Daily Archives: October 6, 2022

People look over a list of legislative candidates at a polling station in Rome on Sept. 25, 2022. (Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images)

Recent elections in Italy and Sweden have been resounding successes for right-wing populist parties, underscoring the growing electoral strength that such parties have displayed in Europe in recent years.

In Italy, the right-wing populist Brothers of Italy party secured the highest vote share of any single party in the nations recent election, making its leader, Giorgia Meloni, the likely prime minister. In Sweden, the Sweden Democrats emerged as the second-most popular party in the countrys recent election. Their strong performance is the culmination of steady growth over the last six parliamentary elections and the near doubling of their vote share since the 2014 election.

Across Europe, populists especially those on the ideological right have been winning larger shares of the vote in recent legislative elections, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data drawn primarily from Parlgov, a clearinghouse for cross-national political information. The Center defines populists on the basis of three academic measures and classifies them as right- or left-leaning based on expert evaluations of their ideology. (For more on these definitions, see How we did this or the appendix.)

This Pew Research Center analysis examines the growing electoral strength of populist political parties in 11 European countries. Vote share data is drawn from Parlgov for all elections except the most recent Swedish and Italian elections, where we consulted country-specific vote returns.

We use three measures to classify populist parties: anti-elite ratings from the 2019 Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES), Norris Global Party Survey (GPS) and The PopuList. We define a party as populist when at least two of these three measures classify it as such. For more information on how we classify European populist parties, read the appendix. Not all populist parties were asked about on the 2022 Global Attitudes survey, so results in the second table about favorability only include the parties that respondents were asked about.

Because the 2011 and 2014 CHES surveys do not include all relevant variables for our definition of populism, we focus our analysis on the 2019 CHES and 2019 GPS. As a result, the parties included in this analysis may be biased in favor of those that remain electorally significant. Similarly, The PopuList specifically looks at parties that obtained at least 2% of the vote in at least one national parliamentary election since 1998 and thus parties that were a larger share of the vote prior to 1998 may not be included. Additionally, parties may exist that are considered far-right or far-left but not populist, according to our working definition; those are not included here. The ideology of parties may also have shifted over time; we classify parties as left, right or center on the basis of CHES experts in 2019.

All European countries are not included in this analysis because we focus only on the 11 countries in Europe that were surveyed in 2022. Surveys were all conducted with nationally representative populations and were fielded from Feb. 14 to June 3, 2022, over the phone with adults in Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Surveys were conducted face to face in Hungary and Poland.

Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.

In Italy this year, for example, around four-in-ten voters cast their ballots for one of the three major right-wing populist parties: Brothers of Italy, Forza Italia and Lega, up from around a third who did the same in 2018 and around three-in-ten in 2013. On the other hand, Five Star, a centrist populist party, saw its vote share fall by roughly half since 2018, when it governed as part of a populist coalition with Lega.

In Spain, the share of the vote going to populist parties roughly doubled between 2015 and 2019 when the countrys most recent legislative election took place rising from around 13% to around 25%. This was especially the case among populists on the right, with the Vox party seeing its vote share grow from around 10% to around 15% during that span.

In the Netherlands, right-leaning populist parties garnered around 16% of the vote in 2021 a high not seen in nearly a decade of parliamentary elections.

In both Hungary and Poland, right-wing populist parties have surged to power, making enormous gains in the last two decades. In Hungary, President Viktor Orbans Fidesz party, which has been in power since 2010, secured a supermajority in this years legislative elections though the total share voting for populist parties in the country fell slightly as Jobbik, another right-wing populist group, joined an anti-Fidesz coalition. In Poland, the ruling Law and Justice Party (Pis) roughly quadrupled their vote share between 2001 and 2019, from around one-in-ten votes to around four-in-ten.

In Belgium and France, while the overall share of voters supporting populist parties has grown substantially in recent years, there have been gains for both right- and left-leaning populist parties. The right-leaning Flemish Interest party won around 12% of Belgiums vote in 2019, marking one of its most successful elections since 2007. But the left-leaning Workers Party of Belgium has also been ascendent, winning around 9% of the vote in 2019, up from less than 1% in 2007.

In France, the share of voters casting first-round ballots for a populist party has risen from around 10% in the 1980s to around 44% as of the 2022 election. On the right, the National Rally party previously called National Front has steadily increased its vote share in parliamentary elections since 2007 and, under Marine LePens leadership, became one of two parties in the second round of the last two presidential elections. La France Insoumise, a populist party on the left, garnered around a quarter of the first-round parliamentary bloc in 2022 though it did so as part of a far-left bloc alongside the Socialist Party, the Greens and the French Communist Party (these four parties running separately in the previous election also garnered around a quarter of the vote).

Germany and Greece somewhat buck the trend. In Germany, support for the right-leaning Alternative for Germany (AfD) fell nationally in the countrys most recent election in 2021, knocking it from its claim as the largest opposition party and the third-biggest party overall, though it remains a force in eastern Germany.

And in Greece, while populist parties still garner a large share of the vote, their popularity has been falling slightly in recent years. Left-leaning Syriza is significantly more popular there than right-leaning parties, including Greek Solution and Golden Dawn.

Despite their electoral gains in many countries, most populist political parties in Europe on the right and left are broadly unpopular, according to Pew Research Center surveys. In fact, outside of Hungary, where the ruling right-populist party Fidesz is seen favorably by 55% of the public, no party receives favorable ratings from a majority of the public.

Still, being seen in a positive light is not a prerequisite for electoral success, as Italy shows. There, only around a third of Italians saw Brothers of Italy (32%), Forza Italia (30%) or Five Star (29%) favorably when the Center surveyed the country this past spring and even fewer said the same of Lega (23%). The share of Italians with a positive view of some of these parties had even fallen since 2020. Nonetheless, record low turnout in Italy and the limited popularity of other parties, including the Democratic Party (38% in 2022, down from 42% in 2021), was enough to catapult the populist coalition to victory.

Note: Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, its methodology and an appendix detailing how populist parties are defined.

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European populist parties vote share on the rise, especially on right - Pew Research Center

The reports about Luiz Incio Lula da Silvas impending comeback as Brazilian president verged on the ecstatic in the week before last Sundays vote. He was after all, fourteen points ahead of his populist rival, incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro, in the last opinion poll before the vote.

But the polls were wrong. Lula got a respectable 48% of the vote, but he was only five points ahead of Bolsonaro at 43%, and in Brazilian politics the candidates in the lead often fall behind in the second round. The long anticipated global decline and fall of the hard-right populist movement has been at least postponed.

