Welcome to this visiting lecture by Professor Cas Mudde. This event, if I may call it like this, that is co-hosted by Montenegro Political Science Association and Faculty of Political Science. I would like to go first through a few technical points before we dig into the world of right-wing politics. First of all, I would like to thank Professor Mudde for taking the time to do the interview. It's really an honor and a pleasure to talk with you about these very important topics, not only for acad
emia, but for societies, wider societies as well. And it's an honor for me to be your host, even if it's only virtually and not in person. Second technical thing for the audience, I would also like to thank the audience for joining us here and for sending the suggestions and questions in advance. And also to say that the chat will be open throughout the interview, so if you have anything that you would like me to ask at the end of the interview, just type it in the chat and I'll try to organize
stuff and maybe we'll have time by the end to go through some of your questions and points. As is, I guess, customary in these circumstances, just a brief introduction of who Cas Mudde is. He is a Stanley Wade Shelton Professor of International Affairs and a distinguished research professor at the University of Georgia. He's originally from the Netherlands, where he received his MA and PhD from the University of Leiden. Cas's main research focus revolves around the question of how can liberal de
mocracies defend themselves against extremism challenges and mostly how can they defend their values, which then revolves around the areas of populism, right-wing politics, football and hooliganism, etc. Apart from being a well-established scholar, he's also someone who's influential in the media space throughout his podcast, which I understand is not active at the moment. He was also, for a long period of time, an op-ed contributor to The Guardian and is very influential on social media, even t
hough, as I understand, you don't really like how Twitter or X is run at the moment. I'm sure I forgot to mention something, but I guess that's the nature of introducing people who are at the top of their field. I would like to start off this interview, maybe inspired by how you started off your interviews at The Radikaal, and present you with an easy opener. What was your first sports team that you supported, and do you remember the first football game that you went on to see live? So, I defini
tely know what the first football club is that I supported. The club I still support today, PSV Eindhoven, which is going through a glorious, glorious season at the moment, but I would not know the first game. I think, but I even don't know whether it's really true, but I remember it mythically as being three years old and going with my dad to a PSV game, and him lifting me up and saying, the red and white boys, those are our boys. It probably never happened, but I was very young when I supporte
d them, but games, I don't know. Okay, I guess that's where the love for football comes from, from early childhood and the feelings that it invoked. Let's dig into the more serious topics. So, recently, the most cited work, you're hugely cited and very influential, but your most cited work became the Populist Zeitgeist, the article you wrote 20 years ago now, and it laid the foundation for the ideational approach of populism. And I wanted to ask you to introduce very briefly, because most of the
audience knows what it's all about, the ideational approach, and I also wanted to ask for your comment as to how do you see that specific concept in terms of traveling from Western Europe to Eastern Europe, and do you see a key difference in how populist parties or populist radical parties operate in Western Europe and in Eastern Europe? Okay, so in terms of the ideational approach, which to be honest, a term I didn't coin, I wasn't necessarily aware of, I felt that my definition was kind of br
inging together and structuring the work on populism that influenced me most profoundly, the work by Margaret Canovan, for example. And I do believe that most definitions of populism, both before and after mine, see populism as a set of ideas in which the good people oppose the bad elite, whatever the specifics of that, that is the core. And it's always a set of ideas, even if they are expressed more as a discourse or a style rather than fundamentally an ideology. I personally think that these i
deas are more than just a trick. I think they structure the way that populists present society and the way they justify many of their policies. So, in that sense, the ideational approach doesn't necessarily see populism as an ideology. It can also be more loosely as a set of ideas in which the opposition between the good people and the bad elite are central. Now, with regard to how this is expressed, particularly at the party level, I think the most important difference between the East and the
West, which are both very complex and heterogeneous categories, is that in Central and Eastern Europe, you have a couple more populist parties that are either from the center or don't necessarily have an ideological core around them. And so what Crristobal Rovira Kaltwasser and I have argued is that most populist parties that are successful combine populism with a so-called host ideology, being some form of socialism on the left and some form of nativism on the right. In Central and Eastern Euro
pe, you see more parties that don't have a coherent host ideology. But I think that is not specific to the populism of Central and Eastern Europe, but actually to the party politics of Central and Eastern Europe. You just see many more parties without a clear ideological core in Central and Eastern Europe, which has in part to do with the fact that they're often the creation of entrepreneurs, they lack the long routes that still, I would say, majority of relevant parties in Western Europe have.
