åkesson speaks to the people on the city square where opposition left-wingers have formed a chain and protest in Umeå, Sweden on August 14, 2018. Photo: Shutterstock.
There is also a puzzle about the relationship between influence and electoral reward. SD had considerable influence over migration and criminal-justice policy during the last four years, yet it still lost support. Does this suggest that voters distinguish between getting the policies they want and supporting the party that first promoted them?
Assoc. Prof. Karl Loxbo: Again, voting depends very much on issue saliency, and in this election, the issue was not particularly salient. But it could, of course, be that many voters effectively free-rode on the Sweden Democrats: the policies had already been advanced, and the work had, to some extent, been done.
Let me turn to the relationship between SD and Social Democracy. Your research shows that Social Democrats can sometimes reduce losses to the radical right by taking a tougher line on immigration. But does this create a longer-term problem? Can Social Democrats win back working-class voters without also accepting the idea that welfare and solidarity should be more closely tied to nationality?
Assoc. Prof. Karl Loxbo: No. In the short term, it seemed that they could do this in some Scandinavian countries, as we saw in Denmark. The Swedish Social Democrats attempted to do the same, but in this election they won little or nothing back from the Sweden Democrats.
So, this appears to be a losing gamble, as much of the research in this field suggests. Accommodation generally does not work, and it works particularly poorly for social democratic parties. In that sense, voters tend to go with the original.
That creates a very slippery slope for social democracy. In the Swedish case, they seem to have adopted this position in order to neutralize the issue and make it less salient, but it has not won them votes. It is difficult to say whether this contributed to the Social Democrats’ weak election result or whether the more important factor was the general ambiguity of their campaign.
Immigration Has Become a Lasting Feature of Swedish Party Competition
This brings us to the wider structure of political conflict in Sweden. Your research suggests that immigration has become more important in shaping how voters understand left and right, while traditional economic issues have become less central. But cost of living, healthcare, welfare, and household finances were also important in 2026. Are economic issues becoming more important again, or has immigration permanently changed Swedish party competition?
Assoc. Prof. Karl Loxbo: Yes, immigration has become a lasting feature of Swedish party competition—although “permanent” may be too strong a word. Party competition in Sweden has clearly changed, and there is no longer a stable political supply of long-term redistributive platforms.
At the same time, demand for such platforms is highly fragmented and no longer consistently sustained over time. The reason is that the main dimensions of political conflict have become increasingly intertwined. Cultural and economic issues now overlap to a much greater extent, and party competition reflects this development. As a result, Swedish politics has become increasingly centered on cultural issues, particularly immigration.
The election also showed clear geographical differences. SD remained strong in many smaller towns and rural areas but faced more resistance in large and diverse cities. How should we understand this divide? Are different parts of Sweden developing increasingly different political cultures around immigration, identity, and social change?
Assoc. Prof. Karl Loxbo: You see the same divide everywhere between cities and rural areas. The radical right tends to be stronger in rural areas and somewhat less strong in more affluent urban environments. This is not a division that is specific to Sweden. But to answer your question, yes, for sure, there are different political cultures. Sweden, however, does not deviate in any significant sense from other countries in this respect.
Younger Generations Remain More Libertarian and Cosmopolitan
Greta Thunberg, climate activist, has been demonstrating on Fridays outside the Swedish Parliament. Photo: Liv Oeian
Another interesting result concerns younger voters. SVT’s exit poll suggests that SD lost significant support among 18–21-year-olds. What might explain this? Are younger voters becoming less attracted to radical-right politics, or are they simply moving between parties more easily than older voters?
Assoc. Prof. Karl Loxbo: Younger voters are not generally that attracted to radical right-wing politics. In fact, the general tendency is that younger generations are more libertarian or more cosmopolitan in their mindset. However, in the last election, it was clear that the SD was strong among young men. The decline now probably also reflects the decline in issue saliency. There are other issues on the agenda, and they are not the issues that the SD own. As a result, you see a decreasing gap between young girls and boys, who are becoming less likely to support the radical right.
Let me turn to the question of normalization. In your earlier work, you argued that strong criticism and isolation of SD could sometimes help the party present itself as an outsider and strengthen its internal unity. Today, SD is much more established. How has the line between what is seen as racist, xenophobic, radical-right, or simply legitimate migration policy changed in Sweden?
Assoc. Prof. Karl Loxbo: It has changed dramatically—substantially. As I said before, it is like moving from one extreme to the other. What would not have been considered acceptable 10 years ago certainly is today.
The boundaries around these issues have been completely erased and redrawn. One example is the recent debate about why the right-wing side lost the election. The Sweden Democrats quickly argued that this was because immigrants vote for the left, and the narrative seemed to imply that these votes somehow did not count.
Yet hardly anyone reacted to that, except on the left. Ten years ago, it would have caused a major scandal. Today, it does not, and that illustrates how profoundly the boundaries around this issue have shifted.
Democracies Should Be Wary When Political Arguments Target Particular Groups
That leads to a difficult but important distinction. Democratic states clearly have the right to control migration and set rules on citizenship and integration. At what point does a restrictive migration policy become nativist or exclusionary? What signs should scholars and people look for?
Assoc. Prof. Karl Loxbo: You should look for signs such as the one I just mentioned: when political rhetoric begins to single out specific groups. When particular groups become the focus of political argument—when people are told to be wary of this group or that, or when individuals are treated as if they act collectively—that is, at least from the Swedish case, one warning sign.
Your research with Mike Farjam also shows how people respond to what they think the majority believes. Could this help explain the normalization of radical-right ideas? If restrictive views are increasingly presented as “common sense” or the voice of a “silent majority,” can this make people more willing to accept or express such positions?
Assoc. Prof. Karl Loxbo: Yes, definitely. It’s the same mechanism here, but it is more about people revealing preferences they already hold. They do so in response to elite cues. When elites shift their positions on these issues, people often shift as well.
The key point is that this broader change does not occur simply because the Sweden Democrats move in a certain direction. They tend to reach a more limited electorate, particularly those who already hold strongly anti-immigrant views. The broader shift comes when mainstream parties also change their positions.
In the Swedish case, that can produce a bandwagon effect: people either shift their positions on these issues or become more willing to express views they already held. That is what redraws the boundaries.
Swedish Exceptionalism Was Greatly Exaggerated
Jimmie Åkesson speaks to the people on the city square where opposition left-wingers have formed a chain and protest in Umeå, Sweden on August 14, 2018.
This also connects to Sweden’s image as a highly trusting and tolerant society. You have questioned the idea that high social trust automatically means high tolerance toward outsiders. Looking at Sweden’s shift toward a more restrictive migration debate, was the idea of Swedish exceptionalism always somewhat exaggerated?
Assoc. Prof. Karl Loxbo: Yes, somewhat exaggerated, perhaps. But if you compare Sweden with many other countries, it is still more tolerant. Although these issues have been normalized here as well, the idea of Swedish exceptionalism has certainly been greatly exaggerated. The belief that Sweden was immune to radical-right populism was actually widely held around 20 years ago. That turned out to be highly naive and reflected an exaggerated belief in the liberalism of Swedish public opinion.
Let me broaden the discussion to Europe. Your recent research with Brigitte Pircher suggests that European integration has reduced conflict in some economic areas while leaving more room for political conflict over identity and social protection. Could this help explain why migration, borders, and national identity have become so important for radical-right parties?
Assoc. Prof. Karl Loxbo: Yes, and this is a traditional explanation in the literature for the general rise of right-wing populism: the convergence of established parties on economic issues. To some extent, European integration has pushed them toward similar positions on issues that were previously more politicized. As a result, this creates political space that can be exploited by other parties, including the radical right. So yes, I believe that.
Sweden Shows the Risks of Mainstream Conservatives Embracing the Radical Right
The Swedish case also has wider European relevance. Germany faces the AfD, France the National Rally, and Britain Reform UK. What lessons can these countries draw from Sweden about isolating the radical right, adopting parts of its agenda, or giving it influence over government?
Assoc. Prof. Karl Loxbo: As soon as mainstream right parties legitimize the radical right—not only by accommodating its main issues and adopting the same positions, but by actively saying that it was right all along—the party system can be reshaped beyond recognition. I doubt that will happen in Germany with the AfD, but if it does, the consequences would be profound.
That is what happened in the Swedish case. When the right-wing bloc included the Sweden Democrats, it produced long-term shifts that now look almost permanent, although I would hesitate to call them fully permanent.
So, it is a significant risk, as the Swedish conservatives have shown. If the German CDU were to follow the same path, I would be worried.
The Radical Right Is a Symptom of the Declining Legitimacy of Mainstream Politics
Finally, let me end with the broader democratic question. If SD continues to lose votes but much of the political agenda it helped create remains in place, how should we judge democratic resilience? Is it enough for the party itself to weaken, or do mainstream parties also need to regain the ability to shape political debate on their own terms?
Assoc. Prof. Karl Loxbo: Yes, definitely. Otherwise, someone else will come along. I would say that the radical right is just a symptom of a broader phenomenon: the declining legitimacy of mainstream politics.
This does not occur in a vacuum. It is the result of a long-term decline in the legitimacy of mainstream parties, which in turn creates space for the mobilization of new parties. So, if the radical right declines, someone else will come along, as long as we have voting rights.
So yes, of course, mainstream parties need to develop clear agendas and political issues of their own again. The question is: can they?
In this ECPS interview, Associate Professor Ov Cristian Norocel of Lund University examines how the Sweden Democrats’ electoral decline can coexist with the continued normalization of their political agenda. He argues that Sweden’s mainstream right has itself shifted, noting that on immigration “the other parties [are] radicalizing themselves, rather than the Sweden Democrats normalizing their political messaging.” Norocel discusses the emergence of a Swedish “right-wing continuum,” welfare chauvinism, differential grievability, the racialized reinterpretation of the folkhem, gender equality, masculinities of crisis, and youth radicalization. His central argument is that SD’s influence cannot be measured by vote share alone: even as the party loses electoral ground, ideas it helped mainstream remain politically powerful and continue to shape debates over migration, welfare, belonging, and Swedish identity.
Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Associate Professor Ov Cristian Norocel of the Department of Sociology at Lund University argues that the Sweden Democrats’ (SD) electoral decline in Sweden’s 2026 election should not be mistaken for a retreat of the political ideas the party has helped normalize. Rather, he emphasizes that the more consequential development may be the transformation of Sweden’s mainstream right itself. As he puts it, on immigration “we see the other parties radicalizing themselves, rather than the Sweden Democrats normalizing their political messaging.”
At the center of Norocel’s analysis is what he calls the crystallization of a Swedish “right-wing continuum” bringing together SD, the Moderates (M), the Christian Democrats (KD) and, to a certain extent, the Liberals (L). While the SD have moderated elements of their presentation in pursuit of governmental legitimacy, Norocel stresses that this has occurred alongside movement in the opposite direction by established center-right parties: “the M, KD, and L, to a certain extent, have radicalized their political messaging.” The result, he argues, is a convergence in which parties that once occupied more distinct ideological positions “have been drawn to one another.”
This convergence is particularly pronounced on migration. Norocel notes that SD has remained “very persistent and consistent” on the issue, while other parties have moved increasingly closer to it. He therefore rejects a simple interpretation of the 2026 result as evidence that the radical right’s influence is waning. Indeed, he argues that “the party had already achieved part of its policy agenda,” as ideas associated with welfare chauvinism and restrictive migration policy have been “appropriated and transformed into policies by the parties in power.”
The interview also broadens the discussion beyond immigration alone. Drawing on his work on “differential grievability,” Norocel explains how political discourse ranks some lives as “more deserving of the state’s concern than others,” linking migration politics to welfare, ethnicity, race and national belonging. He similarly traces how SD’s reinterpretation of the folkhem has become increasingly “narrow and nationalistic,” turning the welfare-state ideal of “the people’s home” into “a home only for the Swedish people.”
Taken together, Norocel’s analysis points to a central paradox of contemporary Swedish politics: SD may be losing votes while the ideological terrain it helped reshape remains firmly in place. The crucial question, therefore, is no longer only how many voters support the SD, but whether mainstream conservative parties will “continue along the path of further radicalization and closer alignment with the SD” in the post-Tidö period.
Associate Professor Ov Cristian Norocel of the Department of Sociology at Lund University.
Here is our interview with Assoc. Prof. Ov Cristian Norocel, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
The Sweden Democrats Have Already Achieved Part of Their Policy Agenda
Professor Norocel, welcome! Let me begin with the idea of normalization, which runs through much of your work. You have shown how the Sweden Democrats moved from fringe nationalism and open racism toward welfare chauvinism, cultural racism, and a more acceptable conservative language. Yet SD lost support in the September 13 elections after four years of major influence through the Tidö Agreement. Does this electoral setback tell us very little about normalization? Could SD be losing votes while the political ideas it helped normalize are becoming more deeply rooted?
