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Luca Szücs: Populism in retreat? Lessons from Orbán’s downfall

Image 1: Supporters of the Tisza Party follow the election results at the party’s election-night event held at Batthyány Square, Budapest. Photo by Julianna Ugrin

On the night of 12 April, in the wake of the landslide victory of the Tisza Party, Hungary erupted into collective euphoria. Images from election night quickly spread across global media, capturing an outpouring of emotion as people took to the streets not only in Budapest, but across the country. Many who experienced that night, including myself, felt they were witnessing a historic moment. This was not simply a parliamentary election producing a new government, it was a vote for full regime and elite change. Once again, Hungarians expressed a strong sense of belonging to their European allies and the illiberal and autocratic regime of Viktor Orbán, along with its left-liberal “progressive” opposition, was replaced.

This collective catharsis also reflected a deeper sentiment: for the first time in decades, Hungarians could truly claim the outcome as their own. Unlike earlier transformation shaped by global forces – such as the collapse of the Soviet Union – this result was driven by domestic political agency. In that sense, it felt like a belated regime change of 1990, when many Hungarians felt more anxious than relieved – rightly so – and did not perceive themselves as active participants in a transformation largely driven by external forces. It is telling that voter turnout in the first free elections of 1990 was only 65 per cent, while in other parts of the former Soviet bloc it exceeded 90 per cent.

This time, turnout approached 80 per cent. The Tisza Party secured a parliamentary supermajority with 53 per cent of the vote, while Fidesz received only 38 per cent. With this result, Péter Magyar (Prime Minister of Hungary) and his government received unprecedented legitimacy, which, of course, comes with enormous responsibility. There is immense social pressure to begin with a clean slate. It is therefore no surprise that the newly appointed head of the Prime Minister’s Office announced that one of the first measures would be the opening of socialist-era agent files, along with the establishment of an Asset Recovery Office to reclaim stolen assets and public funds misused by the Orbán regime.

What happened to the old opposition?

Since the crushing defeat of the Orbán regime, a number of essays, op-eds, and articles have already appeared, and deeper analyses and academic studies will certainly follow, seeking to draw lessons from the Hungarian case on how to defeat illiberal autocratic regimes (see also Pulay 2026). While the European Union and much of the world shared in Hungarian euphoria with a sense of relief, international and domestic commentators have expressed concern (Scheiring 2026) over the disappearance of left-liberal and progressive forces from the new Hungarian parliament, fearing that these perspectives would not be genuinely represented by Tisza. Many felt, understandably, that only various shades of the Right would now remain in parliament. Others saw Tisza’s victory as final proof of the country’s deeply conservative nature (Szakolczai and Eilenberger 2026).

However, by 2026, the left-liberal opposition’s work had become completely hollowed out. Opposition parties were reduced to a largely reactive identity-political force that, willingly or unwillingly, sustained Orbán’s Fidesz system while having long lost their social base, including the working class. It is revealing that, with the exception of the mass protests triggered by the so-called “slave law” (Overtime Act) (Szombati 2018) at the end of 2018, this opposition never meaningfully engaged with topics such as workers’ rights. Nor did they confront the underlying material and cultural forces of “double devaluation” (Kalb 2023) that had produced the class base of Orbán’s illiberalism in the first place.

At the same time, Orbán had meticulously created a system in which room was allowed for dwarf opposition parties focused on identity politics, thus maintaining at least the appearance of a functioning liberal democracy. The dynamic resembled a predictable political choreography between Fidesz and its opposition. The 2025 ban on Pride by Orbán, followed by the decision to organize the event with the support of left-liberal opposition politicians, was a case in point. Rather than joining the Pride march, Magyar and Tisza party continued to focus on its campaign centered primarily on economic and social issues. Their strategy aimed to address the concerns of a broader segment of society in order to unify the opposition. Magyar also understood that the persistence of these cultural wars at the center of political debate, cultivated for more than a decade by both Orbán and his opponents, had made regime change impossible.

Although the election swept away the left-liberal parties and their political elite alongside Fidesz, voters and politicians committed to leftist values did not disappear. Instead, they joined Tisza and its broader grassroots movement.

The rise of a counterhegemonic force from within

In recent years, Orbán’s illiberal hegemony had already begun to erode. In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the drying up of European Union funds for Hungary, and a long series of poor governmental decisions, the economy has been in a bad shape for some time, causing significant material stagnation. Orbánism recorded the highest cumulative inflation in the EU since 2020, with prices rising by 57 per cent. The stark contrast between the material reality of average Hungarians and the unhinged corruption and extreme wealth of Orbán and his cronies became increasingly difficult to conceal. His hegemony was collapsing and the raw domination that had increasingly underpinned it was in plain sight (Éber 2025).

Amid the economic and moral exhaustion of the regime, the counter force emerged from within: Péter Magyar was an insider and for many years a loyal cadre of the Orbán regime. The landslide victory of Magyar’s Tisza Party – and its ability to bring about regime change – was preceded by two years of intensive work centered on a sustained nationwide tour and engagement with local communities. During this period, Magyar established dialogue with the rural majority, moving from village to village and from town to town. This experience distilled the core themes of his campaign.

Out of these encounters, local communities – civil society in its original sense – began organizing themselves into one of the largest grassroots movements of recent decades: the so-called “Tisza szigetek” (Tisza islands), which became the social backbone of the Tisza Party. Crucially, these were not formally part of the party, nor were they created by it. Rather, they were catalyzed by the emergence of Péter Magyar and the Tisza Party, evolving into a parallel social formation alongside it (Borbáth 2026).

Importantly, the main concerns of this social base centered on material issues: the dire poverty of workers, wage conditions, entrenched clientelism, working conditions, systemic corruption, and the erosion of public institutions essential to social reproduction such as health and education. These concerns formed the unifying core of Tisza’s campaign and produced a potentially counter hegemonic focus on everyday material concerns away from Orbán’s increasingly fictitious identity politics.

Nevertheless, these issues were in fact far from new. As a social anthropologist focusing on small business owners and conducting fieldwork in the countryside between 2015 and 2016 – at the height of the so-called migration crisis – I observed that the main concerns of my interlocutors revolved around much the same issues – even as people lived amid Fidesz’s hate propaganda and xenophobic hostility toward migrants, and the country was saturated with government posters conveying anti-Brussels hate messages.

Even during the relatively favourable global conjuncture between 2010 and 2019, when foreign capital and EU funds were flowing in, the structural problems of the economy and the labour market had persisted, particularly the extremely low taxation of capital, reaching as low as 3 per cent (Scheiring 2020) and the relatively high taxation of labour, despite the new flat tax (Scharle and Szikra 2015), which contributed to low incomes, a high level of undeclared employment and impeded formal job creation in small and medium-sized businesses. As a result, my interlocutors, small business owners, were often confronted with labour related issues, while self-employed workers were constantly hustling, working multiple shifts and combining various jobs simply to make ends meet. People managed to get by largely at the cost of self-exploitation. Meanwhile, formal labour became more flexibilized than ever, giving way to informal paternalistic mechanisms of labour control and surveillance (Szücs 2021). Fidesz’s ideology promoted a “work-based society” while curtailing workers’ interests. The so-called progressive side, meanwhile, had long abandoned the working class as well.

Contrary to the claim that the decline of left-liberal parties reflects an inherently conservative Hungarian society, value-mapping surveys indicate that majority of Hungarians lean economically left, with egalitarian and redistribution-supporting values remaining dominant, while only a small minority holds strong market-liberal views (Bíró-Nagy et al. 2022). This was clearly reflected in Tisza’s campaign and became the source of its success. To frame social and economic concerns, Tisza drew on national symbols and shared cultural references – Hungarian flags were everywhere. The reappropriation and rearticulation of the nation against an Orbánism that had turned it de facto against the demos proved a powerful mobilising any unifying tool, though it was often misinterpreted as evidence of an inherently conservative orientation.

The use of national symbols, including the Hungarian flag, may appear banal, but in a country where from the late 1990s the first Orbán government instrumentalised them for division, their reappropriation for democratic purposes carried a deeply liberating meaning for many Hungarians. It signified not ethno-national exclusion or national security vis a vis foreign forces, but rather a sense of popular democratic revival.

The new Tisza government was just inaugurated, so any full assessment of its policies remains premature. However, its general direction is already clear: strengthening ties with the European Union and reintegrating into its institutions; playing a more active role in Central European politics – Poland and Austria were the first to be visited after Brussels; diversifying energy sources in order to reduce dependence on Russia; rebuilding the rule of law and institutional frameworks, including going after misspent public money; restoring checks and balances; revitalizing the economy; strengthening public sectors such as education and healthcare; and reducing social inequalities.

Preliminary lessons learned

Liberal-left parties became embedded within Orbán’s illiberal system and failed, over sixteen years, to establish an effective counterhegemonic force, in fact replicating Orbán’s identity politics from the other side. Their focus on identity politics – largely shaped by Western liberal frameworks – proved politically powerless in the Hungarian context. The rediscovery of the material concerns of the broader population was crucial in Tisza’s victory.

A relentless presence on the ground, combined with the catalysis of a bottom-up grassroots movement, helped to counterbalance the omnipresent, increasingly AI-driven, fear-based propaganda of Fidesz. At the same time, the election was smartly framed as a choice between East and West, to which the Hungarian majority, always already pro-European, responded strongly. The Hungarian case demonstrates that what counts as “progressive” is context-specific, shaped by history, socio-political structure, and culture. Rather than relying on a priori assumptions of what progressive politics is and how progressive forces should respond to far-right and authoritarian challenges, it shows that credible political alternatives must be locally anchored and socially meaningful in order to succeed.

Luca Szücs is an anthropologist with a PhD from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. After working at the International Labour Organization (ILO) headquarters in Geneva, she now works as an independent consultant on labour-related topics. Her research and writing explore the changing world of work, as well as the politics, society, and culture of Eastern Europe through historical and ethnographic perspectives.

References:

Éber, Márk Áron. 2025. “Viktor Orbán’s politics of knowledge, intellectuals, and institutions in the light of Gramsci’s ideas.” In Laboratorio dell’ISPF 22. http://www.ispf-lab.cnr.it/system/files/ispf_lab/documenti/2025_BRM.pdf

Bíró-Nagy, András et al. 2022. Magyarország értéktérképe 2022. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung – Policy Solutions. https://real.mtak.hu/155579/1/Policy%20Solutions_Magyarorsz%C3%A1g%20%C3%89rt%C3%A9kt%C3%A9rk%C3%A9pe%202022.pdf

Borbáth, Endre. 2026. “Explaining Tisza’s Hungarian breakthrough” The Loop, April 12. https://theloop.ecpr.eu/explaining-tiszas-hungarian-breakthrough/

Kalb, Don. 2023. “Double devaluations: Class, value and the rise of the right in the Global North.” Journal of Agrarian Change, 23(1), 204–219.

Pulay, Gergely. 2026. “Post-feudalism and post-fascism at the end of the Orbán-regime in Hungary” FocaalBlog, May 6. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/05/06/gergely-pulay-post-feudalism-and-post-fascism-at-the-end-of-the-orban-regime-in-hungary/

Scharle, Ágota and Dorottya Szikra. 2015. “Recent Changes Moving Hungary Away from the European Social Model” in The European Social Model in Crisis: Is Europe Losing Its Soul?, edited by Daniel Vaughan-Whitehead. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Scheiring, Gábor. 2020. The Retreat of Liberal Democracy: Authoritarian Capitalism and The Accumulative State in Hungary. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Scheiring, Gábor. 2026. “Democracy After Orbánism?” Jacobin, May 5. https://jacobin.com/2026/05/hungary-magyar-democracy-orbanism-technocrat

Szakolczay, Árpád and Wolfram Eilenberger: “What does Péter Magyar’s election mean for Hungary and Europe?” University of St. Gallen Newsroom April 16. https://www.unisg.ch/en/newsroom/what-does-peter-magyars-election-mean-for-hungary-and-europe/

Szombati, Kristóf. 2018. “Protesting the “slave law” in Hungary: The erosion of illiberal hegemony?” Focaalblog, December 28. https://www.focaalblog.com/2018/12/28/kristof-szombati-protesting-the-slave-law-in-hungary-the-erosion-of-illiberal-hegemony/

Szücs, Luca. 2021. “Moral Economy and Mutuality at Work: Labour Practices in Tobacco Shops”. Pp. 57 – 75 in Moral Economy at Work, Ethnographic Investigations in Eurasia, edited by Lale Yalçın-Heckmann. Berghahn: New York – Oxford.

Cite as: Szücs, L. 2026. “Populism in retreat? Lessons from Orbán’s downfall” Focaalblog, May 13. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/05/13/luca-szucs-populism-in-retreat-lessons-from-orbans-downfall/

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Gergely Pulay: Post-feudalism and post-fascism at the end of the Orbán-regime in Hungary

Image 1: István Bibó (on the left) and Ferenc Erdei (second from the right) in the company of sociologist-psychologist Viola Tomori and Erdei’s father in 1940. Photo source: Wikipedia.

With the global rise of illiberalism in the twenty-first century, the reputation of Viktor Orbán’s regime has far exceeded Hungary’s actual geopolitical and economic weight. During late-socialism and around 1989, high profile international discourse on Hungary was shaped by the relationship of Hungarian dissident intellectuals and their Western friends (Harms 2025). Under Orbán, Hungary’s friends became autocratic leaders and far right politicians, and the exchange of ideas took place within transnational networks of knowledge production as a backdrop for an emerging illiberal international in Europe and beyond (Végh 2025). Now that Orbán’s regime is suddenly over as a result of this spring’s electoral revolt, Hungary’s local-global history as political laboratory seems to be entering a new phase, defined by the prospects of overthrowing illiberal regimes. A multitude of commentators are seeking to answer the question of how Orbán was defeated, hoping that the answer may have implications for the struggle against similar leaders in other countries.

The conferral of the political laboratory status often occurs alongside a near-complete disregard for social and intellectual history. Dominated largely by political science and commentary, studies of illiberalism tend toward analytic presentism and theorization in the negative, construing their object of scrutiny as a recent challenge, a style of leadership that does not fully correspond to the normative ideals of liberal democratic conduct. Illiberals reject the universalist criticism directed at them over corruption or the abuse of power, claiming that such critique is just an expression of liberals’ disrespect towards local custom and culture.