Okay. You also argued, I think it was in the lecture for Government and Opposition, something that I think you mentioned here, that the rise, if I can say so, the rise of populism can be attributed to the depolitization of politics or the fact that classical parties have lost their ideological basis. And now you said that that's the case in Eastern Europe a bit more than in Western Europe, if I understood it correctly. Or to rephrase the question, if we go by that idea or a question, could we ex
pect populist or parties with populist ideas to be more successful in the East or more successful in the West? It's a good question. It's also a difficult question for a variety of reasons. So I think there's a difference between losing ideology and not having had ideology. And so a lot of the debate in Western Europe is about how former parties no longer perform their functions, like how social democratic parties don't stand up for the worker anymore, or why there is no Christian democracy anym
ore. And so it is, you can have a nostalgia for old politics. And a lot of the at least populist critique at the mass and elite level is about that, like social democratic parties are not grounded anymore, they don't listen anymore. Parties don't speak for the rural population anymore, things like that. You don't have that really in Central and Eastern Europe. Because from the beginning, post-communist politics in the region has been moderately ideological at best. The other thing is that becaus
e the parties were never that grounded, and most parties have very small organizational structures and similar type of ideologies, like going after the same voters, same arguments, you have much more turnover. And so in almost every election, there are some new parties, non-populist and populist parties. Whereas in much of Western Europe, at least until I would say the last 10 years, it was often pretty much only populist parties that were the new parties, the challengers. And so on the one hand
, you could argue that on a variety of levels, there is a better breeding ground for protest parties in Central and Eastern Europe. But there is also a bigger offer. And so what we see in Central and Eastern Europe is still much more turnover, parties that come and go, governments that come and go. And as a consequence, the populist parties compete with others. And the populist parties largely also kind of suffer from the same weaknesses that non-populist parties in the regions have. They don't
have a host ideology. They don't have an ideological anchor outside of the protest. And they don't have a structure. I mean, the most extreme example is Bulgaria, which has election after election after election. And every single time there are a variety of new parties, at least one, if not more of them are populist, they win and they disappear. And so I think while there are similarities and populism is largely the same expressed in the two regions, there are also fundamental differences, parti
cularly if you look at it long term. In this discussion, as well as in the previous one, you talked a lot about the link between populism and the host ideology of parties. You mentioned something on X last week, and that reminded me of the argument from 2019, I think, from Mathijs Rooduijn, if I pronounced his name correctly. You said something that all meta-analysis now of populist success pretty much tell us much more about the host ideology, the nativism, in the case of the right-wing part of
the spectrum, and how their voters are responding to that set of ideas than on populism. What's your general assessment of the state of the art of populism scholarship? Well, I must admit that I haven't read much specifically on populism over the last couple of years for a variety of reasons. There's a lot of debate about definitions that I think overstates the differences between definitions, and also generally doesn't actually come up with a true alternative, and so I personally don't find th
at overly interesting. I think everyone should do whatever they do, but I don't find that particularly interesting. I think a lot of what is being done under the moniker of populism is stuff that has been done for decades under the moniker of the radical right, and this is one of my key frustrations, and the point that I expressed there, which was referring to a meta-study, but other studies as well. There are a lot of studies, but also a lot of media discussions that are about populism, but the
cases that they refer to are either exclusively of the populist radical right, or in majority. If you do an analysis of all populist parties in Europe today, and all voters, then about three quarters, if not 85 percent, of these parties and voters are of the populist radical right, because the populist left is so small these days, and so whatever you find doesn't so much speak to populism per se, it speaks to the populist radical right, and the core ideology, as well as the core reason for voti
