Viktor Orban may have been defeated in Hungary, but right-wing populism remains a potent political force, particularly in Europe and the United States.
Some populist leaders — Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni — are in power. Populist parties — Reform UK, the Alternative for Germany party — are pounding at the doors of governance. Meanwhile, many traditional parties on the left (Britain’s Labour, for example) are struggling.
Sheri Berman, a scholar and historian at Barnard College who has written about and researched populism, assessed the state of populist politics in a written conversation with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion. (This has been edited for length and clarity.)
John Guida: Viktor Orban was in power for 16 consecutive years and, for much of that time, was an exemplar to the international right for a certain kind of national-conservative politics. He lost, but right-wing populism continues to be a political force in Europe and America. What continues to drive that?
Sheri Berman: The place to begin is by seeing populists as symptoms — of dissatisfaction with establishment parties, politicians and institutions. This dissatisfaction is the consequence of citizens’ feeling that the establishment is unable or unwilling to respond to their demands and grievances. In Hungary, this was precisely what gave Orban his political opening — the dominant socialist party got caught in a horrific scandal, many citizens were suffering from the dislocations and consequences of the transition to “neoliberal” capitalism, and the country was one of the worst affected by the global financial crisis of 2008-9.
The sources of that frustration and dissatisfaction — besides real corruption, lack of responsiveness and poor performance from establishment parties, politicians and institutions — include deep economic, social-cultural and technological transformations that have disrupted Western and other countries.
Guida: Could you tease out the underlying economic shifts?
Berman: They have created growing inequalities within the regions of many countries and shifted the balance of economic power within countries and across the globe. There is less evidence that direct suffering — for instance, poverty and unemployment — is a great predictor of populist voting. Broader measures of insecurity are another matter.
Insecurity includes things like fear of job loss, uncertainty about the future, concern that an economic shock might send one or one’s family into an economic spiral, worry about access to government resources, and so on. There is a lot of evidence that these sorts of concerns contribute not only to a willingness to vote for populist parties that tap into anxieties about these trends, but more generally make it easier for parties to whip up divisions within society — scapegoating some groups (minorities, immigrants, elites) for the problems many citizens face.
Guida: Perhaps you can explain the importance of “representation gaps” as a critical lens to look through for cultural issues. You have said that representation gaps appear “when parties’ positions diverge from voters’ preferences.” A recent research paper, “Political Representation Gaps and Populism” by Laurenz Guenther, also highlighted the idea that this gap exists on nearly all cultural issues — that parties on the whole are more culturally liberal than the national mean voter — as well as across more than two-dozen European countries included in the study.
Berman: The basic point of this paper, and other related research, is that over the past decades Western societies have grown dramatically more diverse. This is most obviously true in Western Europe, where some countries now have a higher share of foreign-born citizens than even the United States — a country that has had a history of accepting waves of immigrants. Sweden, for example, a country I lived in the late 1980s and that had little significant immigration, is now in this category.
These waves of immigrants happened at the same time as educated elites across the West shifted far to the left on a range of social and cultural issues, including immigration. It is important to stress that during this time, “average” people — those without a college education or in the working class broadly defined — also became more progressive on these issues, but just at a much less rapid rate than their educated counterparts, particularly after around 2008.
Guida: And these elites were leaders in both left and right (at least in Europe) mainstream parties?
Berman: Correct. These parties accordingly moved to the left on immigration and related issues at the same time as these massive demographic changes were occurring. What does this mean? In many Western countries, if you were concerned about the pace of demographic change, about illegal immigration, about assimilation, about strains on government resources up through the refugee crisis of 2015-16, in many West European countries in particular, you simply had no mainstream center-left or center-right party acknowledging or responding to your concerns.
This dynamic was clearest for center-left parties, which moved further to the left on these issues and had also abandoned their traditional economic profiles in the 1990s with the embrace of a sort of “neoliberalism lite.” Combined, these economic and cultural shifts alienated many non-college-educated and working-class voters. Over time, many members of these groups ended up voting for the populist right.