In my recent work, I trace a genealogy of two key words, or emic intellectual concepts—post-feudalism and post-fascism—to provide a historically and socially embedded account of the fatal symbiosis we today call illiberalism. These two concepts are rooted in the work of two towering figures of Hungarian social thought, István Bibó and Ferenc Erdei, who developed their main ideas as critics of admiral Horthy’s interwar authoritarian regime and then in the immediate aftermath of World War II (Bibó 2015, Erdei 1988), After the communist takeover, Bibó was marginalized, while Erdei became a high-ranking politician, but in 1956, they both became members of Hungary’s revolutionary government. As I return to it below, at the end of Fidesz’s first term in power in 2002, philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás described Orbán’s rule as an autocracy based on personal dependence, in other words a fatal symbiosis of post-feudalism and post-fascism.

Post-feudalism

Hungarian interwar populist progressives criticized the system of large landownership, monopolies and the redistribution of the national wealth by oligarchs who belonged to a political clientele. In their footsteps, generations of social critics engaged with forms of contingent closure, relying simultaneously on the categories of class and estate rather than reducing one to the other (Böröcz 1997). The concept of post-feudalism (utórendiség) was developed by Ferenc Erdei and his intellectual followers.In post-feudalism, the economic sphere has been thoroughly reshaped by capitalism (hence the ‘post’), yet the dominant logic of inequality remains a rank-based hierarchy of privilege and allegiance, entrenched in a political and administrative system in which the supremacy of the nobility—the ruling estate—persists behind the façade of parliamentary arrangements.

The practical side of post-feudalism is clientelist domination, based on the exchange of loyalty and support for guarantees of security and well-being—or simply the right to exist—between partners in unequal positions of power. In the period between the commodification of land in the mid-nineteenth century and the state-socialist collectivisation of agriculture, patron-client relations functioned as an institution that mitigated the consequences of polarization among different strata of the peasantry—such as landed farmers, smallholders, and landless day labourers within the same village community (Fél & Hofer 1973). As a system of domination and dependence, such networks of kinship and friendship regulated the flow of labour, services, and material goods, as well as the distribution of political loyalty. In clientelist transactions, participants placed strong emphasis on the idea of horizontal camaraderie or the ethics of mutual aid, even while remaining acutely aware of the inequalities between their positions. The wealthy benefited at the expense of the poor, who nonetheless took part in maintaining the relation for reasons of prestige (membership) and the expectation of return service. While clients could criticize their patrons in informal settings, open dissent—particularly in elections—was effectively prohibited.

Depending on the concentration of wealth and power, post-feudal arrangements may involve divergent forms of patronage, brokerage or atomized advocacy. Especially in the initial Stalinist version, the state-socialist regime managed to incorporate clientelism by the organization of the party-bureaucracy or nomenklatura, based on the principle of top-down appointment. In exchange for assistance in advancing their careers, clients carried out their patrons’ policies. (Szelényi & Mihályi 2020: 43) From the 1990s, local entrepreneurs in rural Hungary competed for monopolistic privileges to get access to profit flows by retaining some leverage (i.e. power over the distribution of advantages and disadvantages) and safeguards in relation to the state as well as business partners, banks and customers. Hierarchical forms of mutual obligation provided durable ways to bind the labour force to entrepreneurs as much as local constituencies to their political leaders. Amid the relative absence or decline of universal services, everyday problem-solving became increasingly synonymous with the pursuit of preferential treatment, entitlements, or various micro- and macro-privileges. At the same time, in the post-socialist political field, different factions established durable alliances with party-affiliated companies and economic elites that received competitive advantages and orders from governments in exchange for party and campaign financing (Stark & Vedres 2010). Post-socialist policies of austerity gave rise to a multitude of lobbies and strategies of informal and personalized bargaining to gain exemptions, concessions and favours. With Orbán’s rise to power in 2010, post-feudal arrangements took on an ever more centralized and systematic form. Relations of clientelism and brokerage were increasingly facilitated by the central state—as in case of workfare, the governance of poverty by discretionary power delegated to local mayors (Kovai, Pulay & Szombati 2022)—while minor corruption such as in hospitals was increasingly policed. With parliamentary super-majority, funding from the EU and some economic growth after the recovery from the financial crisis of the late-2000s, Orbán’s ruling estate was profiting from semi-peripheral capitalist integration through monopolizing the resources available through the state, without being held accountable for their misdemeanours. Still, these arrangements were not based on total consent. The introduction of new bills (including the one curtailing labour rights, or the amendments of the constitution) drew large crowds to the streets, but protests had virtually no effect on the ruling party’s decisions. By the early 2020s, popular criticism had become a common feature of everyday talk among ordinary Hungarians who were yearning for normal lives and ‘barking at politicians’ (Jansen 2015) mostly in restricted, confidential and friendly settings, without any necessary implication for their formal political participation or electoral behaviour. Post-feudal forms of domination continued to persist through the gift-like exchange of obligations and channels of atomized advocacy, accompanied by parallel publics and rampant forms of doublespeak. In Orbán’s Hungary, such apparent imperfections of hegemony were to be resolved by the more explicit forms of illiberal propaganda.

Post-fascism

If post-feudalism is a form of hierarchical organization, post-fascism is rather a vision or ideology of hierarchy. In a predominantly rural country like Hungary, twentieth-century fascism responded to economic crisis and a widespread sense of cultural decline by promoting the (re-)invention of supposedly archaic traditions, and the idea of collective rebirth after the elimination of the nation’s ‘others’. Conceiving hierarchy as natural, fascism subdued class-based differences to the principle of the racialized community (Kékesi 2023).

Post-fascism became a core concept in the work of Gáspár Miklós Tamás, following his profound disillusionment with post-socialist liberalization (Tamás 2000, 2002). The concept was inspired by the work of István Bibó, particularly his notion of ‘political hysteria’ from the 1940s, which GM Tamás sought to reframe for the conditions of the twenty-first century. Post-fascism describes a movement within global capitalism that reverses the Enlightenment tendency to equate citizenship with the human condition. In continuity with twentieth-century fascisms, it represents hierarchy as natural and seeks to reinforce the division between sub-political humanity and the privileges or elevated status of ‘proper’ citizens. Post-fascism denies the possibility of reconciliation between groups defined by gender, ethnicity, ‘race,’ or religion. Inter-group relations are instead construed as a domain of existential struggle, in which one side’s gain necessarily entails the other’s loss. This denial of reconciliation produces a vision of the social world in which the common good becomes unintelligible beyond the loyalties of the hierarchical in-group.

In Hungary, amid severe economic and social crises following the fall of state-socialism in 1989-1990, the demand for legitimation increased in a weakened state. Citizens harboured illusions about the protective capacities of state dependency in an attempt to find rescue from the terrifying outcomes of capitalism. The politics of refeudalization eroded and bypassed the entire system of impersonal administration, the rule of law, and bureaucracy by dismissing them as non-national institutions. Thus, understanding its manifestations merely as corruption misses the system’s core dynamics. Refeudalized power binds individuals and groups by concessions, exemptions, waivers, posts, titles, ranks, informal access to goods and services granted outside the statutory scheme (see also: Szalai 2017). Politicians of the new right salvaged what they could from crumbling nation-states, acting as operators of wealth and institutions extracted from the state on territory left behind by global capital. Two main pillars of Orbán’s ideology can be identified: the idea of permanent war against internal and external ’aliens,’ and an understanding of politics as structured by the existential fear for the community. Orbán’s anti-liberalism promised protection from the very minorities that liberals sought to protect against the ‘normal’ (hardworking, heterosexual and obedient) majority. Amid growing economic and social insecurity, majoritarian neo-nationalisms appropriate the language and modes of claim-making originally developed for the recognition struggles of minorities or the truly disadvantaged (Gille 2010). The inversion of human rights liberalism is central to the project, as exemplified by the construction of the white Christian majority as a vulnerable category in need of privileged protection against the threat of becoming a minority in its own homeland. This parasitic dependence on liberal discourse reflected the symbolic dimension of the Orbán-regime’s material dependence on EU-funding—at least while such funding remained available.

What comes next?

Orbán’s downfall resulted from a rare convergence of geopolitical, economic and moral crises. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party and movement emerged as a specialized task force aimed at confronting Orbán’s regime through a broad populist coalition that seeks to liberate suppressed creative energies and defend life itself from a parasitic elite (cf. Rajković 2023). Magyar’s credibility was reinforced by his former insider status within the Orbánist ruling estate, providing him with in-depth knowledge of the regime’s inner workings, akin to the role of former mafia members in anti-mafia struggles (cf. Rakopoulos 2017). Magyar relates to Orbán similarly to the way reform-socialists once related to Stalinists whose crimes they have rejected.

The post-Orbán moment is marked by ambivalence: euphoria, relief and hope coexist with a sense of loss and sacrifice. In states of collective effervescence, we tend to experience heightened clarity regarding temporal divisions between the old and new, as well as social divisions between the victims and perpetrators. Later, however, these distinctions appear more complex, as the experience of shared suffering becomes intertwined with recognition of shared complicity. The new Hungarian parliament is comprised of different conservative, right-wing parties and that should give an impetus for new political movements and platforms that we do not yet see. Fidesz has become a mid-sized party representing predominantly rural, less-educated, elderly, and poorer voters, which should serve as a warning sign for anyone concerned about social inequalities and another backlash.

One of the corrosive effects of illiberal hegemony has been the erosion of critical imagination. In this context, I propose to revisit theoretical ideas from the past in order to reclaim their critical potential in the present, to envisage alternatives for the future. Post-feudal or clientelist social arrangements are often criticized in the name of meritocracy or the autonomous, rights-bearing individual. However, they can be even more powerfully criticized for the way in which—behind the façade of mutual aid—they undermine horizontal forms of association, class-based solidarity and shared claim-making in the name of the commons. Together with anti-fascism, and alongside the more familiar de-colonial agenda, the project of de-clientization should go beyond the critique of specific elites in order to challenge the broader patriarchal mode of social reproduction. For the time being, it is worth recognizing that a huge majority of Hungarian voters expressed their readiness to accept change as a forward-looking condition—even as something desirable—rather than associating it with threat and danger, as Orbán’s propaganda has done for sixteen years.

Gergely Pulay is a sociologist and social anthropologist, Research Fellow at the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest. His research interests include urban marginality, value and livelihood and intellectual history in Hungary and Romania.

References

Bibó, István. 2015. The Art of Peacemaking: Political Essays by István Bibó. Yale University Press.

Böröcz, József. 1997. ‘Stand Reconstructed: Contingent Closure and Institutional Change.’ Sociological Theory 15(3): 215-248.

Erdei, Ferenc. 1988. Selected writings. Akadémiai.

Fél, Edit and Tamás Hofer. 1973. ‘Tanyakert-s, Patron-Client Relations, and Political Factions in Átány.’ American Anthropologist 75(3): 787-801.

Gille, Zsuzsa. 2010. ‘Is there a Global Postsocialist Condition?’ Global Society 24(1): 9-30.

Harms, Victoria. 2025. The Making of Dissidents: Hungary’s Democratic Opposition and Its Western Friends, 1973-1998. University of Pittsburgh Press.

Jansen, Stef. 2015. Yearnings in the Meantime. ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex. Berghahn Books.

Kékesi, Zoltán. 2023. Memory in Hungarian Fascism. A Cultural History. Routledge.

Kovai, Cecília, Gergely Pulay and Kristóf Szombati. 2022. ‘Building the ‘work-based society’: State-enabled grassroots clientelism and the re-establishment of order in present-day Hungary’ Paper presented at EASA2022 Belfast: Transformation, Hope and the Commons.

Rajković, Ivan. 2023. ‘Whose death, whose eco-revival? Filling in while emptying out the depopulated Balkan Mountains’ Focaal 96: 71-87.

Rakopoulos, Theodoros. 2017. From Clans to Co-ops. Confiscated Mafia Land in Sicily. Berghahn Books.

Stark, David and Balázs Vedres 2010. ‘Structural Folds: Generative Disruption in Overlapping Groups’ American Journal of Sociology 115(4): 1150-1190.

Szalai, Erzsébet. 2017. ‘Refeudalization.’ Corvinus Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 8(2): 3-24.

Szelényi, Iván and Péter Mihályi. 2020. Varieties of Post-communist Capitalism. A comparative analysis of Russia, Eastern Europe and China. Brill.

Tamás, Gáspár Miklós 2000. ‘On Post-Fascism’. Boston Review. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/g-m-tamas-post-fascism/

Tamás, Gáspár Miklós 2002. A helyzet. (‘The situation.’) Irodalom Kft.

Végh, Zsuzsanna 2025. ‘Rewriting the European Project? The balance and implications of Fidesz’s illiberal alliance-building in Europe.’ Wrocław: College of Eastern Europe. https://www.kew.org.pl/en/2025/05/05/rewriting-the-european-project-the-balance-and-implications-of-fideszs-illiberal-alliance-building-in-europe/

Cite as: Pulay, G. 2026. “Post-feudalism and post-fascism at the end of the Orbán-regime in Hungary” Focaalblog, May 6. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/05/06/gergely-pulay-post-feudalism-and-post-fascism-at-the-end-of-the-orban-regime-in-hungary/

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen: Pots that go bang in the night: Noise and rhythm as enacting popular security amidst political protest in Mozambique

Image 1: Photo of an election poster for former Mozambican president Armando Guebuza. The poster burnt down and destroyed in relation to the uprisings in Maputo 2010. Photo by author

Introduction

The pots and pans that were banged at night in Mozambique in late 2024 and early 2025 are now silent. However, their legacy is neither muted nor forgotten—reflecting similarly the trajectories of other forms of protest the last decades which has shaken Mozambique and, especially, its ruling party (see Bertelsen 2014).

What unfolded was extraordinary: The country’s heavily contested presidential and parliamentary election of 9th October 2024 was followed by loud street-based protests and riots across Mozambican cities which were often met with brutal violence by police and security forces. The clashes between young men and the police left around 400 dead and thousands injured.

Here I would like to draw attention to a form of protest that was somewhat eclipsed by the street-fighting, namely the banging of pots by female protestors in their homes and on the street. These female protestors engaged the collective sensorium of urban citizens and shifted the very sense of security and insecurity in this highly unpredictable political situation. Beating pots—on balconies, in courtyards, in kitchens with open windows and in the streets—mediated the population’s sense of insecurity, amounting to a gendered form of collective rejection of the violence of the state apparatus. For Mozambique, this marked a definite shift in terms of both the participation and the format of political opposition in the country, the noise also, crucially, instilling fear in the erstwhile security apparatus and the police

Maputo 2024 and 2025: Protests, rhythm, collective security

Centuries of Portuguese colonial rule and violence ended with liberation in 1975 at the hands of Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo – Front for the Liberation of Mozambique). In the half-century that followed, Mozambique has seen ongoing civil war conditioned respectively by Cold War dynamics (1976/77-1992), experiments in Afrosocialism (1980s), and multiparty elections from 1994 onwards. Given the merging of the Frelimo party with the Mozambican state apparatus in this period (Bertelsen 2016), few were surprised when Frelimo won in October 2024, securing the party elite victory in both the parliamentary and presidential elections.