Assoc. Prof. Ov Cristian Norocel: Yes, this is a very interesting question, because if we look at the results and how electoral support has been distributed among the mainstream parties, but also pay attention to the parties that have fallen below the 4% threshold, the picture becomes quite complicated.
On the one hand, we could argue that the universe of ideas—of welfare chauvinism, of an increasingly restrictive migration policy, and also of a very aggressive migration policy, have gained a solid foothold among the mainstream parties. Here, of course, it is worth bearing in mind that the Tidö Agreement, and thus the government that had been in power until now, had been deeply dependent on the support of the Sweden Democrats, and the Sweden Democrats have had a major impact on the policy agenda of that government.
That conceptual universe had been appropriated and transformed into policies by the parties in power. So, this means that, in a sense, the party had already achieved part of its policy agenda. At the same time, their ambition to be able to nominate their own ministers and to hold specific portfolios in a future Tidö 2 agreement had not materialized. So, on the one hand, the ideas had been appropriated and had partly been transformed into policies. We have seen clear avenues for these to be continued further by the Sweden Democrats, and they were very explicit about what they were planning to do should the Tidö Agreement continue into a Tidö 2. However, at the same time, if we look further to the right of the party, particularly at the parties that have landed below the 4% threshold, we see an even higher radicalization of the same kind of ideological content as that of the Sweden Democrats. This is something that tells us that, across the ideological—or ideational—continuum of these parties, certain ideas have seeped into the mainstream and gained political currency. At the same time, the Sweden Democrats, as the vehicle of this ideological content, are considered not radical enough, particularly among the voters of Alliance for Sweden (AfS) or the Örebro Party—the local regional party in Örebro city and county.
So those 50,000 votes that basically made the difference between the red-green side of the political spectrum and the conservative side could have come from those voters who voted further to the right. On the other hand, I am quite skeptical that those votes would automatically have been transferred to the Sweden Democrats.
So, my argument would be that the Sweden Democrats actually suffered a significant defeat. If we look at the final data, they registered a decrease of 3.05% in voter share. And I would argue that those 50,000 that went to the smaller parties do not really account for that entirety, but that actually a lot of these votes, most probably went to the main conservative right party, the Moderates (Moderaterna / M), as well as the conservative-right Christian Democrats, or Kristdemokraterna (KD).
A Clear Right-Wing Continuum Is Crystallizing in Swedish Politics
That brings us to your idea of a “right-wing continuum.” In your work with Felicia Hägerbäck, you describe the growing alignment between SD, the Moderates, and the Christian Democrats, especially on migration and welfare. In the 2026 elections, SD declined while M and KD gained. Does this suggest that voters can now move between these parties without leaving the broader restrictive policy framework? Has the deeper change taken place in the mainstream right rather than simply in SD’s vote share?
Assoc. Prof. Ov Cristian Norocel: I think part of my earlier answer was pointing exactly to this aspect: on the one hand, we see the crystallization of a clear right-wing continuum in which not only the conservative-right Moderates, or the conservative-right Christian Democrats, and, to a certain extent, the so-called Liberal Party are included, but also the Sweden Democrats.
What I find extremely interesting—and this is something that I am working on at present in a manuscript—is paying attention to the dual forces in the creation of this right-wing continuum. On the one hand, we have a normalization of the radical-right populist parties. So, in our case, we have the Sweden Democrats, which, in pursuit of being perceived as more ready to be part of a governmental coalition, had toned down some of their more radical messaging. At the same time, what has happened is that the other parties themselves—Moderaterna, Kristdemokraterna, and Liberalerna to a certain extent—have radicalized their political messaging. So, we see how, from rather different positions on the ideological map these parties have been drawn to one another.
What I find interesting, however, is that on the issue of immigration, which is the core issue of the Sweden Democrats, they have not moderated their messaging. So, they have accepted negotiations and compromises on other policy areas. However, immigration has actually been an issue on which we see the other parties radicalizing themselves, rather than the Sweden Democrats normalizing their political messaging.
So, this also leads me to be rather skeptical of the interpretation that the Sweden Democrats have lost at the hands of the small radical parties. I would rather argue that their voters had perhaps been attracted to a more mainstream packaging of the same anti-immigration message.
Certain Lives Are Considered More Deserving of the State’s Concern Than Others
This convergence is also visible in debates about welfare and belonging. Your concept of “differential grievability” shows how migrants can be presented as less deserving of welfare protection and social concern. After four years of the Tidö framework, has welfare chauvinism moved beyond SD and become more firmly embedded in Swedish center-right politics?
Assoc. Prof. Ov Cristian Norocel: I would argue that it very much has. To explain in lay terms what grievability means—and this is a concept for which I am very much indebted to the scholarship of Judith Butler, who articulated it—my colleague Felicia and I have used the concept in our research to examine how, in political debates in the Swedish Parliament, certain lives are considered more valuable, and certain lives are considered more deserving of the state’s concern than others.
In that context, we noticed that when it comes to welfare provision, the lives of Swedish citizens and of Swedes, narrowly defined as an ethnic and racial community, are clearly placed higher on a hierarchical ladder than the lives of people of migrant descent, first-generation migrants, and people whose allegiance to the Swedish state and its values is constantly questioned. That is the distinction we identified.
What we also noticed in that research, and what I am continuing to explore at the moment, is that while the Sweden Democrats had accepted certain compromises in other policy areas—such as tax reduction, privatized schools, and privatized welfare infrastructure—they have been very persistent and consistent on migration. By the same measure, we noticed how both Moderaterna and Kristdemokraterna, and, to a certain extent, Liberalerna, had moved closer and closer to the Sweden Democrats.
In that context, we saw—and now we have tangible evidence of this, because our article was written before the Tidö Agreement came into force and before we could see its political effects—that the anti-immigration policies pursued over the past couple of years have become increasingly repressive. We also see policies that question the sincerity of people who have gone to great lengths to demonstrate, to a certain extent, even assimilation into Swedish society. Their sincerity is still being questioned.
That manifests itself, for example, in very young children from migrant families being expelled from the country, or in people who do not meet a rather high threshold of self-sufficient employment being forced to leave for that reason. So, we see how, on the issue of immigration, the right-wing continuum is very clearly taking shape. Not only that, but we also see how the mainstream parties have actually moved in a more radical direction, rather than the Sweden Democrats budging in any way on this issue.
SD’s Migration Agenda Endured Even as Voters Prioritized Other Issues
A Sweden Democrats (SD) campaign poster ahead of Sweden’s September 13, 2026 parliamentary elections, featuring the slogan “This is how we make Sweden Sweden again” and highlighting the party’s policies on immigration, crime, Islamism, citizenship, welfare, and the economy.
This creates an important paradox. SD lost around three percentage points, but migration, crime, citizenship, integration, and welfare deservingness remain central political issues. Could this be a case of electoral weakness combined with broader ideological success? How should we distinguish between losing votes and successfully changing the boundaries of acceptable political debate?
Assoc. Prof. Ov Cristian Norocel: Here we need to take a step back and acknowledge that, on the one hand, the Sweden Democrats had been rather successful in imposing their understanding of migration matters on the Tidö parties. To a certain extent, the Social Democrats have also started talking more about, and leaning more toward, a restrictive approach to migration.
However, in the context of the 2026 elections in Sweden, migration as a specific policy issue was not highest on the agenda of the Swedish electorate. There were other topics that voters considered much more important, and here one could point to two in particular: the economy and economic matters, and the climate and the issue of climate change. Matters of migration and law and order therefore ranked significantly lower on the political agenda of the electorate.
We could then argue, perhaps—and my colleagues, like Anders Hellström, would perhaps agree on this matter—that the party had been out of sync with the wider electorate. Even though the Sweden Democrats maintained their direction on migration and remained very critical on migration matters and law-and-order issues, the electorate had moved on and prioritized slightly different topics.
The Liberal Party Is Becoming a Party Without an Electorate of Its Own
The Liberals offer another interesting example of this normalization. After facing the risk of falling below the electoral threshold, they reached around 5.4 percent and moved toward accepting SD participation in government. Does this show that normalization can happen not only through ideological change but also through coalition strategy and political survival? How important is it when a liberal party begins to see cooperation with the radical right as necessary?
Assoc. Prof. Ov Cristian Norocel: On this matter, the Liberal Party has had a very surprising journey. If you think back to the 2022 elections, and even earlier, the Liberals were one of the parties that took a very clear stance against allowing the Sweden Democrats to have any influence on governmental matters whatsoever. However, it seems that, under a series of party leaders, this red line has been crossed several times: from actively trying to prevent the Sweden Democrats from gaining any meaningful influence on governmental matters, to presenting themselves as the party that would guarantee, in a governmental constellation like the Tidö Agreement, that the Sweden Democrats’ policy influence would not be as significant as if the party were itself in power and in government; and, nowadays, to the present leader of the Liberals physically embracing the Sweden Democrats’ leader and saying that a vote for the Liberal Party actually secures a continuation of the Tidö political agenda.
So, we see how the party, at least its leadership, seems to have dropped any ethical concerns regarding its policy guidelines, what sits at its core, and what the core values of the party are. From this point of view, if I may go back to the electoral results, and particularly the VALU research on the party’s voter profile, what I find extremely telling is that, if we compare the 2022 elections with the 2026 elections, only around a third of the original electorate that had voted for the Liberal Party in 2022 continued to vote for the party in 2026.
This means that support for the Liberals had come from elsewhere. Interestingly, that elsewhere was actually the Moderate Party. People who had voted for the Moderate Party in 2022 constituted approximately 40% of the Liberal Party’s new voters in 2026. So it seems that, at present, one could even go so far as to argue that the Liberal Party is no longer a party with a clear ideology of its own or an electorate of its own. Rather, it is a party without its own electorate and is supported mainly by a specific wing that previously backed the conservative-right Moderate Party.
The Folkhem Is Becoming a Home Only for the Swedish People
Celebrating Sweden’s National Day in Norrköping, Sweden, on June 6, 2014. Immigrants and native Swedes participate together in National Day celebrations. Sweden’s National Day is an official public holiday. Photo: Dreamstime.
Let me turn to SD’s use of the Swedish welfare tradition. Your earlier work shows how SD reinterpreted the ‘folkhem’ around a distinction between a deserving national “us” and outsiders. Have the September 13 elections changed this strategy, or shown how durable it has become? Is SD support about more than immigration—about a wider idea of who belongs within Swedish welfare and solidarity?
Assoc. Prof. Ov Cristian Norocel: It is becoming increasingly clear that the way the Sweden Democrats understand and deploy the concept of the folkhem—which, in plain English, means “the house of the (Swedish) people”—makes it self-evident that it is about Swedish people. In this sense, it is becoming more and more of a right-wing project.
Previously, the party had used the concept of the folkhem to mobilize an electorate around the idea that the Social Democrats—the party that had dominated Swedish politics for most of the 20th century and the early 21st century—had forgotten the ideals of the folkhem. The Sweden Democrats then sought to present themselves as its true defenders. Nowadays, however, this use of the concept is becoming increasingly narrow and nationalistic. We are no longer talking simply about a home of the people, as the concept itself would be translated, but increasingly about a home only for the Swedish people. It is defined within the confines of the national community, with a very clear racial and ethnic dimension.
At the same time, and also as part of their participation in the Tidö Agreement, the Sweden Democrats have moved further to the right. The folkhem, as it is now used and deployed by the party, is not only becoming more racialized—a project for the Swedish nation, ethnically and racially defined—but also increasingly a right-wing project in which tax reductions, punitivity, and privatization have become more important.
Even within this understanding of a folkhem for the Swedish people, a certain hierarchy appears to be constructed, in which only certain Swedish people are included in the Sweden Democrats’ folkhem: those who are comfortably middle class and who live in specific locations across Sweden—not in areas with significant migration, but in places with a rather distinct profile, somewhere between rural and highly urbanized areas, in peri-urban locations across the country.
SD’s Vision of Future Sweden Is Necessarily Ethnically and Racially Swedish
Your intersectional research broadens this question further. You show that radical-right ideas about “us” and “them” are shaped through gender, class, ethnicity, race, sexuality, welfare, and traditional values at the same time. Does this help explain why SD can remain strong even when immigration is not always the top concern? Are voters responding to a broader social and moral worldview rather than one issue alone?