This is particularly relevant to the United States, where Donald Trump constantly praises Bolsonaro as Tropical Trump. Lula is to the left of Joe Biden, but both men are ageing stalwarts of the centre-left who have made political comebacks but already feel a little bit like yesterdays news.

What has already happened in this first-round presidential election in Brazil is a triumph of the hard right in the simultaneous Congressional elections that would make another Lula presidency very difficult. Joe Biden may face similar difficulties after next months US mid-term Congressional elections, if polling predictions are right..

Both men have essentially promised a return to the sensible, moderate centre-left politics of yore, and that doesnt seem to be setting hearts aflame in either country. To be fair, however, Lula bears an additional handicap: a criminal conviction.

I spent a whole day with Lula long ago in So Paulos car-making suburb of So Bernardo do Campo, when he was genuinely a horny-handed son of toil and a trade union organiser. He certainly seemed to be an honest man then, even a poor man, but he was freed from jail only last year after serving part of a twelve-year sentence for corruption in office.

It wasnt a lot of money and the charges may have been trumped up: the judge who brought them and sent Lula to jail, Sergio Moro, was later given a post in Bolsonaros government as justice minister. On the other hand, Lula was not exonerated last year; he was released because of procedural irregularities in the case. He could even face trial again.

So there is no clear evidence that the populist wave is subsiding. Bolsonaro could get a second term, Trump could come back in the United States, Modi is not losing his grip in India. Orbn won a landslide re-election victory in Hungary last month, a hard-right coalition won last months election in Italy, Boris Johnson might even make a comeback in the UK.

The driving force in this populist wave is a thinly disguised alliance between a very rich elite and the resentful, downwardly-mobile parts of the old middle and working classes. The emotional cement that holds it together involves a strong dose of extreme religion, deep social conservatism (e.g. homophobia), ultra-nationalism, and anti-immigrant sentiment.

Populism will be with us for some time yet, and it may even spread a bit. Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdoan may cover the rest of the distance to full populism as the countrys economic problems worsen, and France might have gone full populist last year if the French hard-right parties had managed to cooperate. But thats only half the story.

The other side is parties of the democratic left that are winning power in almost all the rest of Latin America Alberto Fernndez in Argentina (2019), Luis Arce in Bolivia (2020), Pedro Castillo in Peru and Gabriel Boric in Chile (2021), Xiomara Castro in Honduras (2022), and most recently Gustavo Petro in Columbia.

Its also noteworthy that only three of the European Unions 27 members currently have populist governments: Italy, Poland and Hungary. Moreover, the new Italian coalition may not last long, and Polands populism is for domestic affairs only: Polish populists are not admirers of Vladimir Putin.

In Asia and Africa, the populist formula has not been deployed in politics at all except in India. As a recently refurbished political technique it is having some successes, but every new political technique loses its freshness after a while.

And neither Lula nor Biden has lost their next elections yet.

Gwynne Dyers new book is The Shortest History of War.

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DYER: Progress and decline of populism Red Deer Advocate - Red Deer Advocate

PENN HILLS, PENNSYLVANIA The race for retiring Rep. Conor Lambs seat in Western Pennsylvania is being fought in starkly populist terms, as Democratic nominee Chris Deluzio pushes a pro-labor, anticorporate greed campaign against his opponent, self-funding millionaire businessman Jeremy Shaffer.

Like Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fettermans run for Senate, Deluzios bid is something of a test case for Democrats who believe economic populism is the key to preserving their edge in former labor strongholds where Republicans have gained ground in recent elections. Early indications are that the strategy is working. Two recent polls commissioned by the campaign and the DCCC indicate that the race is currently tilting in Deluzios favor. While internal polls should be taken with a grain of salt, its notable that Shaffer and the NRCC have not responded with numbers of their own.

Pennsylvanias 17th Congressional District stretches north and west of Pittsburgh, grabbing the parts of Allegheny County not included in neighboring Democratic nominee Summer Lees 12th District, as well as the entirety of exurban Beaver County. While Pittsburgh and its suburbs have mostly trended blue in recent years, Beaver County has trended right. Lamb held the seat for a couple of cycles, but his ill-fated bid for U.S. Senate has left it open.

With an R+3 lean after redistricting, it is daunting territory for Democrats, especially in a midterm year, though the area has had Democratic representation since 2018. Most forecasters have kept the race in the toss-up column, an outlook that appears to be shared by national party committees, which are investing heavily in the race.

More from Austin Ahlman

Groups affiliated with House Democrats and House Republicans have spent over $4 million so far, and that number is expected to balloon in the closing weeks. Shaffer has also boosted his personal campaign coffers with a million-dollar personal loan, and he has benefited from nearly $300,000 in spending by the Koch-affiliated Americans for Prosperity. While Shaffers loan and outside spending advantage have left him with a financial edge overall, Deluzio has handily out-fundraised Shaffer, and the two appear poised for an exceptionally tightand brutalclosing stretch.

In recent weeks, Deluzio and Shaffers campaigns have gone distinctly negative. Deluzios team and national Democrats have lambasted Shaffer for self-funding his campaign, and relentlessly tried to tie his personal wealth and corporate executive title (for a company that creates jobs in China) to the economic pain Western Pennsylvanians have endured in recent decades. Most recently, national Democrats have tried to tie Shaffer to Doug Mastriano, the unpopular Republican gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania.

But Democrats have struggled to puncture Shaffers image as an outsider and moderate consensus-seeker, which he has rooted in his success as a businessman. Like some of the corporate interests that have supported his campaign, Shaffer has managed to maintain his bipartisan veneer by painstakingly avoiding taking any clear stances on conservative social causes.

His campaign website includes various stock diatribes against cancel culture and critical race theory, but so far that rhetoric has been paired with few policy specifics. He has avoided questions about the legitimacy of the 2020 election, as well as LGBTQ rights, where Shaffer has consistently refused to reveal whether he supports basic constitutional protections, such as the right to same-sex marriage, before this year.

Deluzios bid is something of a test case for Democrats who believe economic populism is the key to preserving their edge in former labor strongholds.

In a particularly telling example of Shaffers approach, he once skipped a vote on an LGBTQ nondiscrimination ordinance by the Ross Township Board of Commissioners when he was an elected member. At the time, Shaffer was in the midst of a tough state Senate campaign. (He went on to lose that campaign narrowly, but the measure ultimately passed on a 5-2 vote.)