However, in Mozambique’s last election Frelimo attained a majority so improbable that it defied even the most cynical of expectations among experts and citizens alike. For instance, ghost armies of voters—politically loyal subjects conjured from the realms of both the living and the dead—were called up to attain majorities for Frelimo in districts widely known as opposition party strongholds. Rampant ballot-stuffing bolstered other draconian moves, including manipulation of the country’s complex vote-counting system and widespread voter intimidation.

Formal complaints by the opposition were initially quashed, deepening the unpopularity of Frelimo. Protestors rapidly took to the streets and engaged police and security forces in sustained battles. By 27 January 2025, 313 protestors were registered as killed. While there had been protests against previous elections, the scale, form and distribution surpassed these (Feijó and Chiure 2025a, 2025b).

Central to the protests unfolding over several months was how Venancio Mondlane—popularly called VM7 and the founder of a new opposition party—emerged to contest the result. His firebrand speeches drew heavily on his background as a pastor in the Pentecostal church Igreja Ministério Divina Esperança. VM7’s dramatic contestation included well-orchestrated social media broadcasts from his exile in South Africa and a dramatic heroic re-entry into Maputo on 9 January 2025 where he was greeted like a hero—all cast, recast and morphed on social media.

Revisiting such events in November 2025, these months of unrest and protests also assumed a new and, for Mozambique, unprecedented shape—or, better, shapelessness. Evading the violence of the streets and residing within their apartments, on balconies or in courtyards, every night, female citizens banged their pots and pans for hours, chanting slogans against the Frelimo regime and the stolen election, sometimes accompanied by blowing whistles. In many video clips circulating on social media, one may see that the officers from the police force and the security apparatus are visibly affected by the noise surrounding them, treading more carefully and being visibly nervous.

The format, scale and space of these protests and how they affect also those meant to exert control on the streets, mark a shift in the Mozambican political landscape as the rhythms of protest were also emitted from areas of Maputo inhabited by segments of the population often characterised as wealthy or upper middle class—groups commonly perceived as allied with or integral to the Frelimo-state and not previously having been important parts of protests. Further, it is equally surprising, therefore, that Taela (2025: 6) and others suggest that it was initiated in Eduardo Mondlane University’s student housing—where banging pots was accompanied by throwing books and papers out of the windows onto the streets. Clips of protests have continuously filled the pluriverse of social media and across Maputo residents were informed about what was happening, including both wealthy areas downtown, as well as poorer areas, such as in the bairros Mafalala, Maxaquene, and Chamanculo. Some of the first images and clips surfaced immediately after the election and soon came to visually and graphically dominate several of the popular digital channels Mozambicans follow.

In the weeks and months to follow, the banging of pots rapidly turned into a massively popular mode of protest, mobilising especially women and girls and inserting them into a politics of resistance against the stolen elections. As Taela notes (2025: 6, my translation from Portuguese):

The pots and pans only came out of the cupboards at night, after protesters faced extreme police repression on the streets during the day. Banging pots and pans, known as panelaço, emerged as a strategy for those who wanted to protest but did not want to do so on the streets.

As shown in the many clips on social media, noise started after dark and the rhythms churned out from households were often rapid and intense — rhythms sometimes layered, with sounds ranging from the metallic drum of cheap aluminium pots to the deep humming of cast iron kitchenware. Many clips capture entire neighbourhoods banging in synced rhythm—but, crucially, with few of the protestors being visible.

The repeated banging of pots generated a sense of unification, collectivity, and participation mirroring the mass congregations that usually define street protests but in this case often marked by becoming heard, not seen, as well as being nocturnal, not diurnal. On the street in the same clips, one may see the heavily armed state security forces moving uncertainly through the dimly lit streets, navigating endless cascades of drumming and humming being poured over them. In some clips, the same forces nervously fire teargas grenades against balconies only to be met by a more massive wall of noise.

In many respects, Maputo’s panelaço of 2024 and 2025 constituted an act of resistance that transcended electoral and party-political registers: By amplifying and transmogrifying the soundscape of food-preparation from the individual households and into the public sphere, also collectivizing the sounds, what was repelled by noise was not only ghostly voters but also ossified politics, societal structures, and the gendering of space. This was also an explicit subtext in the many items on social media, namely that women were banging pots to be audibly present as a collective and that women’s politics should be recognized. In many of the acts, including during daytime, women set up kitchens in the streets where they cooked for protestors— extending the private realm of the kitchen onto the violently contested public spaces. Thus, these protests and practices may also be seen as extending care for others in its most inclusive sense. The symbolic importance of the pots should not be underestimated, as noted in a Facebook post by Zito Ossumane that was widely shared in Mozambique (translated from Portuguese):

The pots and pans, in a desperate gesture, decided to speak. They sacrificed themselves, banging against each other in a metallic hymn, invoking the god of kitchens and stoves. It was a collective prayer, a cry for help that spread throughout Mozambique, as if the noise of one neighborhood could travel through the bowels of the entire country. […] The revolution of the pots and pans has already begun. May the revolution of everything else come.

Panelaço: Shifting timespace, generative noise, sonic agency

The nocturnal banging of pots and their rhythm—synchronicity and non-synchronicity, collectivity and not—is not unique to Mozambique nor to postcolonial Africa. Writing on Paris and the 2016 nocturnal Nuit Debout protest—a form of charivari protest well-known from across Europe and North America—Shaw (2017: 117) notes “that the move to the night might be seen as an attempt to find a timespace in which a more open and creative politics is possible, strategically responding to the reduction in the freedom to protest in the more heavily surveyed day.”

Precisely the evasion, the slipping away into the night, the search for other than a securitized and striated space, is central here; in Paris the hypersurveilled urban spaces and in Maputo the security forces and their oftentimes indiscriminate diurnal violence exacted on protestors and civilians. Both index long-standing practices of evading statist domains of control, surveillance and, ultimately, notions of security defined by a central government. Further, in such evasion there is also a blurring of the public and private as protestors would often be confined to homes due to the imposed nightly curfew, left to consume news on TV or social media. Engaging in banging pots and pans may, in some sense, be interpreted as an inclusive, low-stakes form of protest, reflecting other social media activism as a facile way to “vent frustration” by protesting from the comfort of your home. However, here the Paris and Maputo cases diverge somewhat as in the latter those banging the pots were constantly fearing teargas grenades and shots launched at their balconies—as well as the volatility and violence of the situation being underscored by the number of casualties in daytime street protests.

Within contexts that are increasingly conditioned by non-democratic forms of securitization—including places like Mozambique—we, as anthropologists, also need to shift our attention to include the full sensorium: our own and of the fellow humans we engage. This includes exploring also what is entailed by “radical listening”, as Brandon LaBelle has called it. He also notes that “from an insurrectionary urgency, gestures and acts are made that force into being a heterogeneous space of social becoming, whose weakness or invisibility, whose transience or strangeness upset or elide established structures to produce what I think of as unlikely publics” (LaBelle 2018: 14-15).

Arguably, the nocturnal beating did produce what we might, with LaBelle, call “unlikely publics” with noise, rhythmicity, and the rearticulation of the quotidian kitchenware into powerful messages of distrust, assertiveness, collectivity. These forms also carved out yet another terrain for a gendered and classed form of political agency in a violent, state-orchestrated security state environment, instilling fear in the powers-that-be and their agents in the streets

Noise against the nocturnal body of democracy

The political theorist Achille Mbembe connects the nocturnal to various capacities and dimensions of the postcolony in many of his writings (Mbembe 2003). Crucially, he draws our attention to what he calls “the nocturnal body” of democracy. This is a form of organ constituted by the (often hidden) violent parts of democracy and statecraft, exemplified by the plantation and the penal colony.

The image of the nocturnal body aptly captures the shape of the postcolonial state of Mozambique and its long-standing impulse to deploy violence against its citizens—both at day and night (see Machava 2025). However, what is spectacular about the protests in Maputo in 2024 and 2025 and the many incarnations of citizen-led uprisings before that (Bertelsen 2014; de Brito 2017), is that the body of the populace unites through rhythms the source of which is invisible yet tangibly, corporally, and sensorially experienced.

The paradoxical combination of tangible and elusive in the nocturnal acts of panelaço showcase protests that are multivocal, yet highly gendered through transforming quotidian objects into vessels for resounding, collective rhythms of resistance and protests. Crucial here is also the enshrouding in darkness of protestors, effectively obscuring the waxing and waning numbers of those who beat the pans—although the many deformed pots and pans are there for everyone to see during daylight. It also underscores the possibilities inherent in the pliability of the political that is attained via collective (but not organized) efforts, indexing also the forms of articulation available in the restrictive political ontology dominating Mozambique (cf. Sumich and Bertelsen 2021).

This in situ generation of a sensorium of security beyond both the state and the marketized commodity form of metal gates, guards, guns, and alarms is significant and is a form of protest with long historical roots that has become globalised—from Argentina to France, from Canada to the Philippines. In Mozambique, its collective format is poised against the massive nocturnal body of the one-party state and its street-level presences. Finally, if noise should be approached as generative, as suggested by Serres (2007 [1980]), then the nocturnal beating pots, the rhythmic banging and its endless recursivity, as reproduced and shared by digital channels, generates an enduring, common sonic space of collective security against the violence of the state’s nocturnal body.

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen is professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen. He has published on political violence, postcolonialism, urban transformation, and socio-cultural dynamics, most of which is based on his long-term research in Mozambique since 1998.

References

Bertelsen, Bjørn Enge. 2014. Effervescence and Ephemerality: Popular Urban Uprisings in Mozambique. Ethnos, 81(1): 25–52.

Bertelsen, Bjørn Enge. 2016. Violent Becomings: State Formation, Sociality, and Power in Mozambique. New York: Berghahn Books.

de Brito, Luís, ed. 2017. Agora eles têm medo de nós! – Uma colectânea de textos sobre as revoltas populares em Moçambique (2008-2012). Maputo: Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Económicos (IESE).

Feijó, João, and Rita Chiúre. 2025a. “Afinal ‘foi só Maputo’? A geografia do protesto pós-eleitoral”. Destaque Rural #324. Maputo: Observatório do Meio Rural (OMR).

Feijó, João, and Rita Chiúre. 2025b. “Quem saiu às ruas? Uma análise dos actores em protesto durante as manifestações pós-eleitorais”. Destaque Rural #331. Maputo: Observatório do Meio Rural (OMR).

Machava, Benedito Luís. 2025. The Morality of Revolution: Reeducation Camps and the Politics of Punishment in Socialist Mozambique, 1968–1990. Ohio University Press.

Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Life, Sovereignty, and Terror in the Fiction of Amos Tutuola.” Research in African Literatures 34(4): 1–26.

Serres, Michel. 2007 [1980]. The parasite. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Shaw, Robert. 2017. “Pushed to the margins of the city: The urban night as a timespace of protest at Nuit Debout, Paris.” Political Geography 59:117-125.

Sumich, Jason and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen. 2021. “Just out of reach: Imminence, meaning and political ontology in Mozambique”. Current Anthropology, 62(3): 287-308.

Taela, Kátia. 2025. “A ‘Revolução das Panelas’: Mulheres, Crise de Cidadania e Protestos em Moçambique Contemporâneo”. Destaque Rural #337. Maputo: Observatório do Meio Rural

Cite as: Bertelsen, B. E. 2025. “Pots that go bang in the night: Noise and rhythm as enacting popular security amidst political protest in Mozambique” Focaalblog December 24. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/24/bjorn-enge-bertelsen-pots-that-go-bang-in-the-night-noise-and-rhythm-as-enacting-popular-security-amidst-political-protest-in-mozambique/

Blog, Right-wing Populism

Alex de Jong: Geert Wilders’ election victory: The left must concern itself with being a real opposition

Far-right political leader Geert Wilders was convicted of inciting hatred against Moroccans when he called them “scum” at an election rally in 2016. [GETTY]

Last week, Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom Party (PVV) won the largest number of parliamentary seats in the Dutch national elections. The political figure is known internationally for his Islamophobia, and demands for, among other thing, the closing of all mosques in The Netherlands.

Crucial to his victory is the radicalisation of former supporters of the mainstream conservative-liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) of the incumbent prime minister, Mark Rutte. As Dutch news satire website De Speld explained, VVD’s new leader Dilan Yesilgöz had run an excellent campaign…for Wilders.

Rutte had triggered the fall of his own coalition-government by demanding further restrictions on refugee rights that were unacceptable for part of his coalition. The VVD hoped the elections would be dominated by migration, and not other urgent issues such as the country’s housing crisis and the rising cost of living.

During the campaign, Yesilgöz exaggerated the supposed ease with which refugees enter the Netherlands. The main beneficiary of this tactic ended up being the PVV, the political force that for a decade-and-half built its political profile on hostility towards migrants.

The VVD lost 10 seats, leaving them with 24. Of the new PVV voters, one out of four previously voted for VVD.

Like many of his voters, Wilders is a product of the right-wing establishment. In the early nineties he worked for the VVD and in 1998 he represented the party in parliament. He also wrote speeches for the future European Commissioner, Frits Bolkestein, a pioneer in the ‘clash of civilisations’ rhetoric regarding the West and Muslim societies in Dutch politics.

Wilders eventually left the VVD in 2004, partly because they would not categorically oppose Turkey joining the European Union.

Since founding the PVV in 2006, Wilders gathered a loyal base; almost 80% of those who voted for him in the previous national elections, did so again last month. Whilst the PVV largely rallied support as an opposition to Rutte, it is important to highlight that Wilders is not a political newcomer. Voters showed up for a seasoned politician who for years has remained consistent in his main policies. His popularity therefore shows how mainstream Islamophobia has become in The Netherlands.

Indeed, the PVV’s manifesto presented the racist and authoritarian positions that characterise the party. Pledges ranged from the petty revoking of the government’s apologies for the role played by the Dutch state in slavery, to the deportation of criminals with double nationality, to the deployment of the army against ‘street scum’, and the closing of borders for refugees and preventive arrests of ‘jihadist sympathisers’. Particularly drastic was Wilders’ long-standing insistence on ‘no Islamic schools, Qurans and mosques’.