Assoc. Prof. Ov Cristian Norocel: At least in the research I’ve been publishing over the past decade or so, gender has been a very important lens for better understanding the ideological universe of the Sweden Democrats. Gender, and intersectionality in particular, has been one of the main theoretical lenses that has allowed me to understand the articulation and re-articulation of the folkhem concept. It is through this intersectional perspective that I became aware of the growing stratification of the folkhem.
As I was just saying, I became aware of a certain racial stratification that excludes migrants, regardless of how much they attempt to become integrated or even assimilated into Swedish society. There is always a distinction, as reflected in statements by several highly ranked Sweden Democrats who have basically argued that no one of migrant descent will ever be able to consider themselves fully Swedish.
This extends to a certain social stratification within the folkhem, and this is part of what I have described as the mainstreaming of the radical-right populist party in Sweden. The moment tax reductions become important for the party or at least become part of the governmental package that the party supports, this leads to a tacit stratification of the folkhem. Comfortably middle-class Swedes become the preferred members of the folkhem, as opposed to working-class Swedes who may live in highly diverse neighborhoods and who, together with people of migrant background, have other, more socially acute political priorities, such as rent control, redistribution of resources, proper schools, and proper welfare infrastructure.
From that point of view, intersectionality has been very important because it has allowed me to see this stratification and how the concept of folkhem has, little by little, undergone a similar process in which certain people are discursively sorted out and the concept becomes focused on a rather narrowly defined group, not only in terms of ethnicity and race, but also in terms of class.
The issue of gender is also very important here, because we have seen how the party, over at least the past 10 or 15 years, has become increasingly adamant not only about preserving Sweden as it is, but also about ensuring that future Sweden—the future generations of citizens living in this country—will necessarily be ethnically and racially Swedish. This means that there is a very purposeful idea, in rather mechanicistic terms, about who is to be encouraged to reproduce.
Here, of course, this goes back to the idea of turning their gaze toward women and defining their task narrowly as those entrusted with reproducing the Swedish nation and ensuring that this traditional worldview continues into future generations that are, according to the Sweden Democrats, necessarily ethnically and also racially Swedish.
From that point of view, we can see how this understanding of the folkhem, and of the tasks allocated respectively to men and women, has also had certain electoral consequences, because the party still has a significant gender imbalance among its members. We can also look at the leadership, which is dominated by men, with very few women in positions of power. Those few women who do reach positions of power generally leave after a relatively short time, so there are very few who were promoted within the party from the beginning and have continued to occupy a central place in it.
This has also allowed me to see how gender has repercussions both in the way it is articulated politically by the Sweden Democrats and in the party’s internal structure. We see how the party structure does not allow women to progress easily into the leadership, and we also see the consequences among the electorate. There is still a significant difference between how men and women across all age groups and across the country vote for the Sweden Democrats, with a clear imbalance toward the male electorate across all age groups.
SD Presents Itself as Returning to What “Gender Equality Once Meant”
Children enjoy the Malmö Festival in Malmö, Sweden. Photo: Kim Carlson / Dreamstime
Gender equality is a particularly interesting part of this picture. You have shown how radical-right actors can support gender equality rhetorically while using it to contrast a supposedly modern Swedish majority with a racialized and patriarchal migrant “other.” Has this way of speaking spread beyond SD? Has gender equality itself become a way of drawing boundaries around migration, Islam, citizenship, and Swedish identity?
Assoc. Prof. Ov Cristian Norocel: This is also part of an ongoing research project that I’m working on at the moment. Together with a colleague from Sciences Po, we have been very interested, on the one hand, in the crystallization of the right-wing continuum and, on the other hand, specifically in the issue of gender equality: how and to what degree this concept has been used both by the Sweden Democrats and by the other parties along the right-wing continuum, and how it has changed over time.
It is rather interesting because, when it comes to gender, the party clearly takes a stance against what it considers to be” feminism that has gone too far.” The various efforts toward emancipation pursued by feminist actors, including civil society organizations and political parties that have embraced such an agenda, have been portrayed by the Sweden Democrats as their enemies. The party has instead consistently claimed to promote a return to what “gender equality once meant.”
They have a rather mechanicistic understanding of gender equality in this respect. Their approach is, on the one hand, to count very strictly how many men and how many women have access to specific positions and, on the other hand, to emphasize that gender quotas are not something to be pursued. The party has consistently opposed gender quotas across all sections of society, arguing that every individual, whether woman or man, should demonstrate their own qualities and that this assessment should be reflected in the positions they are able to attain in society.
In this sense, they are largely impervious to questions of structural inequality and the structural barriers that prevent women from reaching certain positions in Swedish society. Interestingly, parties that previously supported a rather different and more encompassing approach to gender equality, women’s advancement, and emancipation—such as the Liberal Party and, to a certain extent, the Moderate Party—are now also gradually moving toward this narrower understanding of gender equality.
Gender equality thus comes to mean, basically, having a certain number of women and men in particular positions in society, while emphasizing that this balance should be achieved not through state intervention or governmental policies, but through each individual’s own qualities and willingness to attain those positions. It is a very interesting change in tone among these parties.
The Far-Right Has Been Quicker to Incorporate Crisis into Its Political Agenda
Your work on far-right masculinities also focuses on the politics of crisis. You describe a “masculinity of crises,” in which repeated crises help create an embattled “us” and strengthen ideas of hierarchy and protection. Sweden has faced debates framed around migration, crime, welfare, energy, and security crises. Has crisis become a permanent political language through which authority, masculinity, and national belonging are organized?
Assoc. Prof. Ov Cristian Norocel: Unfortunately, we are living through very interesting times, and these times are indeed marked by a continuing series of crises. This means that all parties in Parliament, as well as those outside it, have to develop their own strategies for dealing with these issues and package those responses in ways that make sense to their potential electorate. My analyses have led me to argue that, along this right-wing continuum, and even further to the right, these actors have been much quicker to incorporate crisis into their political agendas.
Looking specifically at gender, I noticed a clear resonance between the idealized masculinities these actors promote and the politics of crisis. This led me to develop the concept of “masculinities of crises” as a way of conceptualizing these idealized models circulating in these political circles. Put simply, masculinities of crisis refer to a type of masculinity articulated along the ideological continuum further to the right that is not merely a reaction to repeated crises, but a specific construct that actually thrives in a context of crisis. I would go so far as to say that these masculinities would not have the same political impact they have today if there had not been so many crises in recent years.
What we are witnessing in relation to economic inequalities, insecurity, climate denialism, and war very close to our borders has therefore been conducive to the type of masculinity that is crystallizing and being promoted in these circles.
Young Men Are Being Attracted to Parties Further to the Right of SD
The youth vote adds another dimension. SD appears to have lost support among the youngest voters, while young men remain more right-leaning than young women. Should we distinguish between support for SD as a party and the wider spread of nativist or anti-egalitarian ideas among young men? Could younger men move to other right-wing parties while keeping political identities partly shaped by radical-right discourse?
Assoc. Prof. Ov Cristian Norocel: I haven’t had a very close look at exactly how young men and young women, respectively, are voting for and supporting right-wing populist parties, as well as parties further to the right. But from the little I have already seen, a very interesting picture is taking shape. The Sweden Democrats are beginning to lose their appeal as outsiders on the political landscape, while younger men in particular are being attracted to parties further to the right of the Sweden Democrats.
What I find extremely telling is the episode playing out in one of the most privileged social settings in Sweden: Manillaskolan, one of the most prestigious schools in central Stockholm. Interestingly—“interesting” in quotation marks—the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) received votes from a significant number of young people at the school.
This raises questions about the interaction between, on the one hand, a younger generation, particularly men, who find the messaging of the more extreme manifestations of right-wing and far-right ideology more appealing, and, on the other hand, class distinction, because Manillaskolan is actually a setting for highly privileged segments of Swedish society. So we see a stronger resonance between social class, upper-class distinctions, and far-right ideology.
The Key Question Is Whether the Mainstream Right Will Continue Its Radicalization
And finally, Professor Norocel, let me return to the larger question of political success. SD lost votes and seats in the September 13 elections, yet many ideas it helped introduce about migration, welfare, belonging, and national identity remain influential, and cooperation with SD has become more accepted. Should we therefore look beyond SD’s vote share and ask how deeply its ideas about belonging, deservingness, gender, welfare, and Swedish identity have entered the political mainstream?
Assoc. Prof. Ov Cristian Norocel: Yes, this is something we will definitely have to research in the coming years. As we can see from the results, the party registered a significant decline, with the Sweden Democrats losing around 3% of the vote and experiencing a notable decrease in parliamentary representation. This is not the first time such a decline has occurred, as it was already evident in the [2024] European Parliament elections. So, for the time being, the party appears to be on a downward trajectory.
However, these ideas will remain important in the years to come, because it is still unclear how the conservative parties—both Moderaterna and the Christian Democrats—will react in a post-Tidö context. We are still at a very early stage. At the moment, we do not know what the future governmental constellation that will lead Sweden during the coming mandate will look like. This is still to be decided.
The Social Democrats will be the ones to lead the first negotiations on forming a government. We do not yet know exactly whether all the parties involved will be willing to negotiate and agree on a governmental formula. So, it remains to be seen whether, in this post-Tidö context, the social-conservative Moderaterna and the conservative Christian Democrats will return to their previous positions on migration, social welfare, gender equality, and so on, or whether they will continue along the path of further radicalization and closer alignment with the Sweden Democrats in preparation for another decisive moment, perhaps in 2030, with the next national elections.
In this commentary, Associate Professor Anders Hellström examines why the Sweden Democrats emerged as one of the main losers of Sweden’s 2026 election after years of sustained growth and political influence. He identifies three factors: SD’s transformation from an anti-establishment challenger into part of the political establishment; growing resistance to increasingly restrictive immigration policies; and a mismatch between SD’s signature issues and voters’ wider priorities, particularly healthcare, education, and the economy. Assoc. Prof. Hellström also places the election within a broader debate about populism as democratic protest and the narrative foundations of representative politics. He argues that SD has successfully shaped dominant stories about integration, immigration, and Swedish identity, but that the 2026 result may indicate an opening for alternative political narratives as “the pendulum has swung back.”
When populists become the establishment, voters may seek new ways to protest the elite, as Sweden’s recent election suggests. The pendulum has swung back. This article outlines three reasons why the Sweden Democrats (SD) suffered electoral setbacks. It concludes by arguing that research needs to acknowledge the storytelling dimension of representative politics to open up space for progressive stories to be told in the future. What will be the dominant narrative in the years to come? But first, let us return to the election itself.
On 13 September, Sweden held local, regional, and national elections. At the national level, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s Tidö coalition faced an opposition led by the Social Democrats (S). The election resulted in a narrow victory for the center-left bloc. Among the opposition parties, the Social Democrats won 28.3% of the vote, followed by the Left Party (V) (8.4%), the Center Party (C) (7.0%), and the Green Party (MP) (6.1%) (see Table 1).
Three of the four Tidö coalition parties increased their vote share. The Moderate Party (M) rose to 19.9%, remaining the second-largest party, while the Christian Democrats (KD) and Liberals (L) increased to 6.2% and 5.2%, respectively. The main loser was the Sweden Democrats, whose support fell from 20.5% to 17.5% (see Table 1).
After all votes were counted, S leader Magdalena Andersson’s bloc secured 176 seats to the Tidö coalition’s 173. Over the past four years, the SD-backed government has tightened immigration policy, promoted repatriation, made temporary residence permits the norm, and introduced tougher criminal penalties. The Social Democrats did not consistently oppose these measures and have themselves embraced a more restrictive approach to immigration. Yet, despite this broad political consensus, the opposition won.
Why is it that the Sweden Democrats (SD) emerged as one of the election’s losers? I outline below three possible explanations.
1.From anti-establishment challenger to part of the establishment. After decades of rapid growth, often doubling its vote share from one election to the next, the Sweden Democrats’ momentum slowed in 2022 and turned into decline in 2026.
Initially, in the beginning of its parliamentary journey, the party was often portrayed as a devil in disguise of sorts, who concealed an extremely shady past under a fancy costume. Meanwhile, its elected representatives were sometimes ridiculed as political clowns (Hellström & Nilsson, 2010). They faced immense criticism in mainstream media and from the other mainstream political parties. Both the Moderates under Fredrik Reinfeldt and the Social Democrats under Mona Sahlin united in a show of repugnance against the Sweden Democrats, denying them any political influence and refusing to cooperate with them.
But times change.
As the Sweden Democrats have entered the political mainstream, they have sought to portray themselves as a responsible governing partner. Meanwhile, mainstream parties have moved closer to SD on immigration. M leader Ulf Kristersson has endorsed SD leader Jimmie Åkesson’s concerns about immigration, integration, and crime (Kristersson, 2026), while the Social Democrats also support lower immigration and stricter integration measures (Social Democratic Party, 2025).