Prior to Roes reversal, the distinct exception to Shaffers avoidance of hot-button issues was on abortion rights. During previous runs for office, Shaffer indicated that he strongly agreed with the statement that human life begins at conception and deserves legal protection at every stage until natural death. Earlier this cycle, he endorsed further federal actions to restrict access to abortions. The DCCC has highlighted both of these stances in its ad messaging.

But since the emergence of abortion as the defining issue of the cycle, Shaffer has backtracked from those positions on his campaign website, where he now conveniently refers to abortion rights as an issue for state governments to address. Representatives for Shaffers campaign did not respond to the Prospects request for an interview, nor did they respond to a list of questions about Shaffers stances on the aforementioned issues.

For their part, Shaffer and national Republicans have engaged in their own brand of quasi-populism, by seeking to define Deluzio as a radical socialist professor with deep ties to the Sanders-AOC wing of the Democratic Party. As is typical in politics, each of those accusations holds a kernel of truth.

Deluzio, an attorney and Iraq War veteran, is not a full professorhe is the policy director at Pitt Cyber, an institute within the University of Pittsburghs School of Lawbut he has taught a few courses as an adjunct professor, and he proudly touts the way his work at places like the Brennan Center has intersected with voting rights and election security.

While most of Deluzios issue positions are within the mainstream of the party, his unapologetically anti-corporate rhetoric would sound radical to just about any business roundtable (the business lobbies, like the Chamber of Commerce, have lined up behind Shaffers bid.) Deluzios politics have a distinct look and flavor from those of national progressives, but his decision to attend the Democratic National Convention as a Bernie Sanders delegate in 2020 continues to be the subject of frequent attacks.

At first glance, it isnt hard to see why Republicans might think their message would land. While Fettermans populism is bolstered by his gruff aesthetic and mannerisms, Deluzio hardly looks the part of the working-class champion. Compared to Fetterman (who has been subject to similar conservative attacks), Deluzios demeanor is humorously chipper and disarmingly earnest. The button-down shirt and jeans he is commonly spotted in at campaign events hardly exudes the same man-of-the-people energy as Fettermans famed shorts and hoodie sweatshirt. In passing, one of Deluzios staffers joked about the differences between the two candidates. [Fetterman] has the look; Chris doesnt. Chris looks like he could be pulled out of a Brooks Brothers catalog, or something.

Democrats in the 17th Districts harshest terrain, exurban Beaver County, say Republicans line of attack has been particularly potent in recent years, as local residents search for a political explanation for the steep decline of local industry. Marion Tavernaris, another gruff, old-school Pennsylvania Democrat, gave me the context for the showdown between Deluzio and Shaffer. She described several of the districts residents, and its men especially, as former mill workers-in-waiting, who struggled to square Democrats previous chokehold on local politics with the areas rapid economic decline.

In particular, she told me that the closure of the J&L steel mill, a massive operation that once spanned seven miles of the Ohio River, is the most pivotal event in understanding the districts politics, despite it occurring decades ago. I think its just shifted more and more from there, because faith left that, you know, Democrats were for the working people and could provide jobs, she said. Now everything has become a big culture war.

Tavernaris, who volunteers with the local Democratic county party committee, declined to weigh in on how Beaver Countys growing Republican base has responded to Deluzios messaging, but she did say that the thrust of his campaign was in the right direction. She did warn that the biggest issue facing Democrats who attempt outreach in Beaver County is the view that theyve just become so elitist and inauthentic with working people.

Republicans line of attack has been particularly potent in recent years, as local residents search for a political explanation for the steep decline of local industry.

As a perpetual skeptic of candidates who claim the populist mantle, I had the opportunity to vet Deluzios authenticity for myself in late September, at a listening session and free community picnic in Penn Hills. Deluzio joined a slate of local party officials and elected officeholders to hear about the issues facing the community, the largest and most diverse in the region besides Pittsburgh itself. Deluzio spoke animatedlyBeing an Italian guy, he told the crowd apologetically, its hard for me to not move my hands when Ive got a microphoneabout the stakes in his bid against Shaffer.

He briefly recounted his service in Iraq and his work on cybersecurity and voting protections at Pitt Cyber. His mannerisms grew even more excitable when he talked about working on the effort to unionize the University of Pittsburghs staff with the United Steelworkers, which now has a large contingent of graduate students. After spending a few more minutes stressing the importance of the union way of lifea phrase Pennsylvania candidates love to brandishhe ended with some musings over what it means to be a patriotic candidate this election cycle. I dont think its patriotic, he told the crowd, to try to overthrow our democracy I dont think its patriotic to ship our jobs overseas and try to kill the union way of life in Western Pennsylvania I dont think its patriotic to attack womens reproductive freedom.

Deluzio bookended his remarks with aggressive jabs at the corporate executivea title he delivers with palpable disgusthes running against. But with the exception of abortion rights, Deluzio also had noticeably little to say about the cultural fissures arguably driving Western Pennsylvanias rightward shift.

In the Q&A that followed, residents turned little of their attention to the candidate running in a hotly contested congressional seat. Instead, the exchanges were primarily between first-term Penn Hills Mayor Pauline Calabrese and several residents who felt their local government was leaving lower-class and predominantly Black parts of the community behind. The other candidates and officeholders, including Deluzio, stood by meekly while Calabrese and a longtime resident discussed the citys approach to unlawful trash dumping, which attendees appeared to unanimously agree favored whiter, more upper-class parts of the city.

Deluzio followed the panel with a healthy dose of retail politicking, bumping elbows and taking photos with any attendees who stuck around through the speeches and questions. After shaking his last hand, Deluzio caught up with me. I decided to ask Deluzio about a critique of his politics often found on the left, rather than the right: Does messaging rooted almost exclusively in the nostalgia for bygone Midwestern labor strongholds meet the moment for people of color, LGBTQ individuals, and women whose rights in the workplace and beyond are under assault, by an archconservative Supreme Court and increasingly emboldened Republican right wing?

As if to prove the necessity of the question, Deluzio stammered for a few moments before beginning his answer. I think a labor union on the job is one of the most important things you can have to protect workers from racial discrimination, gender discrimination, whatever that may be, he said. The biggest, most powerful corporations, who are wielding all this power over our lives, want to divide us against each other But the union way of life, thats a message of solidarity.

The answer struck me as ever so slightly tone-deaf, but his ardent belief in its corein the power of labor politics to unlock equality in other facets of lifewas unmistakable. We shook hands and parted ways without further grilling on identity issues. But before leaving, I decided to ask some of the lingering attendees whether they thought Deluzios politics met the moment.