ng the populist radical right in Europe, are anti-immigrant sentiments, is nativism. We know that for decades, and so I think that is a problem. I don't think you shouldn't do these studies, but if you really want to show that what you find is about populism and not the populist radical right, then you should also do, in addition to your full set analysis, do subset analysis, and show that this applies both to right-wing populism and left-wing populism, and if it doesn't, then it's probably not
about populism. One of the key points, for example, is this argument made, for example, by Norris and Inglehart, but others as well, this cultural backlash argument, and the argument that people vote for populist parties because they're anti-immigrant. That makes no sense, because populism is not by definition anti-immigrant, and Syriza, for example, was one of the most pro-immigrant parties in Europe. So this is actually, again, this is about nativism, and if it's about nativism, we should call
it nativism, or we should call it populist radical right. The book you mentioned by Norris and Inglehart, it was an attempt to explain how Trump came to power in the US, as far as I understand, and I think I came across, not now in researching the stuff for this interview, but a couple of years ago, you mentioning that the best explanation for the Trump phenomenon is actually been written 50 years ago by Seymour Lipset. Can you elaborate a bit more on that? What was his understanding of the rad
ical politics, and how that can help us explain the things we are seeing today, not only in the US, but also in Europe? Yeah, so first of all, I mean, Seymour Lipset's work is amazing, it's foundational, Lipset and Rokken, but also Political Man from 1960, which, for example, speaks about working class authoritarianism, which is something of great relevance to today's debate about the far right. But in 1955, he wrote an article, if I remember correctly, for the British Journal of Sociology, whic
h was about the American radical right, which was interesting, because at that point in time, of course, you didn't have a radical right party. And what they really, but there was a big debate in the late 50s, early 60s in the US about the radical right in that term, which was more focused on anti -communist movement of the John Birch Society and others. But what Lipset argued was that the real reason for the support for radical right was not so much, let's say, absolute deprivation, but relativ
e deprivation. More importantly, he said this was about social status loss. And I found that, I mean, the first time I read it, which was in grad school, I already found that fascinating. But what was particularly fascinating is social status loss is not necessarily socioeconomic. I think, but I haven't read the article in decades, I think he mostly focused on socioeconomic status, perhaps even exclusively, I think it is much broader. And so today, we would talk about privilege, like the loss of
privilege. But social status loss means that people perceive that the social status they hold is being threatened. And that doesn't mean that they're discriminated necessarily, although many do believe that they're discriminated. It doesn't mean that they are low on status, it means that their status is going down. And they blame someone for that, and they vote against that. And so I think that this is the case of, for example, why we find not that the poor or the poorest vote for the far right
. We also don't find that just all lower educated people vote for the far right. We find, for example, that a large disproportionate group is often lower educated, higher income. And that makes perfect sense in today's society. Because in today's society, level of education has become really the most important status identifier, more than money in many ways. But it also explains why men, for example, disproportionately vote for the far right rather than women. Why issues like wokeness, or transg
ender rights, or feminism, all of these threaten different parts of our social status. And all European societies, at the very least, are based on hierarchies in which generally men is above woman, heterosexual above homosexual, and higher educated above lower educated. Nowadays, working class used to be a moniker of great pride in the 1950s, 60s. Today, it's not. It's kind of an increasingly obsolete category, same for farmers for that sense. So I think social status laws explains a lot. Now th
e problem empirically is how do you measure it? You can measure it at the aggregate level, and just objectively and say, these are the professions or these are the categories that are losing status. But we know that people don't vote on the basis of reality. They vote on the basis of how they perceive things. And so there might be workers who don't feel that the worker moniker is decreasing. And many men who don't have a problem with the fact that men are less dominant, still dominant, or they d
on't perceive it as such. And so to really measure social status laws, you have to get into the head of people. And so empirically, I think that's very difficult. But I strongly believe that this is one of the key reasons. And it is also very clearly what you hear anecdotally, when people, voters speak about it, and in the discourse of far-right parties. I was thinking maybe whether this ties into the, I think, an expanding field, at least from my perspective, I'm mostly interested in political