Guida: We have now had several examples of populist governance. Obviously Orban. Brexit was an early populist project. Generally, how do you assess populist governance in light of the economic and cultural terms you laid out? We obviously have another example right now in the United States.
Berman: Yes, we have a few examples of populist parties that have taken over entire governments — Orban, Trump. These politicians/parties have not always, or mostly (Trump’s first term is an arguable exception, though he governed much less as a populist in those years) been economic success stories. This is partially, but not entirely, because they have also been extremely corrupt — which is somewhat ironic, given that they campaigned against the corruption of existing elites.
But as important, the economic mismanagement in Hungary has been staggering. It has declined from being one of Eastern Europe’s success stories after the Cold War transition to now being far behind similar countries, like Poland.
Trump 2.0 has featured staggering levels of corruption and movement backward on many of the issues he campaigned on — inflation is rising again, there has been no significant improvement in manufacturing, suffering rural regions are still suffering, affordability in general remains a pressing issue for American citizens, access to health care is once again being threatened for many citizens.
Guida: So, economically, a rather spotty record at best.
Berman: Insofar as populists promise a better economic future, there is little evidence they have delivered.
Guida: But has there been a particularly effective populist leader in the past 10 or so years?
Berman: That depends on how you define effective. From the perspective of impact, Donald Trump is the GOAT here. He not only won two elections — he transformed the Republican Party, the nature of political competition in the U.S. and has had long-term, perhaps irreversible, impacts on American democracy.
If, on the other hand, “effective” is defined by policy outcomes, the ranking is more difficult. In Western Europe, there have been many populist parties in power as part of coalition governments — Italy, Finland, the Netherlands, Austria — and here their records are somewhat mixed. They have not managed to solve their countries’ problems, but they have not been disastrous (particularly with regards to undermining democracy) as many feared or claimed they would be.
Guida: What about in strictly social-cultural terms?
Berman: If we focus on immigration in particular, some have been effective — even if in ways many on the left would disapprove. There is no doubt that these parties have forced the issue of immigration and other social-cultural issues onto the agenda — something voters in many of these countries long demanded.
Guida: So maybe that suggests another way of assessing populist governance. Alexandre Lefebvre, a liberal political philosopher at the University of Sydney, wrote a recent piece ahead of the Hungarian elections. He suggested that the regime is best understood as “ordered toward a substantive vision of the good life” and “prepared to use state power to rank and promote those forms of life it deems worthy of honor.” Enshrined in the Orbanite constitution are the “fundamental cohesive values” (via Christianity) of “loyalty, faith and love.”
Is this a potential appeal of right-wing populists — less stress on material matters, and more on a moral vision of national life (even if that moral vision is highly ideological or constrained in ways)?
Berman: This is a vision that appeals to intellectuals — on the left and right. Right-wing intellectuals saw Hungary as an exemplar. But most obviously, this aspect of Orban’s regime was also a failure. He put in place policies to promote birthrates, “Christian values,” and so on. There has been no substantial increase in birthrates, Hungarians do not attend church very regularly, and anti-pride policies have done little more than contribute to driving many young Hungarians out of the country, contributing to precisely the sort of decline Orban ostensibly wanted to fight.
There was a time — not that long ago — when Christian Democratic parties flourished in Europe. These were parties that were inspired by Christian values and precepts — a respect for religion and the church, the centrality of the family and certain “traditional” values. But these parties were also committed to plurality and democracy.
It is unfortunate that these parties declined along with their social democratic counterparts. They provided a way for conservatives to fight for their views, but within a pluralistic, democratic framework. Hardly anyone, even in Hungary, was interested in what Orban was selling in this regard. Making government the arbiter of how people should lead their lives, what the ends or goals of what that life should be, what the definition of the “good” is — this is fundamentally incompatible with pluralistic democracy. Such imposition can come from the left as well, of course, and it is important that we recognize that trying to impose all of our values on our fellow citizens is a dangerous path to go down.