Wynona Harper, a longtime activist who founded the nonprofit organization JAMAR Place of Peace after the shooting death of her son Jamar Hawkins, assured me they did. She described Penn Hills as increasingly segregated, and lamented the way other local politicians and representatives are not willing to talk about those issues. But Deluzio, she claimed, was different. Look, Im not in a union, and Im not gonna be, she said. But I know he cares, and I know hes willing to take our issues on.

How did she know? Hes called me, before all of this, hes called me up to hear my perspective, she said, before going on at length about Deluzios commitment to showing solidarity with every part of the district he intends to represent. Catching herself mid-sentence, Harper stopped and pointed across the park at Deluzio, who had looped back to speak more with a few other volunteers.

And, well, hes here right now, isnt he? she said.

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The Populist Pugilist Vying to Replace Conor Lamb - The American Prospect

Anthony J. Constantini is a PhD candidate at the University of Vienna, with a dissertation focus on populism.

A right-populist wave washed over the European Union from 2015 to 2020.

Poland elected a hard-right government, then the following year saw the United Kingdom leave the bloc in 2016. This was followed by the election of populist-right governments in Austria and Italy, and Hungary reelecting Viktor Orbns Fidesz party in 2018. Capping it all off, Poland then reelected their same government in 2019.

Though that wave did, indeed, come to an end, it is clear a second one has now begun, and is possibly threatening the foundations of the EU. But if European integrationists are to understand how to deal with this second wave and prevent its escalation, they must first closely study their reactions or lack thereof to the first populist surge.

Brussels, and much of European media, had responded to this initial wave of populist success with dismissal. It also threw away an early opportunity to demonstrate that EU institutions were democratic during the blocs parliamentary elections in 2019.

While it was expected that the leader of the largest elected party would become president of the European Commission, as per the popular Spitzenkandidaten system, leaders instead picked then German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen who had not run and was little-known leaving a large number of voters feeling unrepresented.

Meanwhile, voter anger over migration aclear driverin severalof the electoral contests was oftentimes ignored orlambastedas nothing but racism, with most of the right-wing victories beingchalked up to disinformation.

And after doing nothing to affect change, the moment there was the briefest of pauses in populist wins from early 2020 to early 2022 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic analysts fell over themselves to explain how the populist wave was over.

Following this brief intermission, however, populism is now sweeping the Continent once again.

Earlier this year, Orbn followed up his 2018 victory with an even larger win against an opposition candidate who identified himself closely with Brussels, and had brought in former European Council President Donald Tusk to campaign on Hungarys National Day.

Sweden followed this trend in its recent election, with the countrys right wing winning power on the strength of the far-right Sweden Democrats, as the party doubled its support among young voterssince the last election

And further south, Italy has just elected the nationalist conservative Georgia Meloni.

Other dominoes may soon fall too.

SpainandFinlandare set to head to the polls in 2023, and both elections could result in right-wing coalitions that would include far-right parties. Meanwhile, Belgiums top two partiesin current polling averages are far-right populists, andPolandsgoverning right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) still leads parliamentary polling and could feasibly govern with the nationalist Confederation.

EU leadership is either ignoring these facts, or its willfully misunderstanding them.

When former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghis unelected technocratic government fell this summer, Brussels helda metaphorical funeral procession, but there was no reckoning as to why the EU had felt forced to place its hopes on an unelected former central banker in the first place. And its almost as if the bloc was trying to reinforce its lack of appraisal, when just days before this years Italian election, von der Leyen threatened to use tools to make Italy comply with Brussels diktats, should Melonis conservatives take power. Surprisingly, her threat didnt alter the results.

Similarly, when Hungary overwhelmingly reelected Orbn, the European Parliament responded by branding the country an electoral autocracy, rather than trying to understand his popularity. And to combat the far right in Poland, Brussels simply cheered when former President of the European Council Donald Tusk became leader of the Civic Platform opposition party once again in order to take down the ruling PiS.

In each of these cases, there remains a persistent unwillingness to understand exactly why populists and the far right are succeeding.

This isnt to say the EU should ignore rule-of-law violations, should such violations exist. After all, corruption and the erosion of law can do serious damage to institutional trust. But EU leadership should still attempt to figure out why these waves are happening and the answers seem relatively obvious.

For one, Brussels has to figure out and clarify the vagueness of EU powers.

For example, is it illegal to ban things like teaching LGBTQ+ rights? And how much power should the Commission have over the purse, like with its plan to restrict Hungarys EU funds? Here, the Commission claims its responding to Hungarian corruption, but if so, then why arent practically openly corrupt member countries like Bulgaria getting an equally close look? And if it is ultimately because of Hungarys treatment of LGBTQ+ rights, then where do those powers come from?

On a broader scope, what should the EU even be? A primarily economic union that also exists to ensure some basic political rights, or an activist political and economic union that will seek to enforce modern interpretations of morality through the courts? These are enormous questions that need answering.

Secondly, Sweden and Italys elections both point to the continued importance of the issue of migration, and the Commission is clearly uncomfortable with this

While von der Leyen did mention migration in her State of the Union address, it only received a cursory sentence near the end, and much more attention was, once again, given to fighting disinformation. But if all right-wing victories are tarred as being the result of disinformation and nothing more, then nothing else will get fixed.

Its important to acknowledge that not every right-wing or populist election win is due to disinformation such victories often occur because of real voter frustration. And if Brussels doesnt try to listen to voters and figure out why a second populist wave is happening, theres no telling what an almost inevitable third wave might bring.

Excerpt from:

Understanding Europes shift to the right - POLITICO Europe

The Trump-Pence sign still hangs on the older building off Main Street in this historic town, a lasting vestige of the campaign fervor that roused voters, including many who still believe the falsehood that the former president didn't lose in 2020 and hope he'll run in 2024.

The enthusiasm for Donald Trump's unique brand of nationalist populism has cut into traditional Democratic strongholds like Monongahela, about 25 miles south of Pittsburgh, where brick storefronts and a Slovak fellowship hall dot Main Street and church bells mark the hours of the day. Republicans are counting on political nostalgia for the Trump era as they battle Democrats this fall in Pennsylvania in races for governor, the U.S. Senate and control of Congress.

"Trump just came along and filled the empty space," said Matti Gruzs, who stitches old blue jeans into tote bags, place mats and other creations she sells at the weekly Farmer's Market downtown. "He's still the king, and the kingmaker."