However, it is not only racist and xenophobic politics that has attracted voters to the PVV. Wilders was originally an explicit supporter of neoliberal economic policies but for the past decade, his party increasingly posed as defenders of the welfare state. The PVV programme contained seemingly progressive positions, such as raising the minimum wage, lowering healthcare costs, and returning the retirement age from 67 to 65.

Though such rhetoric is contradicted by the party’s actions.

In his book Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me (2012), Wilders described the role of the PVV as supporting the austerity plans of Rutte’s first cabinet in return for measures to ‘restrict immigration, roll back crime, counter cultural relativism, and insist on the integration of immigrants’. In parliament, the PVV introduced a proposal to make collective bargaining agreements no longer binding, and supported further restrictions to access to social security.

Not to mention, today the PVV seeks to form a government with the VVD – the party that for the last decade headed the government’s implementation of neoliberal measures that they claim to oppose.

Whilst a substantial number of Wilders’ voters are certainly committed to far-right politics, part of his appeal is that he has been able to pose as an opposition force to an establishment that included the left-wing parties like the Labour Party.

In an attempt to present itself as a legitimate party that could govern, Labour entered a coalition headed by Rutte back in 2012 after they had won close to 25% of votes. They remained despite the deeply unpopular harsh austerity measures that were implemented, and even ran a former minister in the government as the candidate on a joint Labour/Greens ticket.

The result was a modest advance mostly through votes coming from the centre and other left-wing parties, but it hardly attracted new voters. In the elections last month Labour/Greens won 25 seats, and became the second largest party, but finished far behind Wilders.

Another error made by parts of the Dutch left is that anti-racism and migrants rights are considered secondary to social-economic issues. However, as the recent election dramatically showed, these are incredibly decisive issues in Dutch politics.

When Wilders’ electoral victory was announced, hastily organised protests took place in some cities. A coalition of progressive groups called a national demonstration in defence of civil liberties, freedom of religion and human rights. Such protests are of course not only important, but urgent because they make visible the opposition to Wilders’ agenda and show solidarity with groups that are threatened, especially Muslims.

After all, the case of Giorgia Meloni’s Italy shows what can happen when the far-right is in power; it may moderate some of its rhetoric, but it will not abandon its authoritarian and nativist project.

But protests alone are not enough. For years, Wilders pushed the mainstream to the right, pulling voters to his side. The Dutch left can learn something from this; instead of pandering the right, it needs to pressure them. As for rebuilding a left that can effectively pressure the centre and win new supporters, this will need to be a long term project.

What is needed now more than ever is a left that sees itself not as a government-in-waiting but as an opposition force.

Originally published in The New Arab. https://www.newarab.com/opinion/geert-wilders-left-needs-be-real-opposition

Alex de Jong is co-director of the International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE) in Amsterdam, Netherlands and editor of the Dutch socialist website Grenzeloos.org.

Cite as: de Jong, Alex 2023 “Geert Wilders’ election victory: The left must concern itself with being a real opposition” Focaalblog 18 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/12/18/alex-de-jong-geert-wilders-election-victory-the-left-must-concern-itself-with-being-a-real-opposition/

Blog

Chris Hann: Thanks, Türkiye

How does Recep Tayyip Erdoğan do it? In Spring 2023, the economy is in a mess, inflation accelerating, and corruption rife. Government aid in the wake of a devastating earthquake in Southeastern Anatolia on 6th February was badly mismanaged. The natural disaster revealed the structural shortcomings of poorly regulated construction and real-estate markets, symptomatic of a political economy given over to short-term profit maximization. In the elections just a few months later, the opposition came together behind an attractive and eloquent candidate, the economist Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Yet in the second round of voting on 28th May the incumbent triumphed by over two million votes.

Image 1: Electoral poster for Erdoğan and his AKP party in central Rize, photo by author

If the polls ahead of the election were close enough to rattle Erdoğan, he betrayed no outward sign of discomfort. His imperturbable authority is one of his principal strengths. Critics highlight his control over swathes of the media and the mechanisms through which his Justice and Development Party (AKP) is able influence the votes of state employees. They point to illiberal policies on gender issues (particularly toward the LGTBQ community), arbitrary incarcerations such as that of philanthropist Osman Kavala, and more generally, the repression of a civil society. In his successful mobilization of Islamic sentiment against a secular “deep state” since the closing years of the last century, Erdoğan is categorized by many as a crude populist. In the centenary year of the republic established by Mustafa Kemal (later known as Atatürk), some critics allege that in his two decades of power Erdoğan has fatally undermined the fundamental principles of the secular state. With his AKP party dominating the newly elected National Assembly, the prospect of a more liberal form of democracy emerging in the next five years is tantamount to zero.  

Yet within a week of victory, before formally embarking on his new five-year term, Erdoğan made a well-publicized visit to the Atatürk Mausoleum in Ankara. He lauded the transformations of the inter-war decades, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The extraordinarily high turnout at the May elections, he declared, had once again demonstrated the vitality of the country’s democracy. This ritual occasion was reported in the official media as a ziyaret, a word that has religious connotations in Islam. Has Turkish nationalism been grafted onto Islam such that the mausoleum of Atatürk is now analogous to a religious shrine?

Islamic Capitalism

Erdoğan made his name as a Mayor of Istanbul, but nowadays he regularly loses the biggest cities. He owes his re-election primarily to constituencies in inner Anatolia – including even voters directly affected by the February quake. By unleashing market forces, Erdoğan has continued policies that date back to the very beginning of electoral politics in the wake of the Second World War. Market capitalism struggled to displace a “Jacobin” (Duzgun 2022) variant of modernity which emerged in the late Ottoman era and in secular form continued to dominate in the Kemalist republic. In the changing international climate of the 1980s, Turgut Özal abandoned protectionism and embarked on neoliberal privatizations of state industries. Özal’s Motherland Party demonstrated that capitalism could thrive in an Islamic ideological frame. There were further hiccups and another military intervention in 1997, the Motherland Party faded along with earlier “religious” parties, but in the new century the AKP has sealed the victory of Islamic capitalism: albeit in a political framework that has become ever more authoritarian in the last decade.

Image 2: “Thanks Türkiye” electoral poster for Erdoğan in Rize, photo by author

What does this mean in practice? It means first of all that the middle classes enjoy greater opportunities outside the public sector and that an entrepreneurial spirit is encouraged in town and countryside alike (For discussion and an anthropological analysis of how small businesses operate in a provincial city, see Deniz 2021). But incentives to invest and consume privately have been accompanied by huge public investments, both in material infrastructure (above all roads) and in social security. Public health provision has improved immeasurably and this contributes significantly to the electoral appeal of the AKP. These welfare accomplishments are seldom acknowledged by the regime’s liberal critics. But critics are right to insist that, far from stepping aside to allow private property and market forces to determine outcomes within an impartial legal framework, the AKP intervenes at every level to enable the proliferation of cronyism and rent-taking (Karadag 2013). Following the bloody attempt by sections of the armed forces and others to depose Erdoğan in 2016 and the transition thereafter from a parliamentary to a presidential system, the patron-client networks of the AKP have become a stranglehold across most of the country – even where a semblance of negotiating “agency” to citizens is allowed (see Evren 2022 for an analysis of how AKP-dominated networks shape the transformation of nature as well as property and power relations locally in a valley of northeast Anatolia).    

Nationalism and Ethnicity

Both presidential candidates played the national card. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu proved savvy in his use of social media, whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment on Youtube in a vain effort to make good his deficit after the first round of elections on May 14th. He had little choice. The party he has led since 2010 is the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which dates back to the era of Atatürk. Traditionally a statist party (“Jacobin” in the political Marxist analysis of Duzgun 2022), the CHP has a much smaller membership than the AKP and cannot generate the donations that might enable it to compete more effectively. In the present conjuncture of Islamic crony capitalism, why would any Turkish businessman be inclined to support the opposition? In the run-up to the elections, the public sphere was awash with posters of President Erdoğan.

Fuller explanations of the outcome of the elections require closer engagement with the decline in ethnic diversity since the emergence of the republic. The Ottomans ruled over an extraordinarily multicultural empire, but nationalist modernization has forged Türkiye (as the country now likes to be known in English) gradually into a more homogenous society. However, some forms of diversity have proved resilient. A common religion and similar experiences of socio-economic transformation have not been enough to endear Kurds to the Kemalist Turkish nation-state. Türkiye’s largest ethnic minority comprises roughly fifteen million members. Although significant internal differentiation persists, generations of conflict have consolidated national consciousness. Kurds outnumber ethnic Turks across most of southeast Anatolia. Many have migrated to the big cities of the west and to Europe in order to improve their economic situation (but not all mobility has been voluntary). Even if they lose their language in the second or third generation, most diaspora Kurds will vote for their own political party whenever they have an opportunity to do so, and seldom for the AKP.

Image 3: Electoral poster for Erdoğan in central Rize, photo by author

The East Black Sea Coast

These variables play out differently in other regions with smaller minorities and quite different economic conditions. In accordance with the Lausanne agreements, the Pontic Greeks of the Black Sea coast were deported in 1923 (an instance of ethnic cleansing avant la lettre). Their material traces have receded steadily ever since. The splendid Hagia Sophia in Trebizond (today’s Trabzon) functioned for centuries as a mosque before being carefully restored by the Kemalists and opened as a museum in 1964. It was converted back into a mosque in 2013.

The family of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan comes from Rize, which is the last major city on Türkiye’s Black Sea coast, roughly half way between Trebizond and the Georgian border. Its population has doubled to over 100,000 in recent decades and it now boasts a university named after President Erdoğan. In this province, he won over 75% of the vote on 28th May. Most of the east Black Sea coast region is historically conservative and pious. Its subsistence-oriented rural economy was radically altered by changed by the expansion of tea as a cash crop from the 1950s (see Bellér-Hann and Hann 2000). The tea industry was an example of top-down Kemalist modernization, but peasant beneficiaries showed little gratitude and did not change their world view. The CHP has never done well here; in some towns and villages, the principal opposition to AKP comes not from CHP but from extreme nationalists.

But the province of Rize is not homogenous. An hour to the east in the direction of the border crossing to Georgia at Sarp, languages related to Georgian and Armenian are still spoken in the villages. The number of speakers is small and declining (probably below 100,000). In the absence of state support, the prospects for the survival of Lazi and Hemşinli cultural distinctiveness are poor. Unlike the case of the Kurds, ethnicity here does not appear to have an impact on party affiliation and voting behaviour.

However, some minority citizens distance themselves from the Turks of Rize through their pride in being progressive in the Kemalist republican sense. They attach high value to a secular education and social mobility, which almost always implies geographical mobility. A few committed individuals hang posters of Atatürk on their balconies to proclaim their abiding loyalty to the revolutionary secular traditions of the Kemalists. In this way, the man who dominated the public sphere in the last century maintains a presence; but in this election period, it is a modest one in comparison with the Erdoğan images.

This progressive element is strong in the town of Fındıklı, with a population of barely 10,000, which is still run by the CHP. Erdoğan posters are less conspicuous here. In the first round, Fındıklı was the only district of Rize province in which the incumbent President failed to receive 50% of the votes cast. Recently, a new recreational zone including a Lazi cultural centre was created between the sea and the motorway that has transformed the ecology of the littoral (see Genç and Şendeniz 2022). In other towns of Rize and Trebizond, such an initiative would likely have been named after Erdoğan. That was out of the question here. There was pressure from above to bestow the name National Park, but it was finally named Atatürk Park.

Image 4: (Left) Poster of Atatürk in rural Çamlıhemşin and (Right) electoral poster for Erdoğan in a country lane in Fındıklı, photos by author

But though it is possible to fight the occasional rearguard action successfully, enlightened Lazi landowners nostalgic for Kemalism are not sufficiently numerous to generate an electoral majority against Erdoğan. The success of the tea industry has promoted mobility: the children of the well-educated migrate to the big cities and cast their votes there. Arduous harvesting labour in their native villages is largely undertaken by immigrants, most of whom come from poorer western regions of the Black Sea coast. Some have settled permanently, giving rise to a significant population replacement and hastening the demise of the Lazi language (even activists concede that it would make little sense to teach Lazuri to primary school children who are not of Lazi ethnicity). These sharecroppers retain their conservative worldview. Kemalism has not been as kind to them as it has been to their landlords and the appeal of Erdoğan is strong – sometimes strong enough for them to display posters on quiet country roads. Both owners and sharecroppers approve of the fact that the AKP has refrained from a full-scale privatization of the state enterprise that has set the standard and dominated this sector since the 1950s.

In the second round, after picking up the votes of a candidate further to the right, even in Fındıklı Erdoğan obtained a majority.

Conclusions

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a gifted politician whose calm autocratic persona goes down well with large sections of the population. He has consolidated his stature as a statesman who stands up for an independent Türkiye on the world stage, whereas his rival Kılıçdaroğlu did little to dispel the view that he would be a puppet of the West, in particular of the USA. Rather like the situation in Hungary in 2022, a fragmented opposition driven to uniting behind a single candidate succeeded only in enhancing the standing and aura of the incumbent.

President Erdoğan is especially popular among citizens with low education and few qualifications. This includes much of the European diaspora as well as post-peasants in Anatolia who continue to the cities but are also prepared to relocate to meet labour needs within the countryside. The evidence from the east Black Sea cost shows that multiple factors interact to shape voting patterns. Uneven development in the Kemalist era has led to new class divisions, while fostering socio-cultural homogenization through new processes of internal migration. The persistence of the state corporation regulating the tea industry symbolizes continuity with statist traditions.

Image 5: “Thanks Istanbul” (some citizens of Istanbul were scornful of post-election posters expressing the President’s thanks to a metropolis that actually gave a majority to his opponent), photo by author

In the centenary year of the republic, Erdoğan is frequently mocked by liberal critics at home and abroad as a throwback to the days of Ottoman Sultans. Comparisons with Mustafa Kemal are perhaps more appropriate. Like his illustrious military forerunner, Erdoğan has transformed his country. The two will blend seamlessly as centenary festivities build up in the second half of this year. Erdoğan’s version of the authoritarian state resonates better with both local religious heritage and global capitalism. He has mastered ways of communicating with the masses that work for this country in this century. Within days of his re-election, the AKP machine was putting up new posters all over the country: in trademark pose, the supreme leader has his right hand on his breast, his lips form a faint smug smile, and the text proclaims “Thanks, Türkiye.”