psychology. So I see more and more research on emotions and populism or radical right. And I think I read 2023 chapter by Hans-Georg Betz on anger and populism. Do you think it's maybe a different way to think about the same thing as a social status loss, to put it into this type of whether people are angry at the political system or not? And maybe is that something that could motivate them to turn over to these types of parties? Yeah, so I mean, let me first give a shout out to Hans-Georg Betz,
who still wrote the most important book on the far-right 1994 book, which actually spoke, he already spoke in the early 90s about the politics of resentment, right? Resentment is also an emotion. I personally think resentment is better than anger. I think resentment has more action in it. There's little studies, there are a few studies about anger, right? But I come from the Netherlands and we have this debate for a long time now about angry people. And recently, there were various studies that
showed that Dutch people are not angry at all. Like roughly 10% of Dutch people are angry, whereas about 25% vote for the far-right. So I'm not sure whether anger is the thing. And of course, there's always emotions in politics, right? I mean, I don't think that, I don't necessarily think that that wasn't implicit in most theories anyway. But I don't think that particularly for voting, you need a particular high intensity of emotion, right? And so resentment, which to a certain extent is a lowe
r level of emotion than anger, right? Is more than enough or frustration or fear, right?
Because a lot of this is also about fear, the fear of loss. Because what you also find is that quite a lot of voters of the far-right don't necessarily feel that they themselves are in a bad situation, but they think the country is going into a bad situation, right? So what specific emotion it is, I'm not so sure. I find, and I don't read too much of the political psychology stuff, but what I often read is t
hat studies have a very hard time measuring the emotion they claim to measure. It's often kind of by proxy because emotions are expressed very differently, right? And the thing is, they're also very personal. I can seem incredibly calm while being very angry, right? Because I'm from Northern Europe, right? And so we don't do our emotion in the same way. Whereas if Dutch people go to an Italian soccer game, we think that everyone is angry because they're all shouting, right? So it is very cultura
l, it's even very personal, which makes me always a bit worried about trying to measure something as personal. Maybe to segue away from general discussion, and you mentioned the voting patterns in the Netherlands, can you give us maybe a brief overview of what's happening with the government formation in the Netherlands right now, and what's the most likely outcome? Is it minority government, or as far as I understand, what most people claim is the most likely outcome, you are headed for a snap
election and for a new vote? I have to remember that the Dutch political culture is very much about responsibility. So in the Dutch, traditionally Dutch politics is about administration. It's not highly ideological, it's not highly conflictual. Many voters expect political parties to take their responsibility. Going into new elections is walking away from your responsibility for many voters. The other thing is a majority of people have voted for the right. More importantly, a majority of people
have voted for the right, wanting a right-wing government, which in their eyes means a coalition of right-wing parties and far-right parties. That is possible. If other right-wing parties like the VVD, the Conservative Party, like the Farmers BBB, like the Christian Democratic, new Christian Democratic NSC of Pieter Omtzigt, will reject a coalition with Geert Wilders' PVV, many of their voters will feel that they have been betrayed. You already see it now, particularly the NSC has lost significa
ntly, VVD is still losing, and the only one winning is Geert Wilders. I think that new elections, most importantly, don't solve anything. I think the key debate at the moment is still, is there a majority government or a minority government? I can't say anything intelligent really about it for two reasons. One is that the key player, Pieter Omtzigt, is impossible to read because he communicates poorly and changes his opinion seemingly all the time. And the second is I don't really know what the
status of Geert Wilders is. I mean he seems, for all intent and purposes mainstreamed and normalized, but they're still within several parties and parts of the media a potential backlash. You also have to keep in mind that even a majority government will have a majority in the lower house of parliament, the more important one, but will still lack a majority in the upper house, which is weak but can embarrass the government significantly and this has been the case for the last decade almost. Howe