Against the backdrop of this picturesque place, House Republicans recently released their campaign agenda, hoping their "Commitment to America" can tap into the same political sentiment Trump used to attract not just Republican but independent and former Democratic voters. But it's unclear whether the support that propelled Trump to the White House will be there on Election Day, Nov. 8.

Perhaps even more challenging for the GOP is whether Trump's false claims of voter fraud will cost the party if people believe, as the defeated president claims without evidence, the elections are rigged. Some may just decide to sit out the election.

"It started out as a low-enthusiasm race," said Dave Ball, the Republican Party chairman in Washington County, which includes much of western Pennsylvania.

Ball said enthusiasm has been "building rapidly" his main metric for voter interest in the elections is the demand for lawn signs. "We were wondering, at one point, you know, we were going to see any," he said. "Right now, I can't get my hands on enough."

But Amy Michalic, who was born and raised in Monongahela and works the polls during elections, said she hears skepticism from some voters, particularly Trump supporters, "who think my vote doesn't count."

Trump's claims of fraud have no basis in fact. Dozens of court cases filed by Trump and his supporters have been dismissed or rejected by judges across the nation, but he continues to challenge President Biden's victory. In every state, officials have attested to the accuracy of their elections, and Trump's own attorney general at the time, Bill Barr, said in 2020 there was no voter fraud on a scale to change the outcome.

Michalic reminds skeptical voters in her hometown of the importance of voting and notes that in 2016, no one thought Trump could win. "Look what he did, he took Pennsylvania," she said.

At the Farmer's Market on a recent afternoon, voters shared concerns that many people in the United States voice this election year about the high prices of everything, about finding workers and good-paying jobs, about the culture wars.

"Where do you start?" said Michelle DeHosse, wearing an American flag shirt as she helped vendors set up stands.

DeHosse, who runs a custom-screen print and embroidery shop on Main Street, said she has had trouble hiring employees since the pandemic. While she said just cannot afford the $20 an hour and health care benefits many applicants demand, she understands that many workers need both. "It's the economy that's the biggest concern," she said.

Democrats were sparse among the voters, who didn't seem to have strong feelings for their choices this fall for either of the Senate candidates, Democrat John Fetterman or the Trump-backed Republican Mehmet Oz. Several said they probably would vote party line.

"I don't like either one of them," said Carolyn McCuen, 84, a Republican enjoying sunset with friends and McDonald's coffee at a picnic table by the river.

"Me either," said another Republican, Sam Reo, 76, a retired mechanical engineer, playing oldies from the portable speaker he sets up for the group.

Both still plan to vote. Support for the GOP candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, who was outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, can be seen in the giant signs along Lincoln Highway, an east-west route across the state.

Mastriano is a "folk hero around here," said Gruzs, who recalled his regular updates broadcast during the pandemic.

A history buff who home-schooled her children, Gruzs hasn't missed a vote since she cast her first presidential ballot for Ronald Reagan. The same goes for her husband, Sam, a plumber. They moved here two decades ago from Baltimore, for a better life. Now a grandmother, she spends her days working on her crafts and listening to far-right broadcasts Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk and others.

She is not a fan of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, and isn't convinced he has the toughness needed to push the party's ideas forward. But she did attend the event at a nearby manufacturing facility where lawmakers outlined the GOP agenda. She was heartened to see far-right Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene at the event with McCarthy, and made sure to shake Greene's hand.

"If she's behind him," she said, trailing off. "It looked today he had enough behind him, pushing him."

Trump remains popular, and the sign hanging on the building off of Main Street from his 2020 campaign was far from the only one still visible in the state, two years since that election.

Several of the voters dismissed the investigations against Trump as nothing more than a "witch hunt" designed to keep him from running again office, despite the potentially serious charges being raised in state and federal inquiries. Some voters said they didn't believe the attack on the Capitol was an insurrection, despite the violence waged by pro-Trump supporters trying to overturn Biden's election.

Those views stand in contrast to the hard facts of Jan. 6: More than 850 people have been arrested and charged in the insurrection, some given lengthy sentences by the courts for their involvement. Hours before the siege, Trump told a rally crowd to "fight like hell" for his presidency. Loyalists soon broke into the Capitol, fighting in hand-to-hand combat with police, interrupting Congress as it was certifying the election results. Five people, including a Trump supporter shot by police, died in the immediate aftermath.

And if Trump runs again?

"I wish he would," said McCuen, a retired church secretary. "But I don't know if he will."

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Trump still "king" and "kingmaker" to some in Pennsylvania - CBS News

Last month, a video was posted to Pierre Poilievre's Facebook page accusing the federal government of causing high food prices and driving farmers to ruin. The post on the Tory leaders page laid the blame on "proposed fertilizer cuts" that would force Canadians into an "irresponsible" reliance on expensive imported food.

The video was misleading. The federal government last year announced it was developing a voluntary plan to reduce nitrogen fertilizer emissions by 30 per cent by 2030. Mandatory restrictions on the chemicals were never in the works; instead, farmers would be encouraged to help out by using more efficient fertilizers or using less by changing their farming techniques.

Nitrogen fertilizers account for about two per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions about the same as aviation. In Canada, they account for about a quarter of agricultural emissions and are the only source of emissions in the sector that is growing.

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Within weeks, the 40-second clip posted on Poilievres page was viewed over 35,000 times and received more than 7,500 interactions, making it among the most popular posts about fertilizer on the platform this year. Interactions are a metric used by Facebook parent company Meta that combines a post's likes, comments and shares.

Disinformation and conspiracy theories about Canadas fertilizer reduction strategy have run rampant online, since the release of a doomsday report last year by Canadas $23-billion fertilizer industry. The report claims the plan will cost farmers $48 billion by 2030 and slash yields of our major crops. Since then, conservative politicians and advocacy groups linked to Canada's far-right and fossil fuel lobby, have been posting erroneous information that ranges from greenwashing to flat-out disinformation about the government fertilizer plan, a Canada's National Observer investigation has found.

Nitrogen fertilizers are primarily made from natural gas. As the world tries to reduce gas production and consumption, the chemicals are poised to become increasingly important to the survival of gas companies.

Canada's National Observer looked at Facebook posts containing the word "fertilizer" posted by Canada-based Facebook pages over the past year using Meta's proprietary search engine Crowdtangle, which captures most of the more than 1,000 posts. Of the 120 that garnered the most interactions, 64 per cent were posted by conservative politicians or political parties, right-wing populist groups and pro-fossil fuel groups about the federal fertilizer emissions reduction plan.