As a result, political positions widely regarded as extreme a decade ago have become mainstream today. And when the extreme has become mainstream, young radicals are looking for even more extreme alternatives, as SD has become too moderate according to them.
2.Sweden’s immigration policy, which the SD actively promotes, has become too restrictive. Many voters, both natives and immigrants, now see Sweden’s immigration policy as too restrictive. When well-integrated immigrants face deportation, barriers to family reunification, uncalled-for surveillance of well-behaved immigrant voters, or demanding income requirements (ridiculously high), these policies may generate protest rather than public support. Can these protests be framed in populist terms? For some scholars, the answer is affirmative. In this regard, populism can be understood as a form of democratic protest (Abbott, 2007) rather than merely an anti-democratic force. To shed light on this issue, it helps to revisit Margaret Canovan.
Canovan (1999) identifies two faces of democratic politics: redemption and pragmatism. Democracy, understood as an ideal, embodies a redemptive vision through which citizens can collectively pursue and realize “the good society.” The pragmatic face, by contrast, is concerned with maintaining institutions capable of managing conflict and disagreement peacefully, without allowing political competition to become destructive. In its institutional form, this pragmatic dimension is reflected in arrangements such as free and fair elections, a multiparty system, and the rule of law. Representative politics, however, extends beyond politics-as-usual by also emphasizing redemptive impulses. In this reading, voters who feel that political developments have gone too far reject established politics (pragmatism) and instead support an alternative vision (redemption). Populism is not synonymous with the far right. It can also be understood as a democratic protest against a political system that, in the eyes of its critics, has become overly technocratic.
3.Sweden Democrats’ profile issues were not at the top of the political agenda. There was a clear mismatch between the Sweden Democrats’ priorities and those of the average voter. More broadly, no single issue dominated the election campaign. While some voters focused on climate change, others were concerned about their finances, healthcare, or education. Although society remained polarized, the SD’s agenda did not fully align with voters’ main concerns.
Some voters were protesting against climate change, while others were concerned about their personal finances or health. Even in a polarized political environment, it is fair to say that there was no perfect match between what average voters considered the most important issues and the priorities of the Sweden Democrats. According to the Swedish Television exit poll (SVT Nyheter, 2026), the three most important issues for voters in the 2026 election were healthcare, education, and the Swedish economy (ibid.). According to the same 2026 VALU exit poll, Sweden Democrats’ voters were primarily motivated by concerns about law and order, immigration, and integration (ibid.).
The Sweden Democrats have successfully built a consensus around their narrative of where Sweden is heading and what Swedish national identity is. This lies behind their policies and political rhetoric, at least up to now. I will end this article with two examples of when their narrative has established a consensus and achieved hegemony.
First, consider the failure of integration mantra. While many agree that integration has failed, few agree on what integration actually means. The SD offers a simple explanation: excessive immigration has weakened social cohesion and caused fragmentation. Yet this narrative is often one-sided. Immigrants now constitute more than one-fifth of Sweden’s population, and many have integrated successfully into Swedish society. But as long as the dominant (and only) narrative is that integration has failed, the SD stands to benefit.
A second example is the oft-repeated claim that Sweden must never return to 2015. Yet 2015 created opportunities for both regressive forces and progressive mobilization (Bevelander & Hellström, 2019). While many municipalities worried that immigration was stretching their capacity to the limit, civil society organizations, churches, and private citizens mobilized to help refugees by providing housing, language cafés, and other forms of support. These examples are seldom heard now.
Living with diversity in everyday life gives rise to social tensions in the population and between groups. Sweden has now elected a new parliament. Let us see what the new government will look like. Members of the Tidö government have packed their bags. Which narratives will the new government base its law proposals on? What will be the dominant story? Populism invites us to acknowledge the storytelling dimension of representative politics. It invites us, as researchers of populism, to expand beyond politics as usual. Since the pendulum has swung back, there is reason to hope that the story, Swedish case, will have a happy continuation.
(*) Anders Hellström is Associate Professor in Political Science. He is a senior lecturer in IMER at the Department of Global Political Studies and is connected to the Migration Research Institute MIM at Malmö University. He has published widely in the areas of populism, nationalism, the far right, racism, discourse theory, and the politics of migration and identity. He has published widely in academic journals, such as Government and Opposition, Journal of International Migration and Integration, and Ethnicities. His most recent article is “You Are Not a Racist, Right?”: Racism as a Political Activity, which examines the intersection between discourse and ideology in contemporary struggles over the meaning of racism.
References
Abbott, P. (2007). ‘“Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan”: Democratic Theory, Populism, and Philip Roth’s ‘American Trilogy’.” Canadian Review of American Studies, vol. 37, no. 3: 431–452.
Canovan, M. (1999). Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy. Political Studies, 47(1), 2-16.
Hellström, A. and Nilsson, T. (2010). “‘We Are the Good Guys’: Ideological Positioning of the Nationalist Party Sverigedemokraterna in Contemporary Swedish Politics’.” Ethnicities, 10(1), pp. 55-76.
Kristersson, U. (2026). Statement by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. Stockholm: Government Offices of Sweden.https://www.government.se/ (accessed: 15 September 2026).
Mudde, Cas. (2019). The Far Right Today.
Social Democratic Party. (2025). Social Democrats Adopt New Program with Adjusted Immigration Policy. Available at: Sweden Herald. (accessed: 15 September 2026).
In this ECPS interview, Dr. Gefjon Off examines the Sweden Democrats’ 2026 electoral setback against the backdrop of their continuing political and ideological influence. She argues that declining vote share should not automatically be read as “denormalization,” stressing that electoral strength is only one measure of radical-right success. SD’s “agenda-setting power and policy influence have been very significant,” she notes, extending beyond the Tidö parties as migration-critical positions have spread across the wider party system. Dr. Off also discusses issue salience, youth voting, gender gaps, economic insecurity, tactical voting, coalition fragmentation, and comparisons with Germany’s AfD. Her central insight is that electoral losses can coexist with enduring normalization: “The influence of the Sweden Democrats is clear.”
Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Gefjon Off, a postdoctoral research associate in Comparative Politics at the University of Hamburg, argues that the Sweden Democrats’ electoral setback in Sweden’s September 13, 2026 election should not be mistaken for a corresponding decline in the party’s broader political influence. At the center of Dr. Off’s analysis is a distinction between electoral strength and normalization. While acknowledging that electoral growth can be one indicator of normalization, she stresses that it is far from the only one. “There are many other indicators of normalization,” she notes, including how a party is treated by the media, discussed in public debate, and regarded as a legitimate political actor. For this reason, she cautions against reading SD’s losses as evidence of “denormalization”: “Electoral growth can be an indicator of normalization, but there are many other indicators that matter, too.”
This distinction becomes particularly important because, in Dr. Off’s assessment, SD’s agenda-setting and policy influence have extended well beyond its own electoral constituency. She observes that the party has exercised “considerable policy influence and agenda-setting power” and that this influence has not been confined to the Tidö parties. The Social Democrats have also moved toward more immigration-critical positions, leading Dr. Off to conclude that “SD’s agenda-setting power has extended beyond the right-wing bloc and some center parties.”
The interview therefore explores a central paradox of contemporary radical-right politics: a party may lose voters while some of the issues, narratives, and positions it helped elevate become increasingly embedded in mainstream political competition. Dr. Off suggests that once immigration and crime become widely politicized across the party system, the Sweden Democrats may lose part of the credibility advantage they previously enjoyed as the most prominent owners of those issues. “These issues have become mainstream,” she says, adding that SD’s earlier agenda-setting advantage “has become smaller.”
Yet electoral losses remain consequential. Dr. Off emphasizes that votes are ultimately indispensable to sustaining political leverage: “Without votes, a party eventually loses influence.” Still, she insists that the broader picture cannot be captured by vote share alone. “The influence of the Sweden Democrats is clear,” she concludes, and their “agenda-setting power and policy influence have been very significant.”
The interview thus examines SD’s 2026 setback not simply as an electoral story, but as part of a larger process through which radical-right ideas can reshape political agendas, party competition, coalition strategies, and the boundaries of what is considered politically mainstream.
Here is our interview with Dr. Gefjon Off, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
A Party Can Become More Normalized Even Without Continuing to Grow
Sweden’s 2026 general election produced a narrow parliamentary majority for the red-green parties, with 176 seats compared with 173 for the Tidö parties. The Social Democrats remained the largest party with 28 percent of the vote, followed by the Moderates at 19.8 percent and the Sweden Democrats at 17.5 percent. Source: SVT.
Dr. Off, welcome! Let me begin with your distinction between mainstreaming and normalization.In your work with Anna-Sophie Heinze, you distinguish between mainstream parties adopting far-right positions and the wider normalization of those positions in society. SD fell to around 17.5 percent in the September 13 elections after four years of major influence through the Tidö Agreement. Does this show that normalization does not necessarily lead to continued electoral growth? Can a radical-right party become more normalized even while losing votes?
Dr. Gefjon Off: Electoral growth is one indicator of normalization. As a party grows—especially a party that is new and was originally considered extremist, at least when it was founded, and clearly not normalized at that point—we can consider electoral growth an indicator of normalization.
But there are many other indicators of normalization. How does the media deal with this party? How is it talked about? Is it considered a legitimate political actor in society? So even people who do not vote for the party might consider it a legitimate party and a democratic actor in the political party landscape of the country.
And so, I wouldn’t say that a decline in electoral growth is a sign of denormalization or something like that. I would rather say that electoral growth can be an indicator of normalization, but there are many other indicators that matter, too.
It Is Quite Unusual for Center-Right Parties to Win Voters Back from the Far Right
This raises an important question about who benefits from mainstreaming. SD lost support even though migration, citizenship, integration, and crime remain central issues on the Swedish right. Can a radical-right party shape the agenda so successfully that mainstream conservative parties eventually benefit from positions it helped normalize? And does Germany show that policy mainstreaming can develop even when a party like the AfD remains formally excluded?
Dr. Gefjon Off: Usually, comparative research from other countries shows that center-right parties do not gain electorally by accommodating far-right positions. This pattern has been observed across many European countries, and there is quite a strong consensus on this in the research. So, yes, we would not normally expect center-right parties to win votes by accommodating the far right.
It is therefore quite unusual for center-right parties to win back voters from the far right, as has happened to some extent in Sweden. We usually do not expect this because far-right voters tend to support the party they consider most credible on the issues they care about. If immigration is especially important to them, the far-right party is usually seen as the most credible opponent of immigration because it made the issue its own in the first place. When a center-right party adopts a similar position, it may be seen as less credible because the far-right party was there first.
According to the exit polls, 7% of those who voted for the Sweden Democrats in 2022 voted for the center-right Moderate Party this time, and this is something we have not really seen much elsewhere, so it is quite unusual.
In Germany, regarding your second question—can policy mainstreaming develop even when a party like the AfD remains formally excluded? —yes, that is definitely happening. The center-right CDU still says it will not collaborate with the AfD or form coalitions with it, either at the national or federal-state level. This remains a formal exclusion rule. But, of course, the CDU is still adopting anti-immigration policies, and not only the CDU; we also see other parties doing this. So yes, the influence is still there, even though the AfD remains excluded from formal collaboration.
Can Now Use the Outsider Argument to Re-Establish That Image
Sweden Democrats’ Square Meeting in Umeå. Jimmie Åkesson speaks to the people on the city square in Umeå, Sweden on August 14, 2018.
SD’s position during the last four years was also unusual. It remained outside government but had major influence through the Tidö Agreement. Could its decline partly reflect the cost of becoming associated with government while losing some of its outsider appeal? And does the AfD’s exclusion in Germany help it preserve that outsider position?
Dr. Gefjon Off: I don’t think SD lost votes because it lost its outsider appeal. This is not a mechanism I would expect to find in other countries either, including cases where far-right parties have entered government. But this morning (Friday), the Sweden Democrats’ party leader, Jimmie Åkesson, made exactly this claim at the press conference. He argued that the party had lost some of its outsider appeal because it had worked with established parties.
I find this unlikely for two reasons. First, since becoming party leader in 2005, Jimmie Åkesson has consistently tried to make the Sweden Democrats appear more established. The party was founded by extremists, including Nazis, and since Åkesson came to power within the party, he has worked to clean up its image. Some people were expelled, the rhetoric was de-radicalized, and for a long time his strategy was precisely to make the party appear more established. So now, to claim that they lost votes because they worked with established parties—which has always been their goal—does not seem entirely convincing to me.