ver, these were generally centrist governments or the center-right governments which would then get support in the senate from some other parties. The parties that are not going to be in this government are not going to support this government probably because it's just too far away. So honestly I have no idea because the problem is if we have new elections there's only one party that wins, like literally Geert Wilders is going to be bigger than I think any party in my lifetime probably, polling
around one-third of the vote which is like insane by Dutch measures, but that makes him probably too big for anyone else to govern with him because you're going to be just a pawn of him, right? So and I think that's why Geert Wilders is not pushing for elections. He understands very well that he might actually become too big for a coalition but too small to govern by himself. So I honestly don't know and I expect that they're looking for an excuse. They're looking to create some type of excuse
so that they can say look the Netherlands needs a government. We are taking our responsibility otherwise there would be chaos and so it's not because we trust Geert Wilders. It's not because we think that he has really fully moderated but this is because of the nation. That would be a very Dutch argument to make. It's a mess but it is important also to note this is not just the failure of politicians, right? I mean the media is now writing at times why don't we still have a government because it
's very difficult. I mean the voters have created such a fragmented and divided parliament that there is no clear outcome. Yeah, I think there's a couple of Twitter accounts that aggregate these polls from around Europe. I think you were correct in pointing out I don't remember the last time I saw Wilders' party going below 31 percent. He's 31, 32, 33 percent pretty consistently the last month and a half I believe. We already spent around 35 minutes with my questions so I would just have one mor
e before moving on to the audience and this is maybe something that's of interest to me specifically when we started talking about specific parties and contexts in Europe. I think I recall you writing an op -ed about AFD in Germany and the state of AFD and how maybe there's a push for a ban of the party. What's the argument for and what's the argument against? Is it at all comparable with the Golden Dawn in Greece or is it something completely different? No, I think Golden Dawn was really an exc
eption across Europe for two reasons. First of Golden Dawn was from the beginning a neo-Nazi party and all the important people at the beginning most notably its leader were still there. So even though it didn't fully express an extreme right ideology anymore it was very clear that the party was still the old party and extreme right. At the same time where Golden Dawn was also and truly unique was it actually allegedly had a double organizational structure where one part of the party was about e
lectoral politics and one part of the party was about street politics and the second in command of the party was in command of the street politics element which had as a task to fight opponents in the street. Now you have to of course keep in mind that political violence in Greece is higher than probably in any other EU member state and the far left particularly anarchists are responsible for thousands of smaller and larger terrorist attacks over the last decades. So you have to put it in that c
ontext but that doesn't take away from the fact that Golden Dawn as part of its mission had political violence. That you don't have with AFD. So AFD is a party that of course unlike Golden Dawn which originated on the most outer spectrum of politics, it originated in the political mainstream in right-wing Euroskepticism. All of these people are highly educated, well integrated in society, not extremist. They were largely worked out by the radical right but at the moment there is a struggle withi
n the party between the radical right and the extreme right and more importantly the most popular branches of the AFD are in the east where the branches are almost all dominated by the extreme right. Now I think what the key problem is from a legal point of view is the AFD just like the country is a federally organized organization. At the federal level the two leaders are not extreme right. So even if you prove that Höcke in Thuringia and some of his colleagues in Saxony or in Saxena now are ex
treme right, are neo-nazis, the state is probably going to bend those branches and not the federal party. And so I think it's incredibly risky to start the procedure because anything but a federal party ban will be used to say look this was a political hit job. And so I think I said I think it's risky. I'm not sure whether it's also really something they're going to push. We have to keep in mind European elections are coming up. They're polling very high. There's a long history in Germany to bri