Poilievre tops the list of 20 politicians and political parties who posted on the issue, garnering nine of the top 120 posts. Those messages framed the federal emissions reduction plan as an effort to restrict fertilizer use and an attack on farmers that would increase the cost of food for Canadians.

The federal government has not proposed restrictions on fertilizer use and this summer signed a $2.5-billion deal with the provinces to subsidize Canadian farmers. The price of food is primarily shaped by global forces, meaning associated soaring food prices are largely out of Canadian control.

Some comments by Conservatives went even further. Manitoba MP Dan Maziers Facebook page shared a video claiming the fertilizer plan was an "attack on farmers" that would "kill a foundational sector like agriculture" after first "shutting down our oil and gas industry." The federal government continues to offer generous subsidies to farmers and the oil and gas industry.

Canada's National Observer did not receive a response to a request for comment from Poilievre's office by deadline. A spokesperson for Mazier did not address specific questions about the MP's claims about the plan.

Thirty of the top-performing posts were made by right-wing populist groups or media outlets, many with a track record of attacking the Trudeau government. This list includes groups like Ontario Proud, which holds itself out as a grassroots community group but operates anonymously and is part of a family of similar pages linked to conservative operative Jeff Ballingall and right-wing media outlet True North.

For instance, on Aug. 27, a post by the group Alberta Proud warned the federal government to "keep your hands off our farmers" by backing off its "demand" that they reduce fertilizer emissions and use, and highlighted a cartoon repeating a conspiracy theory that the plan is a plot to make people eat crickets and starve them into submission.

Alberta Proud describes itself as "a group of citizens concerned about Alberta's future within Canada" but does not publicly list its members or staff.

The post received over 8,000 interactions, including about 3,200 shares.

Pro-fossil fuel groups received the highest number of interactions. Take an Aug. 15 post by Canada Action, a group that bills itself as an advocate for Canada's natural resource industries. It does not publicly list its members or staff. The post asked followers to support farmers by signing a petition against the fertilizer emissions reduction plan. It received nearly 17,000 interactions.

The confluence of these groups over the fertilizer emissions reduction plan doesn't surprise Simon Fraser University communications professor Shane Gunster, who studies online links between right-wing groups, politicians and natural resource industry lobbies.

"Clearly there are a cluster of groups fossil fuel industry supporter groups, right populist groups, right-wing politicians, etc. that have latched on to this issue as an effective one to whip up outrage against Trudeau and the federal government," he wrote in an email.

Farmers had largely been overlooked by these right-wing groups until recently, but Gunster said their sudden focus on fertilizers suggests they think food-related issues can generate more support for their broader political goals than less publicly "appealing" industries like mining or oil and gas.

Right-wing populism works by politicians finding groups that are "allegedly victimized by those in power" and claiming to stand up for them. Politicians spreading inaccurate information about the federal fertilizer plan then saying they will "stand up for farmers" against it is "emblematic" of this process, Gunster wrote.

Their message is amplified further by the tight links between the different groups. He pointed, for instance, to a July 27 post where Poilievre's Facebook page posted the link to a Toronto Sun column slamming the federal plan. The piece was written by Anthony Furey, a columnist for the paper who also writes for True North.

"This is exactly how the polarizing echo-chambers that now dominate our media and public sphere are built and sustained, pulling audiences into right-wing networks in which the merchants of fake populism in media and politics reinforce each others appeal," Gunster said.

Groups and politicians turning their focus onto the proposed fertilizer emissions reduction plan comes as no surprise to Darrin Qualman, the National Farmers Union director of climate crisis policy. For decades, right-wing politicians have promised farmers that fewer regulatory measures would boost their incomes. While many of those changes have been implemented by conservative, market-friendly governments, they haven't fixed problems like farm debt, high land prices and widespread consolidation.

"The problem for right-wing candidates is that after decades of blaming farm problems on govt agencies and regulations, so little of that policy and infrastructure is left that they are now having a hard time finding agricultural issues to run on little to whip up rural support," Qualman explained via email.

Thus the push by politicians like Poilievre and right-wing groups aligned with his message to frame the government's voluntary emissions reduction plan as a mandatory cut in fertilizer use that will harm farm incomes and food security.

"Farmers are being pushed to have a false fight about fertilizer because those on the right have few agricultural issues or ideas to talk about," he said.

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Investigation reveals Poilievre, populist and pro-natural gas groups spread fertilizer disinformation to whip up outrage against Trudeau - Canada's...

Is populism seeping into County politics? Are we at risk of becoming consumers of services rather than citizens? What responsibility do we have as residents and taxpayers to advance our community? Has Covid altered our mutual contract?

The message resounding from town halls in this municipal election is of detachment rather than engagement. But its more than that. Local politics, at least as expressed at all-candidate meetings, is tending toward the transactional: What will you (candidate) do for me? Some folks insist their taxes are spent where they can see them. They dont trust their elected officials to work in their interest and have a dwindling sense of the collective good. Of the power of community. Was it ever thus? Or is there a harder edge to our politics locally?

We seem some distance from the Ask not what your country can do for you aspirational sense of community. After all, why should we care if others cant afford a home in Prince Edward County? If I have a home I can afford and pay for, is it really in my interest to see more folks living close by? Especially affordable homes? How much of my property tax dollars do I want to see put into homes for other people?

These questions are rarely stated quite this way. Instead such objections are couched euphemistically as Its not what I imagine as the County or It will harm the character and charm of the County.

If I have retired wealthy to Prince Edward County, do I really care if the local economy works? Or, if theres a place for young people?

Some just want their roads fixed. Beyond that, some just want local government to stay out of their way.

Worryingly, some elected folks and candidates are feeding the consumer model of citizenship.

Mayoral candidate Dianne OBrien opposes low-income housing outright proposing that developers be compelled to build rent-to-own.

With 12 years of incumbency on her side, Ameliasburgh candidate Janice Maynard suggests that perhaps the County shouldnt be in the business of affordable homes at all. Perhaps the responsibility to ensure homes for our neighbours belongs solely at the feet of the federal and provincial levels of governmentnot local government. Maynard calls for a massive shift of County resources and dollars away from the things that support our community to roads and bridges.

Like a lot of populist messages, it gets traction at these meetings. Likely at the doorstep too.

There is, however, a cost.

When the frustrated resident tells the candidates from the back of the room that he wants Ameliasburgh tax dollars spent in Ameliasburgh, he is expressing a narrow view of citizenship. It is borne of frustration and a sincere belief his roads should be better maintained.