Of course, this is also rhetoric he can now use to re-establish more of an outsider image. The other reason is that, even though Åkesson himself does not usually engage in this kind of behavior—or does so only to a limited extent—there are leading figures within the party who have been around for a long time and who have made very controversial statements and sparked highly provocative public debates. In that sense, they have not always acted in an established way. They use provocative language, make controversial statements, and regularly trigger debates over whether such behavior is appropriate.
So, overall, I don’t think it is straightforward to say that SD lost votes because it worked with established parties.
Regarding the second question about the AfD: does its exclusion in Germany help it preserve its outsider position? Yes, of course. The AfD can use this exclusion to construct an identity around the idea that “we are the ones who are being unfairly excluded.” This strengthens an “us against them” group identity and helps the party build a partisan identity around being unfairly excluded.
The Right-Wing Bloc Remained Strong Despite SD’s Electoral Losses
The movement of voters within the Tidö bloc is also interesting. The Moderates moved ahead of SD, while the Liberals survived with around 5.3 percent, helped partly by tactical voting. Does this suggest that voters can move between parties for strategic reasons without changing their broader ideological views? Can SD lose votes while the wider right remains strong?
Dr. Gefjon Off: The exit polls show that the Liberal Party gained votes mostly from the Moderate Party, but not particularly from the Sweden Democrats. So, in this case, tactical voting was taking place, but not so much among Sweden Democrat voters. The Sweden Democrats’ losses therefore do not appear to have been driven by their voters switching to the Liberal Party.
This is also in line with what SD leader Jimmie Åkesson said. A few weeks before the election, he urged his own voters not to support the Liberal Party or engage in strategic voting. So, strategic voting did occur, but it came mainly from other right-wing parties, not from the Sweden Democrats, at least according to the exit polls.
The reason the rest of the right-wing bloc remained strong is probably, first of all, that the Sweden Democrats lost 3 percentage points, some of which went to the Moderate Party. But the Social Democrats also lost 2.3 percentage points, and some of that support went to the Moderate Party as well. This probably helps explain why the right-wing bloc remained quite strong overall.
In general, there was not much movement apart from the losses of the Social Democrats and the Sweden Democrats, who lost 2 and 3 percentage points, respectively. Otherwise, voter shifts were relatively limited. The election was also very tight. So, overall, we are talking about relatively small voter movements.
Once SD’s Issues Become Mainstream, Its Electoral Advantage Can Become Smaller
Your research also distinguishes between what people believe and which issues they consider most important. Could the 2026 election show that restrictive views on migration or crime remain widespread even if these issues no longer benefit SD as strongly at the ballot box? Can a radical-right party win the battle over the agenda but lose some of the electoral advantage once its issues become mainstream?
Dr. Gefjon Off: Yes, I would say these issues have become mainstream. In that sense, if other parties can act credibly in line with what SD stands for, it seems that other right-wing parties have become credible enough to SD voters on immigration and crime as well. That may mean the credibility advantage the Sweden Democrats gained through their agenda-setting power—by raising these issues, or at least by raising them most prominently in the first place—has become smaller. That could be one interpretation of the results.
Compared with 2022, however, immigration and crime were also somewhat less important to voters in 2026. They were still among the top-ranked issues, but we can see some movement. Healthcare, for example, has become even more important than before, and that is also a rather left-wing issue.
So perhaps part of the shift reflects the fact that immigration and crime have become less important in voters’ eyes. The question, then, is why. I can think of at least two possible explanations. One is that immigration and crime rates have gone down, so these issues may simply feel less urgent to many voters.
The other is that some of the immigration and crime policies proposed by the Tidö government were perceived by parts of the public as very harsh and therefore generated considerable public criticism. For example, debates about deporting children and teenagers, as well as incarcerating teenagers, sparked strong reactions. It may be that some voters reacted against the way these policies were ultimately implemented in practice.
So, these are two possible explanations for why immigration and crime may no longer have been as important as before. And that, in turn, could also have affected why SD was not as successful as it had been previously.
Values Tend to Remain Stable, but the Salience of Issues Can Change
This brings us to the importance of issue salience. Your earlier research showed that when gender equality becomes politically prominent, conservative gender attitudes can become more closely connected to SD support. Should we focus less on whether voters changed their values in 2026 and more on which issues parties successfully made important? Is radical-right support often about activating existing attitudes rather than creating entirely new ones?
Dr. Gefjon Off: Usually, research assumes that values are relatively stable. Attitudes may change somewhat more, but values are the deeper underlying beliefs people hold. Views on immigration or gender equality are often closely connected to values developed at an early age. People are generally socialized into these values while growing up, particularly during their teenage years and early adulthood, which we consider the formative years. After that, values tend to remain relatively stable. So, we would not expect people to completely change their minds between elections.
What can change are other factors: whom people trust, how they view political leaders, whether scandals occur, how the government performs, and so on. Another important factor is how salient a particular issue becomes. For instance, after 2015, when immigration increased in many countries, immigration became a more important political issue. It was discussed extensively by politicians, the media, and, of course, the far right. The same applies to other developments, such as the economic crisis or, later, worldwide feminist movements. When events like these occur, certain issues become more salient.
When an issue becomes more salient, the attitude people already hold toward it becomes more important in their vote choice. So, it is less about changing attitudes than about how important those attitudes become politically. This happens through major events, but also through the way political parties politicize particular issues.
Far-right parties across Europe—although the Sweden Democrats somewhat less so—have increasingly politicized anti-gender and anti-feminist views, as well as women’s rights and LGBTQI+ rights, by positioning themselves against these issues. Of course, if I am, say, a far-right voter who sympathizes with such a party and consumes its rhetoric and positions, this can also influence me. By politicizing an issue, the party therefore also increases its salience.
SD Lost 7%Points Among First-Time Voters, but the Broader Youth Picture Is More Stable
People shop in Gamla Stan (Old Town) in Stockholm, Sweden on August 23, 2018.
The youth vote is especially interesting in this respect. SD lost support among younger voters, while the gender gap between young men and young women remains substantial. Does this suggest a weakening of SD specifically rather than a reversal of the wider rightward movement among young men?
Dr. Gefjon Off: It’s interesting. According to the exit polls, the Sweden Democrats lost 7 percentage points among first-time voters. That is quite substantial, considering that they lost 3 percentage points in the electorate overall. Among 18- to 21-year-olds—a very small group—they lost 7 percentage points.
I don’t think this is easy to explain, except by noting that first-time voters are a very volatile group. They are not yet fully socialized into the political system, do not really have a partisan identity, and have not yet developed strong partisan attachments. So perhaps it is not too surprising that voting patterns among first-time voters can change considerably from one election to another.
Still, it is quite striking that the Sweden Democrats lost 7 percentage points in this group. But if you look at slightly older voters, the picture is more stable. Among 22- to 30-year-olds, they actually gained 1 percentage point, according to the exit polls. So, what is happening among young voters depends a great deal on how you define “young.”
I prefer to include voters up to the age of 29 or 30, because if you focus only on first-time voters, the group becomes very small, making it difficult to draw substantive conclusions. Among somewhat older young voters, the Sweden Democrats still gained a little. So, the overall picture really depends on which age group you examine.
We Do Not Yet Fully Understand Why Youth Gender Gaps Are Widening
Your comparative research also warns against assuming that all young men are moving toward the far right in the same way. What conditions determine whether culturally conservative young men support a radical-right party rather than a mainstream conservative party? How important are economic conditions, party strategies, and political institutions?
Dr. Gefjon Off: We see that in some countries, young men have been moving toward the far right, and Sweden was one of these countries until this election. For this election, however, we still need to see the numbers to know whether this trend is continuing.
Sweden has been one such case. But in many other countries, the youth gender gap is driven more by young women becoming more progressive. So, the explanatory factors shaping these patterns remain somewhat unclear. We do not really know why young women become more progressive in some places while young men become more conservative in others. What we do see is a widening gender gap in many countries.
The patterns differ, however, and we do not yet fully understand why. Some research suggests—although this still needs to be tested more rigorously—that in countries where gender equality is more advanced, more young men may move toward the far right. But this remains tentative.
As for economic conditions and party strategies, these certainly matter. They matter for many far-right voters, not just young men. A great deal has to do with economic grievances related to housing, prices, inflation, and perhaps job conditions. But it is also very much about perceived grievances. People’s own economic situation may not always be objectively bad, but they may feel that it is worsening or could worsen in the future. So it is often more about perceptions than about objective conditions. The two can, of course, go hand in hand, but they do not always have to.
This does not necessarily affect men and women differently, however. Everybody experiences economic insecurity when it occurs. Party strategies, on the other hand, do matter. Far-right parties are very effective at mobilizing on social media. And because of gender differences in social media algorithms, far-right content is more often shown to young men than to young women. So, we do think that these party strategies, especially in social media communication, matter.
Political institutions probably matter as well, perhaps in terms of the level of gender equality in a country, but this remains very tentative, as I said.
Voters Can Change Parties Without Changing Their Broader Cultural Values
Your concept of “protective masculinity” helps connect these developments to wider cultural attitudes. It brings together views about immigration, gender equality, sexuality, crime, hierarchy, and national identity. Could these attitudes remain stable even when party support changes? Can voters move between SD and mainstream right-wing parties without changing their broader cultural outlook?
Dr. Gefjon Off: “Protective masculinity” is a concept coined by Katarzyna Wojnicka; it’s not my concept. But I think it is much more about underlying cultural values concerning both immigrants and women, as well as the relationship between men and women, than about specific attitudes that might change from one election to another. That is why I expect these values to remain relatively stable. It is largely about how people view societal relationships between different groups. So, I do think these values remain stable, and they probably do not change even if, in this example, a person decides to vote for a party other than SD.
A More Diverse Electorate Is More a Sign of Far-Right Success Than a Hindrance
Black Lives Matters Protest in Stockholm, Sweden on June 3, 2020.
Your work also shows that radical-right voters are far from a single, uniform group. SD has drawn support from anti-immigration voters, economically insecure groups, former Social Democrats, and younger right-wing voters. Does its 2026 decline suggest that this coalition has become harder to hold together?
Dr. Gefjon Off: The growth of far-right parties necessarily means that their electorates become more diverse. As a party grows, more and more people vote for it, which naturally brings a wider range of voters into its electorate. This is more a sign of success than a hindrance. Being able to attract different population groups shows that these parties have become more successful, so I would not consider this a disadvantage for them. It is probably a good thing.
What is more interesting is that, at least in this case, some SD voters did not identify strongly enough with the party to remain loyal to it. This suggests that the partisan identity far-right parties often create very successfully may not have been as strong among some parts of the electorate. That is quite interesting. It suggests that in Sweden, perhaps this year at least, it was somewhat easier to win back voters from the far right than, for instance, what we have been seeing in Germany.
Far-Right Rhetoric Draws Heavily on a Sense of Unfair Treatment
Threat perceptions are another important part of your research. You show that cultural concerns can become stronger when combined with economic insecurity, distrust, and feelings of unfair competition. How useful is this framework for understanding Sweden today? Could these grievances remain strong while increasingly being expressed through parties other than SD?
Dr. Gefjon Off: As I said before, perceptions of economic insecurity, as well as the feeling of being unfairly disadvantaged in one’s own economic situation, can help fuel far-right support across Europe, not just in Sweden. But again, much of this is about perceptions and a sense of unfair treatment. This is something the far right often draws on in its rhetoric. They may tell people that they are being treated unfairly and that immigrants, for example, are being advantaged at their expense.
We have also seen some of this discourse directed toward men, especially young men, although less so in Sweden. They are told that they are being discriminated against, treated unfairly in society, and deprived of opportunities. This is part of the rhetoric, and it draws heavily on these kinds of perceived grievances.
At the same time, we see that many workers also vote for the far right. Workers traditionally voted for the Social Democrats, and they still do to a large extent, but many voters have also shifted from the Social Democrats to the far right. This has happened in both Sweden and Germany.
This year, 25% of workers voted for the Sweden Democrats, compared with 17.5% of the electorate overall. So, a substantial proportion of workers, who often live in more precarious economic circumstances, supported the party. Economic insecurity, therefore, definitely plays a role.
SD’s Agenda-Setting Power Has Extended Beyond the Right-Wing Bloc
Sweden’s Social Democrats campaign ahead of the general election in Malmö, Sweden, on September 2, 2022, in support of then-Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson’s bid for a second term. Photo: Francis Joseph Dean / Dreamstime.
The election also shows why different forms of political influence need to be separated. SD remains a major party, but electoral strength, policy influence, agenda-setting power, coalition leverage, and government participation are not the same thing. How useful is it to distinguish these different forms of normalization when assessing SD’s position?