ng up like potential party bans of far-right parties in the run-up to elections. Although usually they come from the right because it's the CDU and CSU that feel pressured by the far-right and worry about losing voters. This time it actually comes from the left which is a little bit different. Yeah I think they're pulling around 22-23 percent more than ever and I especially left the topic you just mentioned the European elections for this part because there was a lot of questions from my colleag
ues and from the audience regarding the state of the far-right in Europe right now and how are they going to perform at the European elections and the new structure of the European Parliament that's going to come out of the elections. Is it going to bring on significant change in European policies depending on the organization and I guess depending on where Viktor Orbán and Fidesz end up going into whether the ECR or ID or maybe staying as they are right now unaffiliated. Yeah I just sent off a
short piece on that which is largely in line with a report by Cunningham and Hix for the ECFR that was just published. So the far-right is going to win in the upcoming elections. Electorally they're going to probably win not that much mostly because the far-right already won in 2014 and 2019 and so there's less and less space to win but they're going to win quite big in some big countries and particularly Germany is a major difference like AFD is going to double. You see a massive shift in Italy
mostly away from Forca Italia to Fratelli and these are huge countries right and so actually in the next parliament according to predictions the two biggest factions are going to be far-right Rassemble National and Fratelli but they're already pretty big at the moment. I mean technically they have about 20 percent of the MEPs in the current parliament which makes them like almost as big as the big two groups but of course they don't sit together right and so in the end the European elections ar
e and particularly how the European parliament will work is not so much decided in the election but after the election and we know for example that ECR often does its business after elections trying to get all kind of parties in. Oh by the way AUR in Romania also a reasonably big country could come in with quite a number of seats as well. Now I've always felt that Orban is the kingmaker for two reasons. First of all of all the far-right politicians he's the one who understands Europe the best. H
e has been the vice chairman of the EPP for 10 years. He once was a relatively pro-EU and he has been in power for a long time understanding how important the EU is for member states. Also related to his power and particularly of course his undermining of liberal democracy for him the EU and the European parliament but more importantly actually European council but they are related to each other is instrumental because he lost his major veto player like the reason why we all knew that article 7
was would never be introduced to Hungary was because Poland and the PIS would would sanction it. With PIS out of power they don't have FIDES doesn't have this strong alliance anymore. FIDES has been has been protected by EPP for a very long time they need a new protector. Orban himself has said he wants to join ECR even though ID has been courting him for years now. I think the reason is very simple. ID at this point in time doesn't have a seat in the council. They might get it because FPO almos
t certainly will be in government but ECR does most notably Meloni. And the difference is that while Meloni has a coalition government as Austria would do as well and Geert Wilders would in the Netherlands should that work out. Meloni is much more dominant the far right is much more dominant in Italy. So the Italian coalition is a far-right coalition that the Dutch coalition will never be that. And even the Austrian coalition will be with probably Europe which will probably not veto like sanctio
ns by the rest of the EU. So I think for FIDES and Orban it's actually not about the European Parliament it's about the European Council. But what he needs is to be part of a group that can protect him at all levels. At the same time he wants that group to be as big as possible. Now of course the main distinction allegedly between ECR and ID actually they're kind of two but they're very weird. So the first is Russia slash Ukraine. Now this is debatable for a variety of reasons. Mostly that Broth
ers of Italy was relatively pro -Russian but very much in the margin of the news ECR just admitted one single MEP of a French party which is the French party of Eric Zemmour. And Eric Zemmour has been more pro-Russian than Marine Le Pen. But they still accepted him. This one MEP which makes no sense. They don't need him for to have group rights. The party is going to be at best one-fifth of Rassemblee Nationale in the European election. So what it shows is that ECR is not homogeneous on this and
pro-Russian positions are not a major problem for it. And both Meloni and actually the former Polish prime minister have already said that they're open to Orban. The second part on which there is a division between ECR and ID traditionally is socio -economic. ECR of course was founded by the conservative party and was for a very long time Thatcherist in terms of socio-economics. But for a long time now the PIS was the main party within ECR which is a party that at the very least believes in str