It is the upshot, I think, of a decade in which elected officials have failed to acknowledge the arithmetic fact, that we cannot afford the 1,100 kilometres of roads that have been downloaded onto the 25,000 residents of Prince Edward County to maintain. Its not an opinion; it is the conclusion of experts hired by the County in 2012 and reaffirmed recently. Yet, neither Shire Hall nor elected officials have yet formed the backbone to say it out loud.

So, while the resident is right to complain about the condition of his road, the truth is that there are no good answers. But suggesting that Shire Hall get out of the business of community-buildingthat it merely becomes a funnel of taxpayer dollars into the bottomless pit of the County roads department is a dangerous path. It is the end of community.

Janice Maynard has pushed for more road money in every budget. Having witnessed the pointlessness of throwing an extra $1 or $2 million into an already expensive roads department, Maynard is planning to go all-in. She said last week that an extra $20 million should be added to the roads budget each year. Where is this money coming from? Property taxpayers? Or libraries? Arenas? Parks? Affordable homes? Transit services?

Robbing community building projects, including nurturing affordable home development, to feed a road hole that will never be filled is a dead end. Stealing support from our most vulnerable and giving it to asphalt companies is as immoral as it is futile. Worse, it is corrosive. To us all.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca

Correction: Last week, this column reported that Mayoral candidate Kyle Mayne was forced to sit through the Ameliasburgh all-candidate meeting on the town hall window ledge as every chair had been taken. In fact, a resident gave up their chair for the candidate.

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Citizens or consumers | The Times - The Wellington Times

This is an excerpt from Global Politics in a Post-Truth Era. You can download the book free of charge from E-International Relations.

The scope and implications of global threats often transcend nation-states jurisdictional and territorial boundaries. By creating inevitable trans-planetary connectivity and interdependencies, globalization and its associated threats have challenged the effectiveness of state-centered interventions and, for that reason, have instigated the need for global governance. In the absence of an overarching authority, global governance aims to manage interdependencies caused by transnational threats and issues (Rosenau 1999). Accordingly, different approaches have been expounded to govern and manage these threats, including policy networks, epistemic communities, interest groups, advocacy groups, issue networks, and international organisations. These approaches focus on the involvement, nature, and authority of the actors involved in the global policy enterprise (Sending 2015). In other words, actors within these approaches compete for authority. For that reason, each approach claims a different source of legitimacy, including institutional, expert, moral, or delegated.

The emergence of post-truth politics has deepened global governances authority and legitimacy challenges at the policy making and implementation levels. Sensationalised, provoked, and emotionally driven public opinions on issues such as climate change, public health, immigration, and others push global policy initiatives toward fragmentation and disintegration. Populism, driven mainly by simplistic explanations, the fast and furious spread of misinformation, and the conspiratorial understanding of given issues (Bergmann 2020, 251-65), has erected new obstacles for policy on issues with global scope and implications. The authority and legitimacy of transnational actors is challenged or rejected by the polarised and mostly nationalised public opinion of post-truth politics. Such limitations are more consequential in political and social contexts where democratic deliberations are essential for policymaking.

Returning to science and facts has been promoted as the antithesis of the post-truth age and socialisation. Science as a fact-based enterprise should be an accepted central source of authority for informed reflection. One approach with claim to science and facts is the notion of epistemic communities networks of professionals with recognised expertise and competence in a particular domain, who withhold an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area (Haas 1992, 03). Unlike interest- based or normative approaches, the significance of epistemic communities is their empirical and objective orientation. As a knowledge-policy nexus, the approach should be consequential for global policy outcomes in the age of post-truth politics. The question, however, arises concerning the practicality of this approach in the realm of democratic politics in the post-truth age, where polarised discourses, beliefs, ideologies, and emotions are more influential in shaping public opinion. Furthermore, with the democratisation of knowledge creation and dissemination due to technological advances and social media, the post-truth age challenges epistemic communities authoritative claim to knowledge and facts and their interpretations for policy consumption. Therefore, it can be argued that in an age characterised by the rejection of monopolising information, facts, and knowledge, epistemic communities do not serve as a solution but as part of the problem. An elitist approach to issues and policies can further stir populist controversies and strengthen the rejection of authority over the production, interpretation, and dissemination of facts, if not facts per se.

This chapter is built around three sections. The first section looks at the evolution of the concept of epistemic communities. It discusses how a promising concept in a time characterised by hyperglobalism (the early 1990s) could not stand its ground as an approach to global governance. The second section deconstructs post-truth politics. By destabilising the link between objectivity and Enlightenment, the section argues that untruths, distorted facts, and misinformation have been prevalent in public discourses and politics since the European Enlightenment. The current hype about the post-truth politics is due to the losing grip of elite circles in Western societies over the monopoly of constructing and disseminating master narratives and discourses for channelling distorted facts, misinformation, and untruths. The third section explores the theoretical and practical challenges associated with epistemic communities approach to dealing with global governance in the age of post-truth.

Epistemic communities: An approach for global governance

Realism, and later neoliberalism, have dominated International Relations (IR) theory for most of its evolutionary age. Despite conceptualising the nature and dynamics of the international system differently, these approaches converge on the unmalleability and fixed nature of state interests, which constrain states behaviour on the international stage. However, these mainstream and positivist IR paradigms could not adequately explain states uncertainty regarding their respective interests in the age of globalisation. The emergence of transnational threats and structural issues has caused uncertainty and misperceptions about states interests, which are the underlying reasons for conflicts in international relations (Stein 1990, 55). Uncertainty and misperceptions about states interests have inspired and shaped new patterns in states behaviour for realising new interests in a rapidly transforming and unpredictable international milieu. Accordingly, such dynamics expanded the scope of intellectual inquiries in International Relations to the new frontiers of global governance. New analytical approaches and tools for explaining and comprehending the socialisation of states on a globalising international stage have emerged. Research on epistemic communities is one of many bodies of literature that seeks to explain patterns of states behaviour in an uncertain and complex global context.