Dr. Gefjon Off: I think this is important. As I said, electoral strength is one indicator of a party’s normalization, but there are many other ways to assess how successful it is. Over the past few years, SD has had considerable policy influence and agenda-setting power.
This influence has not been limited to the Tidö parties; it has gone beyond the coalition leverage SD exercised as a support party. The Social Democratic Party has also adopted more immigration-critical positions. So, SD’s agenda-setting power has extended beyond the right-wing bloc and some center parties.
There is therefore a great deal of influence, and it is useful to look at different indicators when assessing it.
The Rise of the Far Right Has Made Coalition Building More Complicated
Government formation shows how SD has affected the wider party system as well. The Center Party rejects dependence on SD, while also resisting Left Party participation in government, and the Left Party is demanding influence if its support is needed. Does this show that the rise of the radical right reshapes coalition choices even among parties that oppose it?
Dr. Gefjon Off: Yes. Since the rise of the far right across different European countries, party systems have become more fragmented, making coalition formation more difficult. Different countries have responded to this challenge in different ways.
For instance, in Germany, we have seen more grand coalitions over the past 20 years, with the center-left and center-right forming governments together to secure a majority. In Sweden, by contrast, we have not seen such grand coalitions in the past decade. Instead, governments have relied on minority arrangements supported by other parties. The Tidö government, for example, was a minority government that depended on the support of the Sweden Democrats.
A similar arrangement may now emerge with a new, more left-wing or center-left government, which could also be a minority government relying on support from another party. So, there are different ways of dealing with this challenge, but the broader pattern is that the rise of the far right has contributed to greater fragmentation in the party landscape, making coalition building more complicated.
The Liberals Survived with Help from Tactical Voting by Other Tidö Voters
The Liberals are particularly interesting here. Their survival strengthened the Tidö bloc, but the party has also struggled internally over cooperation with SD. Does this reveal a tension between electoral survival, ideological identity, and coalition strategy? Can the same tactics that help a party survive also make governing alliances more difficult?
Dr. Gefjon Off: The Liberals are a very interesting case because, traditionally, they were in favor of welcoming refugees. When they joined the Tidö government, which relied on the support of the Sweden Democrats, many prominent members left the party. There was also considerable internal disagreement, which significantly weakened the party. For a long time, it remained below the 4% threshold required to enter Parliament.
Now they have made it. But Simona Mohamsson, their party leader, has only been in the role for about a year. There were also strong disagreements between her and Sweden Democrats leader Jimmie Åkesson over what it means to be Swedish and who can be considered a Swede, especially given Mohamsson’s own background as the daughter of immigrants.
So, the situation has been very unstable. In this case, what probably helped the Liberals survive was tactical voting by supporters of the other parties in the Tidö government—not so much by Sweden Democrat voters, but by voters of the other parties.
Swedish Opposition to SD Is Directed More at Its Policies Than at Its Legitimacy
Your experimental work with Amy Alexander and Nicholas Charron suggests that polarization can grow through both conservative backlash and liberal countermobilization. Could the September 13 elections reflect this two-sided process? Might years of SD influence have mobilized not only its supporters but also voters who are specifically concerned about its growing normalization?
Dr. Gefjon Off: I think there were definitely people reacting against some of the policies of the Sweden Democrats and the Tidö government. We see left-wing counterreactions to some of these policies, but I do not think we see a broader questioning of SD’s legitimacy as a political party. So, I would say that people are reacting more against particular policies than against the normalization of the party itself.
I am therefore not sure that there is such a strong concern in Swedish society about the normalization of the Sweden Democrats. In my impression, the question of whether SD is a legitimate democratic actor is not especially prominent in public debate. The opposition is directed more toward the party’s positions than toward its existence as a political actor.
In Germany, by contrast, there are major public debates about whether the AfD is a legitimate political actor, whether the party should be banned, or whether certain branches of it might be banned. Some branches have been labeled right-wing extremist and unconstitutional, the youth organization was dissolved, and a new organization was founded last year. So there is much more public debate, including formal statements by government authorities about whether the party can be considered a legitimate democratic actor and how it should be dealt with if it is not.
There have also been waves of demonstrations in which hundreds of thousands of people across different German cities have taken to the streets. These protests occur relatively regularly and are directed against the AfD as a political party and political actor.
So, I think the way people have reacted to normalization is quite different in the two cases. The counterreactions to particular policies may be similar, but the reaction to the normalization of the party itself is different.
Electoral Support Matters, but It Tells Only Part of the Story of SD’s Influence
And finally, Dr. Off, let me return to the broader meaning of radical-right success. Should we measure it mainly through vote share and government participation, or also through policy influence, agenda-setting power, mainstream adoption of its positions, and the weakening of stigma around them? If a party loses votes while many of its ideas become more accepted, does that suggest that electoral results alone tell us only part of the story?
Dr. Gefjon Off: Yes, I agree with this. SD lost votes, and it was also the party that lost the most votes in this election, which is probably an indication of the significance of that loss. But the party has gained considerable influence, and that influence remains.
It will be very interesting to see how the Social Democrats, having also lost votes, formulate migration policy in their coalition agreements. Will they continue along the rather conservative path they have been moving toward, or will they try to appeal to their more left-wing coalition partners and step back somewhat from these anti-immigration positions?
So, the situation is quite interesting, but the influence of the Sweden Democrats is clear. I am not sure they themselves would consider this a success, given that they lost votes. Of course, electoral support may still be the most important indicator because, without votes, a party eventually loses influence.
Still, their agenda-setting power and policy influence have been very significant, and that is certainly part of their success.
In an interview with the ECPS, Professor Adam Bodnar, Poland’s Minister of Justice from 2023 to 2025, reflects on Poland’s experience of democratic backsliding and rule-of-law recovery, arguing that electoral victory alone cannot reverse years of institutional capture. He stresses that democratic resilience depends on protecting independent institutions while strengthening civil society, civic education, professional associations, media, and academia before illiberal pressures intensify. Poland’s experience, he notes, showed that democratic forces had won “only partial power within the state” after 2023 and that restoration must proceed within constitutional constraints. For Professor Bodnar, civil society proved indispensable: “We would not have been able to win the elections in 2023 without civil society.” His broader lesson for Europe is preventive — democracies must build durable institutional and civic safeguards before the next crisis arrives.
Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Adam Bodnar, a constitutional lawyer, human rights scholar and Senator of the Republic of Poland who served as Poland’s Minister of Justice from 2023 to 2025 and previously as Commissioner for Human Rights from 2015 to 2021, argues that the durability of democracy ultimately depends not only on constitutional design, courts, or European enforcement mechanisms, but also on the strength of civil society before an illiberal challenge emerges. His work has placed him at the center of both resistance to democratic backsliding and the difficult process of rule-of-law recovery. In this interview, we examine what Poland got right and wrong after the defeat of the Law and Justice Party (PiS), the dilemmas of restoring captured institutions, and the broader lessons for liberal democracy in Europe. We also discuss Hungary, Germany, EU enforcement, judicial independence, accountability, civil society, and democratic resilience.
Drawing on Poland’s experience of democratic backsliding and subsequent rule-of-law recovery, Professor Bodnar presents democratic resilience as an ecosystem in which independent institutions, civic organizations, professional associations, public-interest lawyers, judges, media, and citizens reinforce one another.
A central lesson of Poland’s experience, he stresses, is that electoral victory does not automatically translate into institutional control or democratic restoration. Looking back at the 2023 election, Professor Bodnar recalls that the democratic camp treated the result “as more or less a total victory,” only to discover that it had won “only partial power within the state.” The deeper difficulty was that eight years of PiS rule had transformed not only laws but also institutional personnel, incentives, and expectations. State capture, he explains, involved “filling institutions with people who are loyal to you” and producing “a chilling effect” on those seeking to remain independent.
For Professor Bodnar, however, the answer cannot lie solely in redesigning constitutional safeguards. His strongest emphasis is preventive: democracies must cultivate civic resilience before institutions come under sustained pressure. “Protecting ourselves against illiberal democracy also requires strengthening civic education and civil society,” he argues, adding that civil society actors must possess the capacity to protest, monitor governments, and make institutional capture more difficult. Poland’s own experience reinforces that conclusion. “We would not have been able to win the elections in 2023 without civil society,” Professor Bodnar says, recalling periods when civic organizations continued protesting even as political parties were preoccupied with political competition.
This leads to the interview’s broader argument: democratic resilience should be treated as a permanent institutional and societal investment rather than an emergency response. Professor Bodnar describes government support for civil society as “a form of insurance for unknown times to come.” His concluding principle is equally clear: following Timothy Snyder’s injunction to “protect institutions,” democracies must preserve as many independent strongholds of the rule of law as possible, while ensuring that civil society, professional associations, media, academia, and local institutions retain sufficient autonomy to sustain political pluralism.
The interview therefore moves beyond the question of how democracy can recover after capture. It asks a more fundamental question: how can democratic societies build enough institutional and civic resilience that, when illiberal actors return, the state is no longer so easy to capture?
Here is our interview with Professor Adam Bodnar, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
‘We Won the Election in 2023, but Not Full Power Within the State’
A father and child display their support for Poland’s membership in the European Union ahead of the 2023 parliamentary elections. Photo: Wieslaw Jarek / Dreamstime.
Professor Bodnar, welcome! Let me begin with Poland’s 2023 democratic breakthrough. Poland’s October 2023 election demonstrated that an illiberal governing party can be defeated through democratic mobilization. Yet your subsequent work makes clear that electoral turnover and democratic restoration are very different things. Looking back from 2026, what did Poland get right after removing the Law and Justice Party (PiS) from government, and where did the democratic camp underestimate the depth, durability, or legal complexity of state capture?
Professor Adam Bodnar: I think one of our major mistakes, or perhaps political miscalculations, was to treat the 2023 election as more or less a total victory because we had this sense of a revolutionary moment. The Polish elections of 2023 were quite often compared to the elections of 1989.
But, to be honest, looking back, we did not win full power, only partial power within the state, because the presidency remained in the hands of someone associated with the ancien régime and the previous political leadership. Moreover, we believed that we would be able to achieve significant progress in restoring the rule of law after the subsequent presidential election in June 2025. There was great hope—I would not say certainty, but certainly great hope—that a pro-European, pro-democratic candidate would win. Basically, we failed.
We are therefore still left with a parliamentary majority committed to rule of law recovery and a president affiliated with the right-wing camp who is not interested in that process. He is interested in polarization, in undermining the credibility of the current government, and in bringing the right-wing parties back to power.
In my opinion, this is the major problem because, at the end of the day, what we can achieve in terms of restoring the rule of law depends to a great extent on existing regulations, existing legislation, and the interpretative use of different institutions. We cannot proceed in the same way as is being done right now in Hungary; we never had that possibility. Moreover, we do not even have the ability to override the presidential veto, which makes things much more complicated. So, it is not even easy to pass legislation that would comply with basic rule of law standards.
Eight Years of State Capture Cannot Be Reversed Overnight
PiS was able to transform Poland’s Constitutional Court, prosecution service, public media, civil service, and judicial institutions without possessing a constitutional majority, often through ordinary legislation, institutional faits accomplis, and practices that violated constitutional constraints. Why has reversing those transformations proved so much harder? Does this reveal an inherent asymmetry whereby liberal democracy is procedurally constrained in repairing damage that illiberal actors were willing to inflict without equivalent restraint?
Professor Adam Bodnar: First of all, please note that this process of change lasted for eight years. Even without a constitutional majority, if you have the possibility to change legislation, you can achieve quite a lot because you can change the way institutions operate.
And it is not only about changing legislation. It is also about filling institutions with people who are loyal to you, or who at least will not create problems for you, and about creating a chilling effect on other actors who would like to remain independent.
Over such a long period, you can achieve a great deal. Sometimes we had the sense that this was the end of a liberal regime and that the Law and Justice (PiS) government would last forever. Interestingly, quite many judges, prosecutors, civil servants, and public media officials seemed to think: okay, we are going to work under this new power. We are going to serve this new power, or at least we are going to do our jobs. But we will not interfere in political relations. So, I will sit somewhere in the public media, remain silent, do my work, and basically they will not bother me. I will simply retain the possibility to earn money.
In this way, they were able to exploit different weaknesses in the Polish system and the fact that, through legislative acts, you can change the way institutions operate. Sometimes it was also about passing legislation that abused the language of the Constitution.
But please look at the major, most important reform, which began in 2015–2016 and concerned the political subordination of the Constitutional Court. Once that happened, even if legislation was passed that went against constitutional values, there was nobody able to check it because judicial review had effectively come under the control of the ruling party.