Chris Hann is Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

References

Bellér-Hann, Ildikó and Chris Hann 2000. Turkish Region. State, Market and Social Identities on the East Black Sea Coast. Oxford: James Currey.

Deniz, Ceren 2021. The Formation of Peripheral Capital. Value Regimes and the Politics of Labour in Anatolia. Berlin: LIT Verlag.

Duzgun, Eren 2022. Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Evren, Erdem 2022. Bulldozer Capitalism. Accumulation, Ruination, and Dispossession in Northeastern Turkey. New York: Berghahn Books.

Genç Fatma and Özlem Şendeniz (eds) 2022. Beyond the Land. Looking at the Black Sea as a Marine Environment. Fındıklı: Gola Yayınları. Bilingual publication (Turkish title is Karadan Öte: Deniz Olarak Karadeniz’e Bakmak); pdf available at https://golader.org/projeDetay/36

Karadag, Roy 2013. “Where Does Turkey’s New Capitalism Come From? Comment on Eren Duzgun” European Journal of Sociology 54 (1): 147-152.

Cite as: Hann, Chris 2023 “Thanks, Türkiye” Focaalblog 16 June. Thanks, Türkiye https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/06/16/chris-hann-thanks-turkiye/

Blog

Ida Susser: Melenchon: the creation of a left political bloc

On June 19, 2022, the united left party, NUPES (New Ecological and Social Popular Union), cobbled together by Jean-Luc Melenchon in less than two months, won enough seats to become the official opposition in the French National Assembly. How should we understand the growth of this left alliance in France which seems to have taken political pundits by surprise?

Since 2015, I have been conducting ethnographic research on progressive social transformation in Paris and, in fact, documenting the emergence of the counter-hegemonic bloc represented in this alliance. I have focused on what has been called “commoning” (Nonini 2007; Stavrides 2015; Susser 2016, 2017, 2018; Dardot and Laval 2019), the process of creating commons, to consider the ways in which this form of popular contestation is transforming political subjects, generating collective ethics, and reconfiguring democracy.

Image 1: Jean-Luc Melenchon delivering a speech at the NUPES convention on 7 May 2022, photo by Hugo Rota

Two aspects of commoning help to illuminate the current elections. The first is the creation of a new political subject and a political vision through a process of sharing and community activities. The second is the process of thresholding or crossing of transitional space that led to alliances among groups who had not previously recognized common interests. I argue that both aspects contributed to the creation of a public oriented in the direction of social justice, inclusivity and a collaborative left leaning political bloc.

To illustrate these processes, I focus on the Gilets Jaunes, a movement which emerged in November 2018.  From the start there was much debate in France and internationally about whether to characterize the Gilets Jaunes as right or left in the context of Brexit, Trump, and most significantly, Marine Le Pen, head of the extreme right party in France (Rogozinski 2019, Balibar 2019 and many others). It is this dilemma that made these protests particularly important from an analytic and practical political perspective.

Historical Conjuncture and Crisis

In 2016, the Socialist government of Francois Hollande, with Emmanuel Macron as economy minister, initiated legislation to change the labor laws. Although policies to reduce public spending and increase the flexibility of employment had been gradually implemented for some time, this major effort by a Socialist government to change the labor laws set off a political crisis.

Because of this crisis, a new era of street protest emerged in Paris. The first of the protests was Nuit Debout, which began on March 31, 2016. This movement echoed the historic squares occupations of Southern Europe in 2011, although it took place five years later.  As previously, in Spain, the call to action was initially to join the unions in support of the traditional labor laws that a socialist government proposed to relax.

The attempt to change the labor laws, and the protests in response, dramatically undermined the legitimacy of the Socialist Party. The political conjuncture of this event with allegations of fraud on the traditional right opened the way for a new political configuration in France. In this vacuum, the newly created party led by Macron, the left party created by Jean-Luc Melenchon in 2012, and the marginal far right, reincarnated by Marine Le Pen, re-oriented the national arena.

Taking advantage of the wide-open field, in May 2017, Macron, without a traditional party but strongly supported by corporate funding, was elected President for the first time. He rapidly began to implement far-reaching changes. In the interests of workforce flexibility, he weakened employment security and later tried to alter the calculation of union pensions as well as increase the age for pension entitlements. Student admissions to public universities were re-organized and health workers and teachers faced layoffs. The threat of worker disciplining in the interests of capital became widely feared. Each change was accompanied by massive social movements and street uprisings.

Over the years of the first Macron presidency, many different groups under different kinds of pressures opposed the new changes. Resistance took the form of both organized strikes and wildcat worker strikes, the occupation of squares, student sit ins and street rebellions. In November 2018, the Gilets Jaunes uprising began. Finally in 2019, a mass movement was organized by unions to oppose the dismantling of the national pension plans. I analyze the Gilets Jaunes within this broader historical arena as well as in contrast or comparison with the protest movements I have been observing in the United States.

The Gilets Jaunes and Commoning

The Gilets Jaunes began as a one issue protest, against the gas tax. The message was spread through Facebook, and other platforms. Still organizing around one issue, the protesters began to meet in real time, at roundabouts, crossroads and along highways in many parts of France. Next, Gilets Jaunes took to the streets of Paris in enormous and unprecedented marches on successive Saturdays for over eighteen months.

As people who lived near one another but had not necessarily met before began to meet regularly, they began to build a shared sense of community. Starting out as a mixture of pensioners, and many poor and disabled people from the provinces, including disengaged socialists and Le Pen supporters, the Gilets Jaunes can be seen as negotiating positions over time. Negotiations took place within the space of the commoning experience during the occupations, the general assemblies, the assemblies of assemblies and the massive Saturday demonstrations.

Image 2: Gilets Jaunes – Acte IX at Place de l’Etoile in Paris on 12 January 2019, photo by Olivier Ortelpa

The community was built in multiple ways: by barbecues and picnics, by bringing children to play in the environment, by building cabins, sometimes making them comfortable for wintry stays. Saturday afternoons were spent grouping close together in the cold to keep warm in wind, rain and snow, and some Saturday evenings around fires and in cabins. Gilets Jaunes wrote personal statements and commentaries on the backs of their vests. They spray painted slogans and arrayed tags, posters, and banners as well as other forms of graffiti (Le Comité de soutien 31 2019) along the routes of the demonstrations. The yellow vests and the songs such as the ever-present “On est la” generated a sense of belonging and became a signal that Gilets Jaunes were present in whatever guise they happened to be. Over time, singing the song simply indicated that people emulated and echoed the Gilets Jaunes in other demonstrations.  Experiences such as this can be seen as the commoning process of the Gilet Jaunes.

Through meeting several times, a week, sharing narratives, singing Gilets Jaunes songs and, dressing in the familiar yellow vests, group members built a, possibly fragile, sense of solidarity in ways that crisscrossed over divisions of family, income, color, and age, and maintained a strong belief that the disabled were part of the community. Negotiations involved a recognition that poverty and distress need not be shameful but were a product of changing circumstances and uncaring or destructive government policies. As a result, in difficult, often physically uncomfortable, conditions, principles of cooperation were established along with a belief in horizontalism and an aversion to political leaders.

Où sont les neiges d’antan? (Where are the snows of yesteryear?)

Analysts have discussed the solidarity of factory floors or assembly lines and even nostalgia with respect to that solidarity (Muehlenbach 2017). Following Lefebvre there has also been a recognition of the solidarity of the streets and public spaces (Lefebvre 1971, Harvey 2012, Susser and Tonnelat 2013). The experience of the Gilets Jaunes points to the creation of a critical public at the roundabouts which generated or echoed the affect of the lost village community.

Such nostalgia has historically generated conservatism as well as revolutionary ideas (Susser 2008, Williams 1983). The question became, in what ways would this community be invested with emotions? It could generate an exclusive nationalism (as today in Hungary, Romania, or Poland) or a wider sharing sense of the needs of the poor and disabled.

In an ever-evolving process, people came to the roundabouts and talked among one another of their economic challenges and domestic hardship. They managed to escape the individual humiliations of poverty and household desperation, of their unrelenting work for not enough pay, their exhaustion and lack of belief in their own or their children’s future. Instead, they talked collectively about the degradation of everyday life – the loss of a village center, a post office, a bakery, and a public square; the loss of local schools; the need to drive long distances for employment and childcare; and the endless drudgery of work which did not allow sufficient time or provide the means to help their children, their elderly or disabled neighbors and relatives or meet their friends (Susser 2020). Their nostalgia recalled the loss of a social existence centered around local services and a secure welfare state and became the basis of their rage against Macron’s neoliberal policies.

Thresholding

The second aspect of commoning which contributed to a progressive or left positioning on the spectrum was what has been called thresholding (Stavrides 2015). Analysts (Stavrides 2015) have talked of “thresholds” to distinguish commoning from more right wing or nationalist movements claiming territory. The idea was that open doors or thresholds connected different groups which allowed for inclusivity while at the same time recognizing ethnic and other identities upon which the different groups were based. If commoning creates groups which are built on experiences of sharing in new ways, thresholds are a basis for sharing across groups. Thresholding be understood in much the same way as rites of passage which Arnold Van Gennep (1960) saw as taking place in three stages, separation, transition, and incorporation (see also Turner 1958).

We might consider moments of liminality, such as occupations, freezing afternoons at roundabouts or possibly the common experience of violence in the streets as the moments of separation and transition. These represent challenging and bonding processes taking place in liminal or temporarily undefined space. In sharing such trying circumstances, people cross thresholds of trust and build bridges across unusual groups, in processes of incorporation.  Thus, what might be understood as prefigurative politics which emerged in the practice of street protests included both commoning and the recognition of many autonomous groups working together: In other words, inclusivity, and thresholds to new populations.

Environment, convergence, and thresholding

Thresholding among the Gilets Jaunes occurred with respect to the environmental movement. Emmanuel Macron had announced the gas tax as an effort to curb the use of this gas for environmental reasons. Consequently, the Gilets Jaunes protest against the gas tax was interpreted by the government and the media as a protest against ecology. Over the next two years, much time and effort were put into convergence. Environmentalists who were also Gilets Jaunes and others who organized joint marches, teach ins and conferences worked to counteract stereotypes and to build thresholds between the two movements.

In February 2019, the environmental movement staged a demonstration on a Saturday afternoon in Paris which the Gilets Jaunes joined. They started together. However, after the first few blocks the Gilets Jaunes parted ways from the permitted route of the ecological demonstration and made their way on a “wild” protest (undeclared) towards the Champs Élysées. Later all the groups met again listening to passionate speeches at La Place de la République. Some youthful Gilets Jaunes were sitting in the square wearing flowers in their hair reminiscent of green protests over many decades. After about 6pm, as dusk settled, violence suddenly erupted, traffic was stopped, and the square was closed off by police. From the point of view of the Gilets Jaunes, the violence was in response to police arrests in the square.

In spite, or possibly because, of the evening clashes, this demonstration clearly opened portals between the Gilets Jaunes and the environmentalists. From early 2019, “The end of the month and the end of the world” became a characteristic slogan of the Gilets Jaunes. Climate activists continued their efforts towards convergence. The Gilets Jaunes never became a climate movement, but the polarization claimed by the government was not supported by later events. Rites of passage in shared marches and other experiences had opened thresholds for collaboration.

Police brutality and thresholds of race

As I described in a previous post in FocaalBlog (Susser 2020), the #BlackLivesMatter protests in the US were followed by massive demonstrations against police brutality in France. Although police brutality was a long-time theme of the Gilets Jaunes, this time the Paris protests, while including the Gilets Jaunes, focused specifically on the brutality against youth and people of color. This recognition of common problems represented newly possible thresholding between the Gilets Jaunes and people of color from the banlieues.

Here, thresholds were opened between so-called but no longer stable working classes, the imagined middle classes also at risk of instability, and the super-exploited subjects divided by racism, sexism, colonialism, citizenship, and other forms of historical subordinations.

Joint marches between Gilets Jaunes and people of color most subject to police brutality were not an ongoing phenomenon but again this demonstrated the opening of a portal for common understandings.

Image 3: “Who protects us from the police?” Gilets Jaunes protest in Tours on 12 January 2019, photo by Guillame70

Unions and strikes: thresholding on the left

Many Gilets Jaunes were suspicious of unions and many unions refused to officially march with Gilets Jaunes. However, despite this contentious relationship, there were collaborative efforts on May Day marches and elsewhere. Gilets Jaunes picketed many early mornings with bus drivers when they were out on strike. After the strike, the bus drivers organized a barbecue in front of a bus headquarters for Gilets Jaunes who had come out on those cold winter mornings: one of many thresholding events among strikers and Gilets Jaunes.

The silence of others: a more controversial example of thresholding

While there was openness among the Gilets Jaunes about not having enough to live on and many domestic challenges, Gilets Jaunes avoided talking about the politics of left and right. Their reticence over political persuasions was not surprising in the polarized political situation of France. In 2017, Macron had successfully used the fear of fascism and the history of the Vichy government to mobilize voters in opposition to Marine Le Pen in the second-round elections.

In 2018, as hundreds of thousands of Gilets Jaunes poured into Paris from the provinces, both Le Pen, on the extreme right, and Jean-Luc Melenchon, on the left, pledged support. Reporters and participants claimed that in ACTE 3, Le Pen nationalists led the assault on the Arc de Triomphe. The international leftist Black Bloc may have led the attack on the elite restaurant Le Fouquet a few months later. The participation of many on the left in the protests, and the roundabouts over time led to a movement that called for a diverse democratic voice and the extreme right became marginalized.

While the Gilets Jaunes expressed their rage in breaking windows and other property and participated in attacks on the Arc de Triomphe and Le Fouquet, they did not accept political leadership from either the far right or the left. Silence with respect to political affiliation and the rejection of an official leadership remained a determined response.

Although disagreeing in fundamental ways, Gilets Jaunes were more or less uniform in their hatred of Macron. They believed that he was “stealing the state” with his privatization policies and cutbacks in funding for services and public employment.  They blamed the government for the destruction of a middle-class lifestyle either for themselves or for their children.

Collaboration for a political bloc was not based on a romantic image of common identity. Rather it was built on a restrained acceptance of political difference in a common rage about the loss of accustomed living conditions. This contrasts sharply with the US where polarization between left and right has become more extreme.