ong state interference in the economy. On top of that Meloni comes from a fascist tradition where again the state plays a major role in the economy. So they're divided on that and within ID you have parties that are more left-wing at least in discourse like Marine Le Pen and to a certain extent Geert Wilders and parties that are socio-economically very much right -wing like AFD. So I think that there is a potential to bring ECR, most of the ECR and most of the ID parties together. But under whos
e leadership, right? Orban wants to be the leader. Rassemblant National has always been the leader of the far-right faction in European parliament. Will be hard not to be that and Meloni probably has better things to do. But I think those things are important. The expectation that there will be a right -wing majority in the next parliament in terms of pure counting the MEPs is possible. As said they will probably be divided over various factions which means that they can be an alternative coalit
ion to the mainstream coalition that we have. But whenever the EPP doesn't want to do something, for example on the European Green Deal or on immigration, they can pressure the social democrats and the liberals by saying if you don't do what I want I find a majority with other parties in parliament. And so I do believe that there is going to be a change. It's not a radical change. EPP and ECR have been working at times together. But it's going to be much more like in the next parliament the trad
itional groups no longer hold a majority of the seats. And that in many ways reflects the reality of most member states. There was a question here from one of my colleagues Božina Stešević about the normalization of right -wing politics. I want to tie it up with Meloni because you discussed her case a bit more. And I think that's what's happening especially in the European arena where there's more and more voices saying well she's cooperative, she's not that bad, she's not disturbing European co
nsensus in terms of providing funds to Ukraine, maybe she's doing stuff about immigrants in Tunisia, but in general she's much better than we could anticipate. What's your view on how this normalization of right-wing politicians and politics in general is affecting liberal democracy and politics both on the European level and in domestic arenas? I was in Europe last summer and one of the things that stood out to me was how often I was asked as kind of a pushback by journalists or by other people
almost always more in the center left or in the center about using the time far right for two parties in particular Sweden Democrats and Brothers of Italy. And why is this significant? These are two of the few parties that actually come out of the extreme right. Both have their roots in clear neo-fascism. And so the fact that these parties like 10 years ago Sweden Democrats were universally seen as far right and many would still could not say a sentence about them without talking about their ne
o-nazi roots. Now including colleagues are using the term conservative for these two parties. I think that the normalization, the reflection is that the things that they say and do are now considered normal. And of course the normalization comes not from the fact that they have changed fundamentally, it's that we have changed fundamentally. We now find it normal to see immigration as a problem and a threat. We find it normal that we spend billions on keeping immigrants out and that we pay dictat
ors and warlords to keep them out. What I find personally most disturbing about Meloni is in many ways we make the same mistakes as that we did with Orban. Orban was protected and defended by EPP exactly on the same grounds. But he plays nice in Brussels. When push comes to shove he votes for the things that we find important, which at that point in time were more socio-economic issues. Today the EU seems to find the fate of the Ukraine more important than liberal democracy within its own border
s. And we have done that before, the EU did that before with regard to the PIS government, where particularly von der Leyen was pushing very hard to free up the money to reward PIS for being staunchly anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian. Now this can all be applauded. Sure it's good that they support Ukraine and against Russia, but that should not be a free pass for undermining liberal democracy at home. Meloni has of course gone after the LGBTQI community, which to be fair is not uncommon within the
EU. Virtually all Central and Eastern European countries and many of the Southern countries discriminate against gay couples, against transgender etc. But she also uses very sharp critique of independent media. She's trying to push a constitutional change which would center a lot of power into the hands of the executive. These should be alarm bells. Like there might not be red lines, but many of these things we have seen in countries where liberal democracy was weakened. The fact that we don't