At the second stage—and I think this is quite interesting—you could see pieces of legislation aimed at gluing or cementing the legal system. A good example is the prosecution service. Just half a year before the elections, the law on the prosecution service changed the way deputy prosecutors general are appointed and dismissed. Basically, they have to be appointed after obtaining the opinion of the President of the Republic, but they cannot be dismissed without confirmation by the President.
So, even now, three years later, we still have deputy attorneys general who cannot be dismissed because of this law. As a result, you have to find different ways to circumvent their powers or limit their impact on the daily operation of the prosecution service. This is one of the difficulties we face today in restoring the rule of law.
Chairperson of Law and Justice (PiS), Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Photo: Tomasz Kudala.
Restoring the Rule of Law Requires More Than Formal Legalism
This asymmetry creates what might be called the central paradox of democratic restoration: a new government is expected to restore constitutional legality while operating through institutions partly captured by actors who violated that legality. How far can a democratic government legitimately go in correcting unconstitutional appointments, restructuring captured bodies, or refusing to recognize decisions produced by improperly constituted institutions without itself weakening legal continuity and the rule of law?
Professor Adam Bodnar: That’s a very good question, because we face this dilemma and debate on a daily basis. There is no easy or quick answer, but, at the end of the day, you should work in good faith to restore the proper functioning of constitutional institutions.
Second, you should adopt an approach that prevents existing institutions from paralyzing this effort. You should not be blocked by certain formal rules when adopting particular solutions. If you relied solely on formal legalism, you would simply end up doing nothing. So, you need to be somewhat constructive in taking certain actions, while also ensuring that those actions have political legitimacy.
Consider three central institutions that were important from the perspective of rule of law recovery: the public media, the National Council of the Judiciary (NCJ), and the Constitutional Court. In each case, legal action aimed at recovering those institutions was preceded by resolutions of the Polish Parliament. By adopting those resolutions and identifying the legal and constitutional problems, their sources, and the relevant jurisprudence of the Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights, Parliament was essentially saying: we see a problem, we are going to repair it, and we are going to use certain measures that may not be typical but that we believe are necessary from the point of view of law. Even so, those measures were adopted in accordance with basic rules. Interestingly, they were still not accepted by the president who was serving the previous regime.
I think the most interesting and exemplary case of these dilemmas is the recovery of the National Council of the Judiciary (NCJ). Under the Polish system, the NCJ is composed of 25 members. It is a hybrid body, with roughly 10 politicians and 15 judicial members. The key question is: who appoints those judicial members? Traditionally, under Polish law, they were appointed by their peers—other judges.
But in 2018, Parliament changed the law so that those judicial members would be elected by Parliament, on the grounds that the sovereign should have more influence over the operation of the NCJ. Interestingly, after 2023, we twice passed legislation that would have returned this power to judges. But both laws were vetoed by the presidents—first Duda, then Nawrocki.
So, in the end, the ruling majority decided to appoint the judicial members in accordance with the existing law. Parliament formally voted to select them, but the preselection of candidates was carried out by judges themselves. They organized local general assemblies and selected the judges they wanted to see on the NCJ. In this way, we essentially implemented the constitutional spirit.
Although we did this on the basis of existing law, which should not be binding, we had no other solution in such circumstances. So, basically, you have to resolve these dilemmas constructively, while adhering very closely to constitutional language and constitutional values, and keeping in mind the ultimate need to restore and recover certain state institutions.
Poland Must Resolve the “Neo-Judges” Question Without Creating Chaos in the Judiciary
President Karol Nawrocki campaigning ahead of Poland’s 2025 presidential election in Łódź, Poland on April 27, 2024. Photo: Tomasz Warszewski.
Your work anticipated that the status of so-called “neo-judges” would become one of the most difficult questions of Poland’s transition. How should a recovering democracy distinguish between judges who actively participated in political capture, those who accepted promotion within a distorted system, and those who simply continued functioning within it? Is individualized review the only defensible solution, even if it makes restoration painfully slow?
Professor Adam Bodnar: You’re absolutely right that the status of neo-judges was the central issue in resolving these problems. I spent more or less the whole of 2024 trying to find a legislative solution to this dilemma: how to make the process, on the one hand, as automatic as possible and, on the other, how to provide remedies and individualize the assessment. There was also a third consideration: within this group of so-called neo-judges, there were different categories.
There were judges who voluntarily accepted first appointments or higher positions in the judiciary, but there were also those who were simply graduates of the School of Judiciary and had little say in how the nomination process unfolded in their cases.
In my opinion, we found a solution, and we presented it more or less in March or April 2025. This solution was subject to the opinion of the Venice Commission. But because of the result of the presidential election in June 2025, we no longer have any real political chance of implementing it. So, to some extent, this has become a theoretical discussion, based on existing draft laws, but with a low probability that the law could ever enter into force.
In general, our idea was to proceed in this direction: on the one hand, we wanted to secure the proper functioning of the judiciary; on the other, we tried to make the process as swift as possible. The third element was that, in cases involving promotion, a judge would either be sent back to the court from which their position and career originated or be dismissed from the judicial position and return to another legal profession—as an attorney, legal advisor, prosecutor, or scholar—with remedies allowing an appeal to the court.
But please note that this was only a proposal. As I said, it was enshrined in the draft law, but it did not enter into force. To be honest, we are now in a very difficult moment because we still have one year to go before the parliamentary elections due to take place in October 2027. It seems to me that the issue of what to do with these new judges will become part of the political debate in the context of the elections. But my feeling is that there will be little willingness on either side of the political spectrum to reach a compromise.
On the other hand, we have jurisprudence from the Court of Justice, as well as the European Court of Human Rights, questioning the status of these judges. So, we cannot avoid thinking about what to do with them and how to evaluate their status, or at least how to confirm it. Most probably, this discussion will continue after the elections of October 2027. At the end of the day, we will have to find some kind of compromise solution to this question.
But let me add one more point. The general philosophical difficulty with this problem is that, on the one hand, you can argue that these judges should be questioned from the point of view of the legitimacy and legality of their appointments. On the other hand, they have been adjudicating cases in courts on a daily basis.
Moreover, it has been difficult to determine what should happen to judgments issued by them, because if we were to say, simply by virtue of legislation or some other measure, that all those judges were invalid, it would create a total disaster for the Polish judiciary. So, it has been a little like repairing the sails while the boat is still moving.
But, as I said, this discussion is now much more abstract because of the position of the president. The president maintains that all his judicial appointments are valid and is not going to accept any challenge to them. So, the question will be whether, after the elections, there will be some room for compromise and for finding solutions that could serve everyone.
Public Demands for Immediate Justice Can Collide with the Rule of Law
The Constitutional Tribunal (Trybunał Konstytucyjny), Poland’s constitutional court, in Warsaw, Poland, on December 31, 2021. Photo: Dreamstime.
You have stressed that recovery requires accountability for abuses—from the partisan use of public funds to Pegasus surveillance—but that accountability must proceed through fair-trial guarantees rather than revolutionary justice. How can a democracy satisfy legitimate public demands for accountability without allowing transitional justice to be portrayed as political revenge? And conversely, at what point does excessive procedural caution turn constitutional immunity into practical impunity?
Professor Adam Bodnar: First of all, to be honest, we do not have a proper theory of transitional justice for periods like this. If you look at typical theories of transitional justice, they usually concern moments following major reconfigurations in a nation’s history. We can point to different examples of transitional justice in the United States, after wars, or after periods of authoritarian or totalitarian rule.
In Poland, certainly, we are a liberal democracy, but if you look at the level of rights abuses, it was, of course, significant. There were numerous abuses involving freedom of assembly, police brutality, surveillance, and so on. But still, this is incomparable to communist times, when people were killed in prisons, police stations, or police units, or when there were sweeping restrictions on fundamental rights. The same applies to Hungary. There have been different abuses of rights, but you still cannot compare them to the situation before 1989.
So, the broader problem we face as a community is what kind of transitional justice system we should adopt and to what extent we should create new institutions to implement it. Once again, Hungary is an interesting example because they created this Office for the Recovery of State Assets. It is quite an interesting institution. If I had tried to create that kind of institution, I would simply have faced a presidential veto, and that would have been the end of it. I would have had no chance of creating such an institution.
So, I had to rely either on the regular operation of the Polish Prosecution Service or on investigative committees established in the Polish Parliament. Basically, I could pursue accountability through existing procedures for auditing, investigating, and examining the conduct of previous authorities. We have been extremely creative in doing this.
But then, if you do this and provide voters with a great deal of information—if you disclose different abuses and try to recover assets—what becomes apparent quite quickly, and this was to some extent a surprise to me, is that people expect immediate results. People think that because they suffered so much, all those political actors they hated will almost immediately be prosecuted, jailed, convicted, and put behind bars.
When you proceed in accordance with fair-trial guarantees, however, you cannot do things just like that, because you do not have revolutionary mechanisms. Moreover, if you follow fair-trial standards, the process takes time. A proper investigation takes time, the defense needs time to prepare, immunities have to be lifted, and so on.
Why do I mention this? Because the absence of immediate results creates frustration among voters. They start to say: okay, if you have not delivered on this, if we still see all those actors who perpetrated political abuses in the past, then maybe you are not competent enough, maybe you are not effective enough. So, there is this sense that, while you are carrying out rule of law recovery, you are also expected to act like a sheriff who restores order and uses every possible mechanism to do so.
In my opinion, one of the mistakes we may have made is that perhaps we promised too much. There was this political promise when we were fighting for power: sooner or later, those guys will be prosecuted and jailed. Maybe we should instead have promised that we would do everything possible to disclose the truth and engage all state institutions in a general state audit and a broad investigation into different cases. But perhaps we should not have promised that we knew what results the courts would deliver or what judgments they would issue, because we have no influence over that.
So, if I were now advising a government in a similar situation, I would probably say: be careful with this. Check your resources. Check the loyalties of people working in institutions such as the Prosecution Service, the secret services, or the police. Promise only those things that you can realistically deliver. Of course, be energetic in pursuing accountability, but perhaps you should promise the delivery of truth—an account of how the state operated—rather than the delivery of convictions. Otherwise, you may create too much frustration and dissatisfaction among voters, and that may ultimately undermine your future electoral prospects.
It Is Easy to Demand Faster Restoration in Retrospect
Donald Tusk speaks at an election rally after a televised debate on government television at the end of the campaign in Warsaw, Poland on October 9, 2023. Photo: Shutterstock.
In an earlier essay you warned that “time is of the essence” when European institutions confront rule-of-law deterioration. Does the same principle apply to democratic restoration? Looking back at the first years after 2023, did the Polish government move quickly enough on the Constitutional Tribunal, judicial governance, prosecution service, and accountability—or did constitutional obstacles and the desire to proceed legally create delays that allowed the old institutional networks to consolidate their defensive positions?
Professor Adam Bodnar: No, by now we are all wiser about what worked and what did not. It is easy to criticize in retrospect, but I remember that we really tried to use every day to pursue rule of law recovery properly and to repair the state. I also think we do not sufficiently appreciate the scale of the damage we had to repair after those eight years—how many abuses there were and how much time it takes to properly examine them. So, in my opinion, it is quite easy to say: you should have moved faster, you should have acted immediately, you should not have waited, and so on. But, to be honest, when I look back, I do not see any really good examples of what could have been done more efficiently.
I also remember moments when I considered possible political compromises with the president in order to avoid a veto and move forward with the restoration of the rule of law. But, at the same time, there was no appetite or support for political compromise. There was a sense that because we had won the elections, we should pursue all possible changes without making moral or legal compromises.
Maybe one of our mistakes was that we assumed the presidential election result would be in our favor. If we had had a pro-democratic, pro-European president, then by the end of 2025 we would have had all the necessary laws passed. They would already have been in force and would have made it possible to restore the rule of law. After that failure, we had to look for alternatives and other solutions.
But when I look at the situation now, the National Council of the Judiciary, as I said, has been resurrected and is functioning properly. There is a certain chance that the Constitutional Court will also begin to operate properly. The Prosecution Service may not be a perfect institution, but its current shape still guarantees the independent exercise of prosecutorial power and accountability.
Interestingly, we have a very good example today. One of my successes, and something I am really proud of, was Poland’s joining the European Public Prosecution Office (EPPO). Today, the EPPO won an important victory in the Polish Parliament because it obtained consent to lift parliamentary immunity and also consent to arrest a member of Parliament. What is particularly interesting is that this member of Parliament is associated with the existing ruling coalition.
So, if the EPPO is able to go after a member of the existing coalition, it shows that we are restoring quality in terms of the independence of the prosecution service and the operation of European institutions on Polish soil. The vote in the committee was something like 14 votes in favor and two against. So, there was no defense of “our guy” by the ruling coalition against the accusations made by the EPPO.