Trump, class, and thresholds in the United States

Although the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders certainly raised the possibility (Susser 2018), no political bloc has yet emerged to work across the vicious polarization in the United States. Trump demonstrators also come from the shrinking middle class and displaced affluent working class partially represented in the Gilets Jaunes. However, they have moved to the right and responded to the Trumpian rhetoric of anti-immigrants, whispered racism, antisemitism and now even the adoption of theories of the Great Replacement. What can explain these different reactions to some similar circumstances?

Analysts have been concerned that Gilets Jaunes, like Trump supporters, were opening an avenue for the antisemitism, racism, and anti-immigrant rhetoric expressed by the growing far right. Indeed, in recognition of the popularity of Le Pen, Macron adopted some rightwing exclusive rhetoric. A popular surge to the right was a frightening possibility. However, the Gilets Jaunes did not evolve into a movement fundamentally based on hatred of the other. Instead, as a movement they focused their desperation and rage against Macron’s shredding of the welfare state and reduction in investment in areas outside gentrified Paris (Hazard 2020). They demanded a more receptive democracy and not an authoritarian state.

Conclusions

As political pundits have finally noticed, a new political bloc or a working class with consciousness or agency is emerging. Commoning and the generation of shared values as well as thresholding across autonomous groups were particularly significant in the long-term building of this oppositional left bloc. An important part of this thresholding was the ability to by-pass the polarization of the extreme right and the extreme left. This unusual collaboration, rarely the product of any explicit negotiations, allowed the extraordinary and inspirational mass movement of the Gilets Jaunes to avoid the exclusive and racist nationalism evident in the US.

In the presidential elections of 2022, Le Pen, as in 2017, made it through to the second round. However, Melenchon came in a close third. Macron, lacking the broad support evident in 2017, relied on the anti-fascism of the left to pull him through the second round. The power of the left to support Macron against Le Pen was finally negotiated into NUPES, a united left front for the deputy elections for the National Assembly in June 2022. 

In the June elections, NUPES won enough seats to become an official opposition and deny Macron his majority in the National Assembly. Some of Macron’s nominated ministers did not even make it into the Assembly. Macron was no longer able to pass the much-hated changes in pensions or his other policies. Marine Le Pen also won more seats than previously.   Nevertheless, the success of NUPES clearly represents an unheard-of situation in the fifth French Republic where the President is generally rubber stamped by a weak National Assembly. This new powerful counter-hegemonic political bloc should come as no surprise. It has been formed over five years of extraordinary protest including the collaborative politics of commoning, thresholding and silence in the Gilets Jaunes collective efforts. The forthcoming regime will have to take these progressive voices into account.

Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her most recent book is The Tumultuous Politics of Scale, co-edited with Don Nonini.

References

Balibar, Etienne. 2019. Le sens du face-à-face. In Joseph Confavreux (ed.). Le Fond de l’Air Est Jaune. Editions Seuil

Dardot, Pierre and Christian Laval. 2019. Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Hazard, Benoit. 2020. Lorsque les ‘sans-parts’ se rallient au ‘pouvoir vivre’. Ethnographie des associations des gilets jaunes sur les ronds-points de l’Oise. Condition Humaine/ Condition Politique 1 https://revues.mshparisnord.fr/chcp/index.php?id=237#text

Lefebvre, Henri 2003. The Urban Revolution. University of Minnesota Press.

Muehlebach, Andrea. 2017. The Body of Solidarity. Heritage, Memory, and Materiality in Post-Industrial Italy. Comparative Studies of Society and History 59(1), 96-126.

Comité de soutien 31. 2019. La rue etait noire de jaunes – 500 slogans, tags, affiches, pancartes, dessins, photos, banderoles….  Éditions du croquant.

Nonini, Donald M. (ed.) 2007. The Global Idea of ‘The Commons’. Berghahn

Books.

Rogozinski, Jacob. 2019. Démocratie Sauvage. Lignes 59, 23-36.

Stavrides, Stavros. 2015. Common Space as Threshold Space: Urban Commoning in Struggles to Re-Appropriate Public Space. Footprint 9(1), 9–19.

Susser, Ida. 2016. Considering the urban commons: Anthropological approaches to social movements. Dialectical Anthropology 40(3), 183–198.

Susser, Ida. 2017. Commoning in New York City, Barcelona, and Paris: Notes and Observations from the Field. Focaal 79, 6-22.

Susser, Ida. 2018 Re-envisioning Social Movements in the Global City: from Fordism to the neoliberal era. In Don Kalb and Mao Mollona (eds.). Worldwide Urban Mobilizations. Class struggles and Urban Commoning. Berghahn Books.

Susser, Ida. 2020. Covid, police brutality and race: are ongoing French mobilizations breaking through the class boundaries? FocaalBlog, December 3, https://www.focaalblog.com/2020/12/03/ida-susser-covid-police-brutality-and-race-are-ongoing-french-mobilizations-breaking-through-the-class-boundaries/

Susser, Ida. 2021. “They are Stealing the State”. Commoning and the Gilets Jaunes in France. In Moritz Ege and Johannes Moser (eds.). Urban Ethics. Conflicts Over the Good and Proper Life in Cities. Routledge.

Susser Ida, and Stéphane Tonnelat. 2013. Transformative cities: The three urbans

commons. Focaal 66,105-121.

Turner, Victor. 1958. Schism and Continuity. Manchester University Press.

Van Gennep, Arnold. 1960. The Rites of Passage.University of Chicago Press.

Williams, Raymond. 1983. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. Columbia University

Press.

Cite as: Susser, Ida. 2022. “Melenchon: the creation of a left political bloc.” Focaalblog, 21 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/21/ida-susser-melenchon-the-creation-of-a-left-political-bloc/

Blog

Markus Virgil Hoehne: Perpetuating conflict through democratization: Presidential elections in Somalia

Presidential elections will happen in Somalia on Sunday, 15 May 2022. This will most likely not bring peace and stability to the war-torn Somali society. To the contrary, the elections and their aftermath will, in all probability, perpetuate and even worsen to political crisis in the country. On the one hand, the electoral process has already dragged on for almost two years, producing violent clashes between government and opposition forces and instigating vote buying and other forms of political corruption (Gaas and Hansen 2022).  On the other hand, and this might even be worse, the country’s “democratization process” is out of tune with important political realities in Somalia, namely with the fact that the government only holds nominal power in parts of Somalia.

Militant Islamists control much of southern Somalia; the northwest of the country has declared its independence 30 years ago and exists since as the secessionist Republic of Somaliland. Other areas in central and northeastern Somalia are to some degree autonomous, partly controlled by clan militias. This means that the government controls only around 20 percent of Somalia’s territory. Foreign troops have to assist the government to hold its areas. Southern Somalia, where most of the resources and the economy of Somalia are concentrated, is still in a phase of active war (EASO 2021).

It can be assumed that the government in Mogadishu would, without external support, collapse even quicker than the Afghan government did in the wake of the US-withdrawal in mid-2021. Moreover, in the areas controlled by the government and its external allies, hardly any services are delivered to the ordinary population. The hallmark of the nominal Somali governments since many years is internal wrangling and massive embezzlement of the state’s budget including the income from foreign aid. The question is: what does the presidential election bring at all? My answer is: it helps to keep up a façade, which serves external actors, including the USA, Ethiopia, the EU and many INGOs and UN organizations, in that it allows the conduct of “business” (development business, counter-terrorism business, political stabilization business, humanitarian business) which enriches a few international and local elites, while it keeps the bulk of Somalis in extreme poverty and caught up in protracted conflict.

A story of many missed deadlines

Somalia should have had a new parliament and a new president long ago. The term of office of the current president Mohamed Ali Farmajo ended in February 2021. The UN and western donors including the USA and the EU have been pushing for free elections already for years (since around 2018). At the same time, the “one person one vote” formula introduced into Somalia’s politics was and remains unrealistic. While external actors, mainly UN officials, tried to push this voting-scheme through, President Farmajo actively undermined it by not taking any steps to prepare elections. This led to conflicts between the president and the prime minister, with the latter trying to steer the preparations of the elections. Eventually, as ACLED (2021) outlined, also in the face of ongoing war in southern Somalia, the major political actors agreed in mid-2020 to holding indirect elections in Somalia – in a similar way as the last elections in 2017.

This indirect election process is complicated: At the local level, family elders nominate a total of almost 30,000 electoral women and men. These then determine the 275 members of the lower house of parliament, the seats of which are not distributed according to party-membership, but according to belonging to patrilineal descent groups (and according to personal networks and who can pay which bribes). The 54 members of the upper house are nominated by electoral committees of the Somali federal member states. Together, the two houses then elect the president (Elmi 2021). President Mohamed A. Farmajo prefers indirect elections because they are strongly controlled by the presidents of the federal member states, some of whom are his supporters. Yet, he even did not push very energetically for the completion of this process. When his term ended on 8th February 2021, no members of parliament had been elected so that Farmajo was able to extend his mandate by decree for two years. This was, I would argue, the easiest way for him to stay in power.

However, it led to violent reactions. Temporarily, armed opposition supporters occupied parts of Mogadishu. The crisis finally calmed down in mid-2021 when Somali elites and external supporters agreed on indirect elections to be concluded by the end of February 2022. Although this deadline was missed, by the end of April 2022 all members of both houses had finally been elected and nominated. During the indirect election process, massive influence (buying of votes and exercising political pressure, even intimidating members of the electoral committees, elders or candidates) was exercised. The complete parliament can now vote for one of the more than thirty nominated presidential candidates. Again, much money is clandestinely changing hands these days in Mogadishu; and gun-prices are going up on the capital’s markets, according to The New Humanitarian.

Elections in a long-term battlefield

Violence in Somalia escalated from the end of the 1970s. In the context of the Cold War, first the Soviet Union and then the US and their respective allies (such as German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany) supplied arms to the dictatorship under Siyad Barre (1969-91) – even when it was evident that human rights violations would be committed with them. In 1991, rebels overthrew the dictatorial regime, but they were unable to agree on a new government. The state arsenals were broken open, and the population armed itself. Chaos and violence led to a famine that claimed hundreds of thousands of victims by the end of 1992. As a result, the USA and the UN intervened with up to 30,000 blue helmets to guarantee the supply of the civilian population with humanitarian aid and to restore political order. It was the first time in the history of the UN that blue helmets were deployed in a country without the government’s consent. The operation failed: the famine was alleviated admittedly, but the armed intervention intensified the fighting. The USA and the UN cooperated with some warlords and attempted to capture others, such as Mohamed Farah Aideed.
This led to the solidarity of many Somalis with Aideed, who, as a former army officer, was involved in the overthrow of dictator Barre. When American special forces tried to seize him in October 1993, fighting broke out in Mogadishu. Hundreds Somalis and 18 American soldiers were killed in the house-to-house fighting (depicted, albeit with an extreme US-centric [and racist] bias, in Ridley Scott’s movie Black Hawk Down). Subsequently, all intervention troops withdrew from Somalia by May 1995. The weapons and the warlords remained. The latter made “dirty” deals with foreign companies, for instance for dumping toxic waste off the Somali coast (VOA 2009).

Only after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Muslim nation of Somalia returned to the attention of Western governments. The USA and its allies – in the Horn of Africa especially Ethiopia – cooperated with several warlords to capture and eliminate Islamist terrorist suspects in southern Somalia. At the same time, the international community initiated a peace conference for Somalia in Kenya, at which, in mid-2004, former militia leader Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed was elected president by a Somali interim parliament. However, he and his government could not enter the capital because the local population rejected him. Most Somalis were now aligned with the lslamic Courts, which promised an alternative political and economic order for Somalia, based on Sharia law. These lslamists were the only ones to ensure peace in the urban neighborhoods under their control and offered effective jurisdiction (Ibrahim 2018).

Image 1: Elections in Somalia through the lens of the United Nations (their caption: “Members of the Somali Federal parliament queue to cast their ballots for round two during the presidential election held at the Mogadishu Airport hangar on February 8, 2017. UN Photo/ Ilyas Ahmed”)


From early 2006, tensions erupted into fighting between the Islamists on one side and the government and allied warlords on the other. The militias that fought for the Islamic Courts finally gained the upper hand. They soon controlled large parts of southern Somalia. The Ethiopian army intervened in December and dispersed all but a small core of Islamist forces. This was the nucleus from which Al-Shabaab (The Youth) emerged in 2007. In the following years, Al-Shabaab evolved into the strongest Somali force, which temporarily (between 2009 and 2011) ruled southern Somalia including Mogadishu and other urban centers and was then from 2011 driven out by a massive campaign of more than 10,000 African Union-troops deployed to Somalia. As of 2022, some 22,000 AU forces are stationed in southern Somalia. Together with around 10,000 Somali National Army soldiers and a smaller number of USA special forces (waging drone war) they have not managed to defeat Al Shabaab, which not only fights a guerilla war against the Somali government and its allies but actually also governs substantial rural areas, delivering justice and security at the local level and building-up some basic legitimacy in this way, despite the fact that the violence of the extremists, exercised through harsh punishments of (alleged) criminals or enemies and through regular terror attacks with many civilian casualties mainly in Mogadishu appalls many Somalis (Hoehne and Gaas 2022; Bakonyi 2022).

No one is legitimate

While a new war – one characterized as “counter-terrorism war” – escalated in Somalia and has cost tens of thousands of lives between 2007 and today, international actors have been trying to establish a government in Mogadishu, based on a new federal constitution (which was partly drafted by German legal specialists working for the Max Planck Foundation, which contrary to the name is not a basic research institute but a consultancy firm). Based on that constitution, indirect elections were held for the first time in 2012, and Hassan Sheikh Mahamoud became president. He sought to implement the federal constitution and establish federal states. The idea was to achieve some division of power in the state and between (patrilinear descent) groups through federalization. Traditionally, in Somali society, affiliation is regulated less by territory than by descent in the paternal line. Mahamoud’s government succeeded in establishing some federal states, at least nominally. Nonetheless, Al-Shabaab still controlled the hinterland of southern Somalia.

Also Mahamoud’s government was extremely corrupt. Approximately 70 percent of the funds given from outside disappeared into the private pockets of government actors, as documented by the World Bank, among other sources. The term of office of the following president, Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo, was accompanied by massive accusations of corruption as well. Farmajo negated the federal model of government and worked toward the centralization of power.

Given the limited function and low legitimacy of Farmajo’s government and the state in Somalia as a whole, the question arises why elections are nevertheless organized at great expense. It is common knowledge how corrupt the political actors are and that they have little support among the population. A leading UN representative said in a briefing end of 2021, at which the author participated, that “no matter how the election process turns out, it will not contribute to any improvement”. A German NGO worker told an expert panel in January 2022 (again, the author was present at this meeting) that his biggest concern was how the losing side would react after the corrupt election. Some fear a new escalation of violence.