Guida: Is someone like Giorgia Meloni in Italy governing like something of a Christian Democrat in populist clothing?
Berman: That is true to some degree. Many of the policies now treated as beyond the pale — limits on immigration, insistence on assimilation, defense of “traditional” values, preference for family and private-sector provision of social care rather than state provision — have long been associated with Christian Democratic or conservative politics. I am not saying these are positions we should endorse. But pathologizing them, or treating them as threats to democracy, is at best a dramatic exaggeration and a dangerous one, because it erases the distinction between policies we strongly dislike and policies that are genuine threats to democracy.
Guida: Recently we have not seen many populist parties of the left, although historically, particularly in the U.S., they have thrived. Is there a political opportunity for a successful populist party of the left?
Berman: Figures like Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani are trying to push the Democratic Party in that direction. And there have been left populist parties in Western Europe, although they have been much less successful than their right-wing counterparts.
Part of that has to do with the electorate in the West: Noncollege-educated, working-class voters as a group tend to be somewhat conservative on social and cultural issues but somewhat left on economic ones. This makes it hard for contemporary left populists to attract them, and they remain not a majority of voters, but a plurality. In Western Europe, proportional representation systems give rise to a plethora of parties, so, there, left populists tend to be parties mostly supported by people who are highly educated, white collar, living in cosmopolitan cities.
Guida: You recently suggested that populism, as a grievance-focused mode of politics, lacks a vision for the future. You said that Communism or fascism, for all their profound flaws, “articulated a sense of what a new future would look like. They did not only seek to destroy the old order but to create something new.”
Last year, Adam Tooze, the economic historian, wrote that “Trump’s national economic strategists” — he was speaking at the time about his tariffs — “are far bolder in what they demand of the American public than their opponents in the Democratic Party ever were” and “what Green New Deal advocates never dared to be: a direct challenge to prevailing norms of American consumerism in the name of a better future.”
For opponents of right-wing populists, how critical is a compelling vision of the future?
Berman: There is no grand vision of the future on the right today. A shift back to a more Christian Democratic option is viable, but again, that is squarely within the democratic rules of the game. Instead, what the new right thrives on is significant resentment against the “excesses” of the left rather than a broad desire for what they claim to stand for.
Trump is radical in many ways and has represented a break with the past — particularly the recent Republican past — in a very clear way. But most Americans recognize that his tariffs are not capable of recreating prosperity or even a thriving manufacturing sector in the United States. The irony of Biden’s economic policies is that, however imperfect, they were extensive and designed to deal with the challenges economically disadvantaged Americans and economically disadvantaged regions of America face. But not least because the Democratic brand has become so toxic among such voters and regions, the intent of these policies remained obscured. The messenger matters as much as the message — when voters have lost faith in a party, when they see it no longer standing for them, it is harder for them to see that their policies may indeed be helping them.
Guida: So a positive vision isn’t enough. It needs a compelling messenger to advance it.
Berman: There is a difference between undercutting support for your opponents and creating support for yourself. In Western Europe, for example, we have some examples of countries where support for right populists has diminished because the immigration issue has been largely moved off the agenda. Denmark is a poster case here.
But moving immigration off the agenda is not the same as creating support for the left. The comparison in the U.S. is clear: Trump’s missteps will surely help the Democrats in the midterms and probably 2028. But if you want to build support for a party over time, you need to do more than thrive off the missteps of your opponents. You must build a brand and a program that is distinctive and attractive of your own.
Sheri Berman, a professor of political science at Barnard College, is the author of “Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Regime to the Present Day” and the forthcoming “The Political Consequences of Economic Ideas: Neoliberalism, the Left, and the Fate of Democracy.” John Guida is a Times Opinion editor.
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