In my opinion, a lot of things also happen on a daily basis at this symbolic level. When you look at the operation of the courts and the prosecution service, they are much more independent and much more trusted than they were during the illiberal period. I think this is also the consequence of a certain approach to, and a certain way of thinking about, the state.
Democratic Recovery Also Means Restoring Public Servants’ Trust in the State
Your recent comparison of Poland and Hungary argues that democratic transition is not merely constitutional or legislative reconstruction but also a matter of regaining the trust of institutions and citizens. What actually restores that trust? Is it successful prosecution of abuses, functioning public services, impartial courts, transparency, political restraint—or the visible demonstration that institutions will no longer be treated as spoils of electoral victory?
Professor Adam Bodnar: I think the truth lies in all the things you have mentioned, but creating institutions that are genuinely independent from politicians—and that also project an image of independence through real action—is extremely important.
One aspect that is often neglected is how the legislative process works and how transparent the operation of the state is. My feeling is that trust in the legislative process is now much greater than it was before. Moreover, decisions are made with a high degree of transparency regarding how the state operates, even if this sometimes comes at a daily political cost.
But, in my opinion, one of the most neglected aspects of recovery is the question of people: to what extent those serving in the judiciary, the prosecution service, public media, and other institutions feel that they have regained trust in the state and can act in accordance with their professional oath, ethical commitments, and the law. My feeling is that when politicians stop pushing the state in particular directions, judges and prosecutors gradually regain the sense that what they are doing is simply part of the ordinary, day-to-day functioning of the state. In turn, this affects public perceptions.
Let me give you one example. It was certainly not a typical rule of law recovery case, but recently there was a case involving a drunk driver who killed four people in a car accident in Warsaw. He escaped to Germany, was brought back under the European Arrest Warrant, and was subsequently convicted. The trial was conducted properly and did not last very long—only a couple of months. The court sentenced him to 25 years in prison and provided a very strong justification for the judgment. What I found particularly interesting was that the judgment was applauded across the political spectrum: left, right, far right, extreme right—whatever. Everybody was basically satisfied with both the court’s decision and the reasoning behind it.
In my opinion, when you have that kind of moment, you can see that something is changing. The case is no longer interpreted politically but is instead understood simply as a matter of public interest and as an instance in which justice has been done. So, I would hope that we will see more and more cases like this, in which courts are assessed on the basis of what they actually do, rather than through calculations about whether this or that judge is politically affiliated.
TISZA Must Avoid Reproducing the Winner-Takes-All Logic It Inherited
Péter Magyar speaks at a public demonstration near the Hungarian Parliament building in Budapest on April 6, 2024. Photo: Istvan Balogh / Dreamstime.
You argue that Péter Magyar’s victory and TISZA’s constitutional majority potentially give Hungary far greater room for institutional reconstruction than Poland possessed after 2023. But does that greater capacity also create a greater democratic danger? How can Hungary dismantle deeply entrenched Orbán-era structures without reproducing Orbán’s own winner-takes-all constitutional logic under new political ownership?
Professor Adam Bodnar: I remember when I made this point, it was just at the beginning of the transition in Hungary. But it seems to me that Péter Magyar is handling this quite intelligently, and even the reconstruction concerning the President of the Republic has been carried out in a way that respects some basic guarantees. The clearest proof of this is that the person who accepted the position of the new president is one of the judicial dissidents from the Orbán era—András Baka. So, let’s hope that Hungary continues in this direction.
What concerns me more is the accountability process. With the passage of time, there may be growing dissatisfaction among voters with what TISZA is doing. People will expect miracles and major economic change; they will look at the promises that were made, and the government will not be able to deliver on everything. We may also begin to see a struggle for power within the TISZA movement. We can imagine all kinds of things happening.
The question is whether accountability will proceed effectively, especially at the local level. If the prosecution service and the secret services were built over 16 years by Orbán, there are many people within those institutions who received their appointments to a great extent thanks to Fidesz. They may have developed internal networks and connections that are not even visible to the general public, particularly at the local level. The question, then, is how this will affect the accountability process and how strong that process will ultimately be. This is where I see the major danger in Hungary’s transition.
Civil Society Is Democratic Insurance for Unknown Times to Come
One lesson from Poland and Hungary seems to be that constitutional democracies often assume political actors will exercise self-restraint, respect conventions, and accept institutional pluralism. Populist governments exploit precisely those assumptions. Should European democracies now redesign their constitutional architecture on the premise that future governments may be deliberately hostile to liberal-democratic constraints—through stronger appointment rules, dispersed powers, entrenched judicial protections, independent prosecution, and more robust safeguards for public media?
Professor Adam Bodnar: In my opinion, they should, but the question is whether they will have enough popular support to make that kind of change. Some countries are already moving in this direction. Look at the Netherlands or Germany. We also have solutions at the European level, such as the European Media Freedom Act, which is intended to support public media.
But, to be honest, I believe that protecting ourselves against illiberal democracy also requires strengthening civic education and civil society. Society needs instruments of resilience and pressure, and civil society actors need the capacity to protest and keep the democratic flame alive when populists come to power. They should be able to monitor government actions, scrutinize what is actually being done, and make institutional capture much more difficult.
The question, then, is whether European societies have enough energy for this. A great deal can be achieved through pro-democratic support for civil society organizations, by building national and transnational networks, and by supporting independent judicial associations, bar associations, and similar institutions. The real question is whether we are doing enough in this area, or whether we have become too accustomed to taking the existence of these institutions for granted.
Democratic Resilience Depends on People Willing to Defend Institutions
March of a Million Hearts. Hundreds of thousands march in anti-government protest to show support for democracy in Warsaw, Poland on October 1, 2023. Photo: Shutterstock.
Your account of Poland’s resistance places unusual emphasis on civic activism, lawyers, judges, the Ombudsman, and what you describe as the emergence of constitutional patriotism. Does Poland demonstrate that democratic resilience ultimately depends less on constitutional text than on a social infrastructure of people willing to defend it? If so, how can democracies cultivate that civic capacity before a crisis rather than discovering its importance only after institutions come under attack?
Professor Adam Bodnar: I truly believe that we would not have been able to win the elections in 2023 without civil society. I remember many moments when it was only civil society organizations that were still protesting, while political parties were simply playing political games and were not so deeply interested in what was happening on a daily basis in the judiciary, the prosecution service, and public media. But because of civil society, we were still able to protest.
A good example is the operation of judicial associations, but also different forms of civic education and other formats. Of course, the question is to what extent this was specific to Poland and whether it is a global phenomenon. But right now, I see that in the United States some of the Polish practices are being repeated, and they are very interested in what we were doing during those difficult times.
I believe that the result of the 2023 elections was the result of a combination of, on the one hand, political motivation and, on the other, different civil society streams and concerned people who came together and fought for the same values.
What should be done in a situation when you have a relatively stable position? In my opinion, you should constantly create space for the development of civil society. You should create different incentives for new NGOs to appear on the scene, for private donations, for crowdfunding, and for different forms of support. The government should be a guardian supporting civil society, because by supporting it, it is creating a form of insurance for unknown times to come.
My feeling is that right now the government is making this effort, and I believe that, in the event of another challenge, there will be enough actors willing to protest and ready to make sacrifices for the sake of defending democratic values.
EU Must Protect the Institutions That Sustain Democratic Values
You have written that populist governments do not necessarily silence criticism through spectacular censorship; they can instead use state advertising, friendly ownership, public broadcasters, litigation, and government-sponsored Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) to make criticism progressively more costly. Should media pluralism, academic freedom, and protection against legal harassment be understood as part of Europe’s constitutional security architecture rather than merely as sectoral rights?
Professor Adam Bodnar: If I look at statements by Ursula von der Leyen, State of the Union addresses, and different speeches by Věra Jourová, former Commissioner, my feeling is that Europe understands this. The adoption of the European Media Freedom Act, the creation of funds supporting independent NGOs, the adoption of anti-SLAPP legislation, and support for local media are all movements in this direction.
The question is to what extent these measures really have an impact domestically—to what extent policies developed at the EU level, such as the Democracy Shield or democracy resilience policies, are actually implemented at the local level. Here, I am a little concerned that EU policies do not always receive the same recognition locally. Please note that I am saying this from the Polish perspective. I think national governments should also be taking certain actions in this regard.
Certainly, academic freedom is extremely important, but my feeling is that, in Europe at least, academic freedom is suffering too much because of bureaucratism and a certain kind of commercialization. It is not so much based on promoting values as the most important component; rather, it is increasingly about treating science and scholarship as part of the EU economy. That is why there is so much emphasis on grants, proficiency, excellence, and not necessarily on fighting for values.
So, in my opinion, at the end of the day, we should remember that without actors such as civil society, the media, and academia, democratic values will not survive. The European Union, but also its member states, should be very much aware that taking care of these actors is a precondition for the survival of democratic values. Of course, this should be a predominant consideration in the EU’s different political strategies.
Poland Became a Laboratory for the EU’s Rule-of-Law Instruments
Photo: Dreamstime.
Your writings repeatedly point to a timing problem in European rule-of-law enforcement: Article 7 became politically stalled, litigation took years, and domestic institutional capture often produced immediate political benefits while European legal consequences arrived much later. Has the EU learned this lesson? Or does its rule-of-law architecture still operate too slowly to stop an elected government determined to transform institutions before Brussels, Luxembourg, or Strasbourg can react?
Professor Adam Bodnar: When I commented on the operations of the European Union, it was partly out of frustration, because we observed the decay and destruction of the rule of law on a daily basis, while the government learned how to play the game regarding Article 7. But later on, more or less at the end of 2017 and in 2018, the European Commission started to use the infringement procedure in a very efficient way. Thereafter, we had a series of judgments from the Court of Justice of the EU, and finally, we had the conditionality regulation and the suspension of EU recovery funds. In my opinion, the Polish case was a little bit like a laboratory for the practical use of all those instruments. So, I think that right now, the European Union is much more powerful.
But, on the other hand, the EU is perhaps not using enough of its capabilities to check whether this so-called democratic front-sliding is being done in a proper way. There should be better observance of how different states are complying with the rule of law. I have read papers by my friends Thomas Pavone and Christophe Hillion about this relationship between the EU and so-called democratic front-sliding. So, this kind of compliance check by the EU is an important element of the European Union’s rule-of-law architecture.
Protect Every Democratic Stronghold Before It Is Captured
And lastly, Professor Bodnar, if you were to draw one overarching lesson from Poland for Hungary, Germany, and other European democracies confronting populist radical-right pressure, what should “democratic resilience” mean in institutional terms? Is the priority stronger courts and constitutional safeguards, more effective EU enforcement, independent media, social and territorial inclusion, civic education, accountable political parties—or, ultimately, a democratic culture capable of accepting electoral conflict while refusing the idea that winning an election gives a majority the right to capture the state?
Professor Adam Bodnar: I think I would concentrate on what Timothy Snyder called lesson number two: protecting institutions. Because, in my opinion, if I look back, we would not have been able to survive if we had not trusted state institutions that created room for maneuver, protest, resilience, and different forms of change. One of them was the Ombudsman’s office. But it was also the Polish Senate, the upper chamber of Parliament, which, after 2019, was really important in terms of preventing backsliding.
On the other hand, we would not have been able to survive without civil society. Civil society, of course, may operate separately from state institutions, but when it has support from some state institutions and when they can cooperate with one another, this can have a significant impact, because it gives you a sense that pluralism still exists. Maybe it is not pluralism in Parliament, because you have the domination of one political party, and that political party has a great deal of influence over decision-making. But still, this pluralism exists in different state institutions that continue to perform their checks-and-balances function.
It also exists at the local level, and I think that in a number of countries, including Turkey, we can see how important the existence of pluralism at the local level is. But it is also in the hands of civil society, civil society leaders, bar associations, judicial associations, and all those institutions that have not been captured and that still preserve the spirit of citizenship and the spirit of true democratic values.
So, I would go in this direction: protecting as many institutions as possible that believe in and serve as strongholds of the democratic state and the rule of law. If you have this, then it gives you enough power to fight for the values you believe in and for the survival of the democratic regime.
After all votes were counted, S leader Magdalena Andersson’s bloc secured 176 seats to the Tidö coalition’s 173. Over the past four years, the SD-backed government has tightened immigration policy, promoted repatriation, made temporary residence permits the norm, and introduced tougher criminal penalties. The Social Democrats did not consistently oppose these measures and have themselves embraced a more restrictive approach to immigration. Yet, despite this broad political consensus, the opposition won.