One explanation is that Somali elites and external aid workers benefit from elections. Somali elites make sure that they get well paid for their participation in the farce that the elections are. In order to continue to carry out projects in the crisis-ridden country, Western aid organizations need administrative partners to sign off on projects – which is obviously an end in itself, because the aid often does not benefit the ordinary population, but the external actors and their Somali elite partners. Moreover, the elections formally support the narrative of Western governments that things are “getting better” in Somalia. In the end, even Al-Shabaab benefits from the election disaster. Although the militant extremists do not have a broad basis of legitimacy either, they only need to do things a little better than the government, and they can gain some support from the conflict-weary population.

Instead of holding elections, Somali political actors should seek reconciliation and strive for political dialogue with all relevant powers in Somalia, including Al Shabaab. Yet, in Somalia, this seems to be made impossible by an (informal) doctrine of military counter-terrorism mixed with a focus on formal democratization and institution building, no matter how hollow the construct of the thus erected “government” is.  

Markus Virgil Hoehne is a social anthropologist at the University of Leipzig researching on conflict, identity, state-building, and dealing with the violent past in Somalia and Peru. He has been working on Somali issues since 2001. He is the author of Between Somaliland and Puntland: Marginalization, Militarization and Conflicting Political Visions (Nairobi: Rift Valley Institute) and the co-editor of Dynamics of Identification and Conflict: Anthropological encounters (New York: Berghahn).

Bibliography:

ACLED 2021: A Turbulent Run-up to Elections in Somalia. https://acleddata.com/2021/04/07/a-turbulent-run-up-to-elections-in-somalia/

Bakonyi, Jutta 2022: War’s Everyday: Normalizing Violence and Legitimizing Power. Partecipazione&Conflitto Vol. 15, No. 1: 121-138

EASO 2021: Country of Origin Information Report: Somalia Security situation. https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/2021_09_EASO_COI_Report_Somalia_Security_situation.pdf

Elmi, Afyare 2021: The Politics of the Electoral System in Somalia: An Assessment. Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies: Vol. 21: 99-113, available at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/bildhaan/vol21/iss1/10

Gaas, Mohamed Husein and Stig Jarle Hansen 2022: A Near End to Somalia’s Election Conundrum? RAAD Policy Brief 1:2022.

Hoehne, Markus Virgil and Mohammed Hussein Gaas 2022: Political Islam in Somalia: From underground movements to the rise and continued resilience of Al Shabaab, in J.-N. Bach and Aleksi Ylönen (eds.): Routledge Handbook of the Horn of Africa. London: Routledge, pp. 411-427.

Ibrahim,Ahmed Sheikh 2018: The Shari’a Courts of Mogadishu: Beyond “African Islam” and

“Islamic Law”.  Dissertation, the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology, City University of New York.

Somalia Corruption Report July 2020, available at: https://www.ganintegrity.com/portal/country-profiles/somalia/

The New Humanitarian 12 May 2022: Gun prices soar ahead of Somalia’s presidential elections https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2022/05/12/gun-prices-soar-ahead-of-somalias-presidential-elections

VOA 30.10.2009: Waste Dumping off Somali Coast May Have Links to Mafia, Somali Warlords, available at: https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2005-03-15-voa34/306247.html

Cite as: Hoehne, Markus Virgil. 2022. “Perpetuating conflict through democratization: Presidential elections in Somalia.“ FocaalBlog, 13 May. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/05/13/markus-virgil-hoehne-perpetuating-conflict-through-democratization-presidential-elections-in-somalia/

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Bruce Kapferer and Roland Kapferer: The Trump Saga and America’s Uncivil War: New Totalitarian Authoritarian Possibilities

Times are a Changing. The Trump phenomenon as a whole, his election, his presidency, the events of the Capitol, Joe Biden’s accession and Donald Trump’s impeachment are moments of radical process. They form a dynamic in and of themselves. They express the chaos and transition of the moment but they are also and at the same time forces in the transformation and transmutations of capitalism and world history, perhaps, with the complications of the COVID19 pandemic, virtually an axial moment, a switch or turning-point of crisis, as Don Kalb has argued on FocaalBlog early in the pandemic (Kalb 2020).

This involves a re-consideration of what is fast becoming the master narrative concerning Trump, with ideological implications of its own. Trump is presented as a spectre of a fascist past rather than a foretaste, a mediation into, the potential of an authoritarian totalitarian future involving major transmutations in capitalism. What follows concerning the Trump phenomenon is written with all this very much in mind. 

Our guess (a risky gamble in these times when almost anything seems possible) is that Trump will fade. There are doubtless many other political figures similar or worse who could take his place. With the going of Trump so may his “movement”. What crystallized around him was more an assemblage, a loose-knit heterogeneous, motely collection of diverse persons and groups ranging from the extreme far right to the more moderate, whose organizational cohesion may be more illusory than real. Not yet a political ‘Party Trump’ it is as likely to melt into air and go the way of most populist movements as it might congeal into a longer-lasting force of opposition headed by Trump.

This is not to gainsay the shock of the storming of the Capitol on the otherwise ritualistic day of the confirmation of Biden’s victory that concludes the liminal transitional period conventional in the US-American democratic cycle. Such a liminal space (Turner, 1969) is a relative retreat and suspension of the state political order as the presidency is renewed or changed. This is often a festive time given to all kinds of political excess when the people vent their potency in the selection of those who are to rule them. Trump encouraged and intensified the potential chaos of liminality at its peak when, ideally, it should subside and political order be fully restored. He aimed to disrupt this critical moment and to maintain his uncertain presence as the Lord of Misrule, if not necessarily to effect a coup. Named as “God’s chaos candidate” by some evangelicals who supported him, Trump promoted, even if unwittingly, a moment of extreme chaos that was all the more intense for the liminal moment of its occurrence when the participants themselves blew out of control.

Night of the World, Pandemonium at the Capitol

In the nightmare of the event, newscasts presented visions of a fascist future filled with Fascist and Nazi images and other commonly associated symbols. There was a strong sense of dialectical collapse along the lines of Hegel’s “Night of the World” of demonic appearances when forces in opposition dissipate against each other and lose their meaning. The representatives of the nation cowered under their desks fitting gas masks while those who would challenge them in festive mood and drunk with brief power put their feet up on desks aping their masters and carried off the mementos and spoils of their invasion. Exuberant chants of “this is our house” echoed down the corridors of power.

Shades of the past paraded in the present, foremost among them that of the enduring trauma of the rise of Nazi Germany.  What Sinclair Lewis had warned in It Can’t Happen Here – a Hitler-esque rise to power at the centre of the democratic world – anticipated by all sides from the early days of Trump’s apotheosis, seemed to be actually materializing. This accounts for the excitement on the steps of the Capitol – “this is America 2021 y’all!!” Arlie Hochschild captured the millenarian Nuremberg feel of his campaign rallies when researching Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (Hochschild 2016), her excellent ethnography of the white far right and their sympathisers in Louisiana, America’s poorest state and a Donald Trump heartland. Hochschild recounts at a lecture to the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin a scene, reminiscent of the opening frames of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will, when Trump’s plane, “Trump Force One”, appears through the clouds and, as if from heaven it descends “down, down, down” to the waiting crowd; electrified in expectation of the saviour’s endlessly repeated sermon of redemption of the deep resentment that they felt for having been pushed aside from the promise of the American Dream. 

But here is the point: The immediate reaction to the storming of the Capitol gave further confirmation to the real and present danger of Trump’s fascist threat fuelled in the rumblings of class war which Trump has inflamed and exploited. It is a liberal fear, mainly of the Democrats but including some Republicans, who are the chief targets of Trump’s attacks. His demonisation of elite liberal value (marked by accusations of moral perversities aimed at unmasking the claims to virtue) is at one with his condemnation of the liberalism of Federal political and social economic policies which he presents as contributing to the abjection of mainly white US-American working class and poor; to be seen in the rapidly increasing power of global corporations, policies of economic globalization, the privileging of minorities, refugees, recent immigrants etc.

The 2012 Capitol Christmas Tree arrives in Washington, D.C. tied to a large trailer. The truck cab has a sign that reads "From one national treasure to another."
Image 1: When surprises were minimal and manifest destiny kept on giving. The Capitol Christmas Tree arrives in Washington, D.C., Nov. 26, 2012 (Foto: US Forest Service/Keith Riggs, accessed 8 Feb 2021)

It might be remembered at this point that the violence of the Capitol invasion–the marked involvement of military veterans, the carrying of weapons, baseball bats, the reports of pipe bombs–that shocked so many, reflects the fact that all modern states are founded on violence. This is particularly the case in the US where the US Constitution’s Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms in defence of democratic rights. In an important sense the violence of those invading the Capitol refracts back at the middle class and especially the ruling elite the very violence that underpins the structure of their rule. If liberal virtue was shocked by the events on January 6 it was also confronted with the violent paradox deep in its democratic heart (see Palmer 2021). Thus, this paradox slips into paroxysm at this critical moment in American political history.

The transitional figure of Trump feeds on the prejudices of his intended constituencies and exploits an already ill-formed class awareness building on ready commitments and vulnerabilities – the well-rehearsed fascist and populist technique – creating indeed a false consciousness (there is no other way to say it) that is not only destructive but in the hands of the likes of Trump integral to intensifying the feelings of impotence and the miseries that give Trump his relative popularity. Slavoj Zizek says as much in what he describes as “Trump’s GREATEST TREASON”.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, ‘The Governator,’ was quick to counter the white supremacist, macho, Proud Boy, Oath Keeper and Three Percenter elements highly visible in media newscasts with a Conan the Barbarian performance. This was his take on the dominant brand of Make America Great Again. (Really, all those along the political spectrum participate in MAGA – Democrat Party badges and hats from the recent election read “Dump Trump Make America Great Again”). He focussed on his own immigration away from his native Austria and its Nazi associations to the liberated American world of his success. For Schwarzenegger, the Capitol invasion and its vandalism equated to Kristallnacht. Noam Chomsky likens the storming with Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 observing that it effected a greater penetration to the heart of power than did Hitler’s failed attempt. But Chomsky, with characteristic acuity, adds that the fascist danger lies in the anti-democratic class forces (including electoral and political manipulations on all sides) that provide the fertile ground for fascism; forces that have acutely and early been pinpointed by anthropologists (Holmes 2000, 2020; Kalb and Halmai 2011; Kalb, forthcoming).

But the point must be taken further. New class formations are in the making right now and they are being driven in the explosive nature of technological revolution (see Smith 2020). This is something Marx himself was very much aware of and why he wrote more than one hundred pages on the machine and the human in Capital. This is also the concern of Marcuse in One Dimensional Man (2002) and the continued focus of today’s accelerationists such as the Nick Srnicek (2017) on platform capitalism.

Creative Destruction, the Transmutation in Capital and Corporate State Formation

The rise and fall of Trump (not discounting the possibility that Humpty Dumpty might come together again, which is the fear of the master narrative) may be understood as expressing a transition between two moments of capitalism during which one formation morphs into another. Trump is the embodiment, instrument, and anguish of this transition, a tragic figure in a theatre of the absurd. Grand Guignol almost, but in Gothic American Horror Story style. The accession of Biden is the apotheosis of the new in the hopes of most; he is a vehicle for healing the divisions in the U.S. that Trump brought to a head and are still very much present. But Biden’s rise has ominous oppressive indications of its own.

The Trump events have all the hallmarks of the crisis and rupture of transformation or, better, transmutation. The millenarian spirit that Hochschild captures in her account is one born in the capitalist ideology of the American Dream; fortified in the religious fundamentalism of Trump’s many followers that revitalizes their hopes in that American Dream in the face of abject failure. The rallies and the impassioned actions of those invading the Capitol are filled with revitalizing energy.

Such millenarian explosions, distinct in their own historical contexts, occur at many other points in global history. It was apparent at the dawn of capitalism in Europe, at later moments of crisis and redirection in capitalism up to the present – indeed at the inception of the Nazi horror, and at points of the disruptive expansion of capital in the western imperial/colonial thrust as in the Cargo movements of the Pacific (Cohn 1970, Lanternari 1960, Worsley 1970 (1959); Neveling 2014 for a link between Cargo Cults and neoliberal capitalism).

The rupture of transmutation in capital, the crisis that the Trumpian progress manifests, is an instance of what Marx and others have understood to be the creative/destruction dynamic of capital; whereby it reproduces, renews, revitalizes its potency against contradictions and limitations to its profit motive that capital generates within itself as well as those thrown up against it in the very process of its own expansion and transformation.

The circumstances underpinning the current transmutation in capital relate to the revolutions in science and technology those associated particularly with the digital age and advances in biotechnology). The rapid development of capital (and especially that of the still dominant, if declining, US-American form) was driven by the innovations in knowledge and technology (something that Marx and many others admired in US-America). What became known as the nation state (the dominant political form that nurtured capital) and the class orders that were generated in capitalism and necessary to it (not to mention the over-population and ecological disasters that grew in capital’s wake) also constituted barriers and limitations to capital’s growth.

The new technological revolutions are a response to the limitations on capital emergent within its own processes. Technological innovations enabled revolutions in production and consumption, creating new markets and increasing consumption, reducing the need for human labour and the resistances it brings with it, overcoming problems, and opening up novel lines, of distribution; forcing the distress of unemployment (especially among the erstwhile working class), creating impoverishment and uncertainties reaching into once affluent middle classes as captured in the neologism ‘the precariat’; shifting class alignments; redefining the nature and value of work, of the working day, the expansion of zero hours and, as an overarching manifestation, a sense of the return of a bygone era.

The current technological revolution is a key factor in the extraordinary growth in the monopolizing strength of corporations such as Google, Amazon or even Tencent. The dot.com organizations (the flagships and spearheads of capitalist transformation with huge social transmutational effect) have wealth that dwarfs many states and they are functioning in areas once controlled by the state (from what used to be public services to the current race to colonize space). Indeed the corporate world has effectively invaded and taken over the operation of nation-states (Kapferer 2010; Kapferer and Gold 2018).

This is most noteworthy in those state orders influenced by histories of liberal social democracy, in Europe and Australia for example, which tended to draw a sharp demarcation between public interest and private enterprise. The nation-state and its apparatuses of government and institutions for public benefit have been corporatized so much so that in many cases government bureaucracies have not only had their activities outsourced to private companies but also have adopted managerial styles and a ruthlessness along the lines of business models. The corporatization of the state has aligned it much more closely with dominant economic interests in the private (now also public) sectors than before and enables a bypassing of state regulation, even that which once sustained capitalist interest, but which became an impediment to capitalist expansion.