care about that because she supports the EU's Ukraine policy, I think is very very short-sighted. As is the idea that because there is a difference between what she says at home and what she does in Brussels, that that would always be the case. Again that is what Orban was for the first 10 years. But then his cost-benefit analysis changed and he took on the consensus of the EU. At this moment for Meloni, she needs to get EU money back to Italy. If she does that, she will come out of the next ele
ction absolutely hegemonic and we'll see whether she will still play ball then. Thank you for that. There was a question, to change the topic and maybe to finish up with this, there was a question from Filip Visković. He was more interested in your view on football and hooliganism more than primarily right-wing politics. So he asked something about what's more detrimental for internal politics and the state of democracy? Hooligan groups that are anti-systemic and extremist and are against the st
ate or those who have informal ties with the security services and are kind of linked with formal politics? Yeah, just to be clear, while I work on soccer and politics, I actually don't particularly work on the far right or hooliganism to a large extent because I think hooliganism gets way too much attention. But it depends on the country where you live. Now, in general, hooligans are almost irrelevant in terms of politics, in high politics, but even constitute a relatively small public order pr
oblem in most countries. I mean, Serbia being a significant outlier to a certain extent, Poland, some countries, but the violence and particularly hooliganism violence is now almost like a kind of a martial arts sport that is mostly done outside of stadiums, actually in woods secluded. I think in general, so I think the ties of people to organized crime are much more problematic in this respect and particularly again, and it's not exclusively so, but the ties between organized crime politics and
intelligence units in a reasonably sizable portion of countries, like we have a long history in Italy on that, we know that these things happen, for example, in Serbia, in Bulgaria and other countries. Anyone who is close to the levels of power, levers of power, is potentially dangerous. And this is one of the key points that I've made for a long time, is that threats to liberal democracy do not just come from people who openly state that they're anti-liberal democracy. In fact, most of the cit
izens protections from state overreach have been diminished by parties that claim to be liberal democratic. Just think about the responses to 9-11 here in the US, but also in Europe. Think about the responses to the so-called refugee crisis in 2015-16, which almost every government at that point in time did not have a far-right party in it. But there wasn't that much difference in how they responded. There were far-right governments that have built walls, and there have been mainstream governmen
ts that have built walls. So, in terms of danger, I think the danger of football and football fans and hooligans has always been overstated, as has actually been their far-right ideology. Most of the groups, even that have a lot of far-right supporters, like the Lazio -Irriducibili, they're organized crime, more than anything. It's a bit like far-right gangs in US prisons. If you don't know about it, watch American History X, a fantastic movie that is about that. Yes, they might have swastikas,
but in the end they deal drugs. Many of the worst firms in European football are first and foremost criminal organizations that express and pressure other fans and people from clubs to give them free tickets or money for protection or sell drugs. Their agenda is not political first, it's economic first. Thank you for this answer. I also second the suggestion to watch American History X. It's a great movie, a great story of redemption for one of the characters and a tragedy for the others. It was
really a pleasure to talk with you today. I really am grateful that you took the time to discuss and say a lot of very nuanced and thought-out analysis of what's happening in Europe now, not only in the political arena, but also in terms of academia and where we are headed at specific points. There was a comment by Professor Darmanovic in the chat, and it's been seconded by a lot of people, that it's not really... that often the political scientists can both write and speak very eloquently and
fluently at the same time, but that you are one of those examples. And pretty much, I assume everyone who is here enjoyed this conversation. Thank you very much. And I hope we'll get to do this again, maybe next year, somewhere around this time, when we have a bit more to say about how European infrastructure, political infrastructure is gonna change depending on the result of these next elections. I'm totally open for that. So when you're interested again, just send me an email. We'll do it aga
in. Thank you very much. Bye. Okay, have a nice day.
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