These changes have wrought socio-economic and political disruption and distress globally and most especially in the Western hemisphere. This is not merely collateral damage. The revolution in science and technology has been a key instrument in effecting social and political changes via destruction, for the regenerative expansion of capital. It is central to the re-imagination of capital in the opening of the twenty-first century.

This is particularly so in the United States whose socio-political order is historically one of corporate state formation which accounts for its long-term global political economic domination. Some renewal in leftist thought (e.g. with Bernie Sanders) is an index of the depth of distress that is being experienced although the ideological and counteractive potency of the American Dream fuelled especially in fundamentalist Christianity suppresses such potential and contributes to the intensity and passion of the Trump phenomenon. The ideological distinction of the Trump event aside, its dynamic of populism is reflected throughout the globe (Kalb 2021)

One common feature of this is the rejection of the political systems associated with nation state orders and, to a marked extent the largely bipartite party systems vital in the discourses of control and policy in nation states. Trumpism and other populist movements (in Europe notably) complain of the alienation of the state and its proponents from interests of the mass. The expansion of corporatization and the further hollowing out of the state, the corruption of its public responsibilities by corporate interests, is effectively what Trump was furthering in his presidency. It is a potent dimension of the Trump paradox and a major irony of the Capitol invasion that, for all the apparent fascist tendencies, it was the spirit of reclaiming democracy (admittedly of the freebooting kind) in an already highly corporatized establishment (subject to great corporate capitalist interest) that Trump’s actions were directed to. An important figure in this respect is the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel. The tech billionaire, early investor in Facebook and founder of PayPal, was an early Trump supporter and named a part of Trump’s transition team in 2016. His book, Zero to One, based on his lecture courses at Stanford University, argues for a corporate-technocratic governance beyond older systems of government. (Thiel 2014).

From Panopticon to Coronopticon

COVID-19 has highlighted the social devastation of the destructive/creative dynamic of capitalism’s transmutation (see also Kalb 2020). The class and associated ethnic inequities have everywhere been shown up and probably intensified by a pandemic that is starting to equal, if not surpass, the depressing and devastating effect of two world wars. Like them it is clearing ground for capitalist exploitative expansion – something like Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism (Klein 2007).

Under the shadow of the virus, labour demands are being rationalized, the cutting back of employment and its benefits legitimated, governments are pumping capital into the economies in a way that protects consumption in an environment where there is declining occupational opportunity and income. The idea of the universal basic income is seriously discussed. Its implementation would offset some of the contradictions in a transformation of capitalism that is reducing our dependence on labour and endangering consumption through automation and digitalization. While the poor are getting poorer the rich are getting richer; most notably those heading the revolutionary technologies of the digital age and biotechnology, with the competitive race to secure viable vaccines against the virus one example for the latter sector’s power.

There is a strange synchronicity linking the pandemic with the dynamic of capitalism’s transmutational corporatization of the state. The virus reproduces and spreads in a not dissimilar dynamic. Indeed, COVID 19 in some ecological understandings is the product of the acceleration of globalization effected in those processes of capitalism’s transmutation associated with corporate expansion and the corporatization of the nation state. As a crossover from animal to human bodies the virus is one manifestation of increased human population pressure on wild animal territory, the closer intermeshing of animal and human terrain. The scale of the pandemic is, of course, a direct consequence of the time space contraction and intensity of the networked interconnections of globalization.

State surveillance has intensified as a by-product of combatting COVID which is also its legitimation, with digitalization as the major surveillance instrument. The digital penetration into every nook and cranny of social life (see Zuboff2019, and Netflix’s The Social Dilemma), is interwoven with the commodification of the social and personal for profit – economizing individuals calculating the costs and benefits of their social ‘interactions’ (the YouTube or Kuaishou ‘influencer,’ the hype TED talker as Foucault’s entrepreneurial self, cut, pasted, uploaded and remixed).

The management of Covid-19, demanding social isolation and the disruption of ordinary social life, has exponentially increased the role of the digital as the primary mediator of the social and a commanding force in its very constitution. Covid-19 has been revealed as a kind of social particle accelerator. As such, and ever more exclusively so, the real of the social, is being re-imagined, re-engineered and re-mastered as a digital-social, a ‘Digisoc’ or ‘Minisoc,’ constrained and produced within algorithmically preset parameters. Here is Peter Weir’s film, The Truman Show, radically updated. And, as with Truman, the space of freedom is also and at the same time experienced as a space of unfreedom.

This manifests in the deep ambivalence many feel about the new technologies they daily live with and through. The digitized social is often presented as a new agora, a liberating ‘space’ in which new, progressive ideas and directions are enabled, operationalized and indeed optimized. The internet has become a site of multiple struggles in which class forces and new potentials for social difference and proliferating identity-claims are continually emerging. The freedom of the internet has provided exciting opportunities for many. Such freedom also and at the same time contributes to conspiracy imaginations on all sides. As has been made clear in the two elections featuring Trump, the superpower of corporations like Google and Facebook threatens to install a domain of hyper-control. Digital walls and electronic fences are appearing everywhere in the age of the global ‘splinternet.’

The hegemonic and totalizing potential for the ruling bodies of the corporatizing state who control the digital is as never before. This is so not just in the global scale of the network reach but in the heightened degree to which controlling bodies can form the ground of the social, radically remodel, engineer and design reality in accordance with dominant interests, and where motivated shut out that which threatens their order. The awareness of this has driven the fury of censorship and self-censorship on all sides – Trump’s threatened TikTok ban becomes Twitter’s actual Trump ban.

Back in Some Form: From 1984 into a Brave New World

Trump and Trumpism are moments in the transitional, transmutational process of capitalism outlined above and of the formation of new social and political orders. Echoing the past, they express its transmutation (and its agonies) rather than repeat it. Trump and Trumpism manifest the contradictions of such processes, agents and agencies for the transmutations in the social and political circumstances of life that are in train, themselves forces in the bringing forth of a future that, in some aspects, is already being lived.

Trump himself can be described as an “in-betweener”, a bridge into the new realities, both a force in their realization and a victim. His manner and style, the brutal no holds barred amorality is familiar from the captains of industry and robber barons of an earlier age, who built capitalist America and crushed working-class resistance by all means, more foul than fair. Trump maintains the style but in reverse redemptive mode. In his shape-shift he presents as supporter of the working classes not their nemesis as did his forerunners.

However, his authoritarian business manner, of The Apprentice’s “you’re fired” fame, matches well the managerialism of the present. He is an exemplar of contemporary venture capitalism and most especially of profit from non-industrial production (often anti production) gained from real estate, property transfer, asset stripping, and the expanding gaming and gambling industries (their importance as symptoms of the crises of transformation in capital) from which some of Trump’s key supporters come.

Trump’s reactive anti-immigrant nationalism and “Make America Great Again” rhetoric not only appeals to the white right but is an engagement of past rhetoric to support new political and economic realities. Trump’s economic war with China stressed re-industrialization but it was also concerned with counteracting China’s technological ascendancy, especially in the realm of the digital, a major contradiction born of the current globalizing transmutation in capitalism involving transfers of innovatory knowledge.

Trump anticipated the risk to his presidential re-election. It manifested the dilemmas of his in-betweenness. His inaction with regard to the pandemic was consistent with the anti “Big Government” policies of many Republicans and the US-American right who cherish QAnon conspiracy theories as much as they want to reduce government interference and modify regulation in capitalist process, a strong emphasis in current transitions and transformations of the state and of capital.

Trump’s cry that the election was being stolen was excited in the circumstances of the pandemic. His attack on postal votes related to the fact that the pandemic gave the postal vote a hitherto unprecedented role in the election’s outcome by by-passing and neutralising the millenarian populist potency of his mass rallies already reduced in numbers by fear. Trump sensed that the COVID-inspired move to ‘working from home’ and ‘voting from home’ would challenge, fence in and fence out his base of support.

Trump has always taken advantage of the digital age, his use of Twitter and Facebook the marked feature of his style of rule. His practices looked forward to the politics of the future ever increasingly bounded and conditioned in societies of the image. Following the events at the Capitol, Trump’s own Custer’s Last Stand to allay his fate, his cyberspace and internet accounts were switched off. He has been cancelled by the new digitally authoritarian corporate powers (who arguably benefitted the most from the Trump era and profited greatly under pandemic conditions) who are behind the growing new society of the image, in which he was a past-master and within which he had in the main established his identity. (Kapferer R, 2016)

The overriding image of the Capitol invasion and carried across most networks is that of the occupation of the heart of American democracy by those who would threaten its ideals. The media have concentrated on what was the dominating presence of the extremist macho white US-American far right violently parading symbols of a racist past combined with clear references to the not-so-distant memories of fascism and Nazism. There were others there more moderate in opinion and representative of other class fractions, if still mostly white, whose presence does not reduce the fear of fascism, possibly as in Nazi Germany when what seemed to be small groups of extremists hijacked power (and the events of the Capitol evokes such memory) to unleash the horrors to follow. Something similar could be said for what happened in the Soviet Union leading to Stalinism. These were the worlds of George Orwell’s 1984, in which some of the major ideals of the time flipped in their tragic negation. Such events were very much emergent in realities of the nation-state, its imperialist wars and the class forces of that particular historical moment in the history of capitalism and the formations of its social and political orders. There is no statement here that this could not happen again.

What we are saying is this: a different authoritarian and oppressive possibility may be taking shape – not of the fascist past but of the future. This is a future that Trump was mediating but which may be coming into realization, despite the great hope to the contrary, in the accession of President Biden. Perhaps this prospect can be seen as more akin to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World born in the current transmutations of capital (and its agonies of class) and in the circumstances of the radical technological revolutions of the digital era, involving the apotheosis of the corporatisation of the state, the corporate state emerging out of the ruins of the nation state.

Aldous Huxley depicted a world centred on production and efficiency, a bio technologically conditioned global system of perfect rational, optimised order. The class conflicts of the past are overcome here; everyone accepts their predetermined place. It is a post-human reality in which the foundation of human beings in their biology and passions is transcended. It is a somatised, artificially intelligent world of the image and promiscuity. Indeed, the American Dream. Those who do not fit or who resist are fenced out. Time and space are being reconfigured, incurving around the individual and ‘personalised.’

Biden’s inauguration for all its upbeat ceremonial spirit had some intimation of such a future, taking into full account the security constraints of its moment: to protect against the murderous unchecked rampage of the virus and the threat of the attack of right-wing militias. The stress on this, it may be noted, had an ideological function to distance what was about to come into being from, for example, the definitely more visceral world of Trump and thoroughly evident in the invasion of the Capitol – what Biden in his inauguration speech called an “uncivil war.”

The scene of the perfectly scripted inauguration was virtually devoid of people. Apart from the dignitaries and all-important celebrities, the highly selected order of the society of the corporate-state. Where the general populace would normally crowd, was an emptiness filled with flags and protected by troops, more than currently are stationed in Afghanistan. Those who might disrupt, Hilary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ and Aldous Huxley’s ‘resistant savages,’ were fenced out. It was a totalizing and constructed digital media image presenting a reality of control, harmony, and absolute surveillance.

We claim that something like Trump and the events surrounding him would have happened regardless of the specific phenomena we have focussed on here. The events Trump are a moment, perhaps among the most intense, in the transitional transmutation of the history of capitalism and the socio-economic and political orders which build and change around it. The apparent chaos indicates a major axial moment in world history – a chaos driven in the emergence of a cybernetic techno-capitalist apparatus on a global scale. What might be augured in the Biden accession is already taking vastly different shape in China and elsewhere around the globe. New and diverse formations of totalitarian authoritarianism are emerging. The Trump phenomenon is crucial for an understanding of some of the potentials of a future that we are all very much within and that an overconcentration on the parallels with the past may too easily obscure.

Bruce Kapferer is a roving anthropologist and ethnographer, Professor Emeritus at Bergen University, Professorial Fellow UCL, Fellow Cairns Institute, and the Director of the ERC Egalitarianism project at the University of Bergen.

Roland Kapferer is a Lecturer in Anthropology, Deakin University, a filmmaker and a musician. He does research on cybertechnologies.

Cite as: Kapferer, Bruce, and Roland Kapferer. 2021. “The Trump Saga and America’s Uncivil War: New Totalitarian Authoritarian Possibilities.” FocaalBlog, 2 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/02/bruce-kapferer-roland-kapferer-the-trump-saga-and-americas-uncivil-war-new-totalitarian-authoritarian-possibilities/

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Evan Smith: Love milkshakes, hate racism: A short history of throwing food at the Far Right

An earlier version of this article first appeared on Hatful of History.

In the last month, milkshakes have been lobbed at several far-right candidates in the European elections campaign across the United Kingdom. First it was former English Defence League (EDL) leader Tommy Robinson, then UKIP’s misogynist YouTuber Carl Benjamin, and now Nigel Farage as he was out campaigning in Newcastle for his new Brexit Party. When Farage visited Edinburgh, the local police advised McDonald’s not to sell milkshakes, and there has been further news that Farage refused to step off his tour bus after being threatened with further milkshakings.

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Alessandro Zagato: “Spokesperson for the people and candidate for the media”: An indigenous woman for the 2018 presidential elections in Mexico

María de Jesús Patricio, known as Marichuy, is an indigenous Nahuatl woman born on 23 December 1963 in Tuxpan (“land of rabbits”), a small town located in the south of the state of Jalisco, where she grew up in a condition of extreme poverty. She is mother of three. As a child, she spent time observing older women from her family practicing traditional medicine. They were performing rituals and preparing oils and medicaments to heal people in their community. Over the years, she became a practitioner. In an interview of some years ago, (Tukari 2010: 12) she recalls that a mentor once warned her not to profit from her ancestral knowledge, because “the light protecting you would extinguish,” he argued, and she would no longer be effective as a healer. Her wisdom increased significantly as she started giving workshops around the region. Since 1995, María directs a health center in the Calli neighborhood of Tuxpam, where indigenous medicine is practiced and researched. Since then, she has received several public recognitions for her work, which focuses, she argues, in healing the community rather than just individual diseases. “Through the health center we defend traditional medicine, indigenous territories, and the mother earth based on an anti-capitalist approach and the libertarian struggle of the indigenous people” (University of Guadalajara 2015).

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