As a conceptual framework within the constructivist IR paradigm, the epistemic communities approach explores the coordination of global governance in an interconnected and interdependent world (Haas 1992, 135). It explains the authority, role, and effects of experts in global affairs. Haas identified four defining characteristics for epistemic communities: shared normative and causal beliefs, shared notions of validity, and common policy enterprise. Unlike interest-based and normative approaches to global policy such as policy networks, interest groups, and issue networks that are engaged in political exchanges to secure better stakes epistemic communities scrutinise issues exclusively under a scientific lens. It is considered more instrumental to effective policy formulation and tangible outcomes. As an example, the approach was deemed influential in shaping some directives and consensus of the European Union (Haas 2016, 08). However, it could not seem to evolve beyond its initial conceptualisation and became marginalised (Cross 2013, 137). Different aspects of the concept have been scrutinised to understand the reasons behind its stagnation, including the political autonomy and orientation of experts, the vague definition of experts, confusion about the target audience (state only or non- state actors as well), the application of science-based arguments in public policy and discourses, and the lack of an analytical tool to explain the consensus on the authoritative claim to knowledge.

While the proponents of epistemic communities have responded to such criticism, a novel area of inquiry about these communities is their application and implications in the post-truth age. Thus, while the concept has emerged to coordinate and facilitate informed policy initiatives in a globalising world with prevailing uncertainties, contemporary post-truth politics have introduced the concept to new challenges. Before exploring these, it is essential to shed light on the emerging narrative of the post-truth age.

International Relations (IR) in the age of post-truth politics

Post-truth is a relatively new adjective in the domestic and global political lexicon. In the age of globalisation, the implications of post-truth politics are directed at societies collective intellectual reflection on issues with national and transnational scope. As such, post-truth politics have effects on international politics and global governance, mainly in societies with democratic deliberations on policy making. It can be inferred that rather than being informed by the objective reflection of the truth of reality, the circumstances related to the post-truth drive the orientation of public and global policy initiatives towards populistic socialisation.

The unexpected rise in narratives related to post-truth politics resulted in widely varying accounts of what caused it to emerge. However, many existing explanations fail to revel the substantive aspects of the problem. The RAND Corporation, for example, identified the transformation and proliferation of conventional and social media, the spread of disinformation, and polarisation as drivers of truth decay (Kavanagh and Rich 2018, 79). Such is a simplistic description of a complex and multidimensional issue. While the proliferation of information sources can facilitate a conducive environment for disseminating both facts or lies, restricting or monopolising these sources have social, political, and moral implications. Furthermore, having control over sources of information does not mean the objectivity of information or the reality of truth. It only restricts the plurality of given narratives in favour of the status quo.

Lewandowsky et al. (2017, 356) relate the malaise of post-truth to the creation of alternative epistemic spaces as platforms for sharing alternative realities. Similarly, Fuller (2016) argues that the post-truth age results from the universalisation of symmetry or epistemic democratisation. Such perspectives hold post-truth as circumstances facilitated by the proliferation of information production and dissemination instruments. Once again, these accounts exclusively focus on the tools and platforms (conventional vs. popular, or mainstream vs. alternative) of information, not on the underlying processes and structures involved in producing information and knowledge. Accordingly, in an editorial, the Social Studies of Science (2017, 3) argues that while the production of scientific knowledge requires infrastructure, effort, ingenuity, and validation structures, the current popular information tools destroy these structures. In general, existing explanations of the post-truth age revolve around the role of social media and other alternative information platforms. They point to the diminishing role of scientific knowledge, objectivity, and facts in shaping public opinion, politics, and policy initiatives. Such comprehensions seem to be based on the assumed role of conventional sources and spaces of information in socialising public opinion with objectivity. The question, however, is if conventional sources truly disseminate facts and objective information?

Scrutinising against the theoretical and practical aspects of objectivity and facts in informing public opinion, the rigor and robustness of existing comprehensions about post-truth politics are questionable. Notably, in the milieu of International Relations, conceptual and practical relationships between objectivity and facts with politics and public opinion are complex. Therefore, it is essential to have a theoretical discussion on the subjectivity of truth and a brief retrospective look at the Western powers long tradition of politicising realities and distorting facts to shape public opinion. These two discussions reveal a complicated picture of truth and objectivity in the political sphere.

Science and Truth

Truth is a philosophical concept, and plenty of controversies are associated with the simple statement of what is truth? (Glanzberg, 2021). It has a strong subjective appeal and is shaped by personal convictions and opinions. Therefore, truth is contested. As a belief-based enterprise, the popularity or universality of a truth does not make it factual or objective, per se. These characteristics complicate the relationship of truth with science, for that reason, with facts. Within the realm of scientific knowledge, the purpose of inquiry is not about truth. Scientific inquiry and its different epistemologies confront or support a position, idea, thesis, and theory with facts and evidence. This is to draw a clear line between scientific and non-scientific endeavours, such as authoritative knowledge. While the beliefs and personal convictions of an overwhelming number of people can constitute a truth this does not necessarily constitute facts, as these truths can be based in superstition or other unprovable mental processes, such as beliefs.

Furthermore, as a self-restraint measure and to avoid transforming to a belief- based enterprise that is not only unquestionable but at the same time equally unprovable, scientific inquiry applies anticipatory processes. These make science open to challenge and change. Within the complex field of philosophy and history of scientific knowledge, explanations such as the 20th centurys probabilism, Karl Poppers falsifiability (Popper 2002), Thomas Kuhns paradigm shift (Kuhn 2012), and Lakatoss research program (Lakatos 1980) identified different mechanisms and structures for the internal consistency of and progress in scientific knowledge. Consequently, while not directly dealing with truth, scientific knowledge actively evolves to defy becoming a belief- based enterprise that can neither be disproved nor subject to argument and challenge.

These arguments do not imply to justify the manifestations of the post-truth politics, such as deceptions, lies, and misinformation in the public sphere. However, the point is that the concept of truth is a complicated philosophical construct that can hardly be squared within the fundamental characteristics of scientific inquiry, including falsifiability, testability, generalisability, and parsimony. Truth is a multifaceted, delicate, and loaded notion that even those who talk about post-truth avoid talking about the truth. For example, RAND Corporation, in its report on Truth Decay, while using the phrase truth decay hundreds of times, the term truth however, is used not more than a handful of times and that exclusively in the context of disclaiming discussing the truth (see Kavanagh and Rich 2018). Similarly, Kakutani (2018), unlike what the books topic reads The Death of Truth did not discuss truth but focused on the fall of reasons or the vanishing of reality. Even though these three truth, reality, and reasons are separate and different elements of mental processes.

The intellectual context surrounding the philosophical juggernaut about discussing truth is understandable. Truth has a pervasive use in ordinary language. However, its meaning, interpretation, and comprehension are nothing but intellectually nebulous. As such, where does this leave the conceptualisation of the term post-truth? A logical fallacy. While the premise truth cannot be straightforwardly conceptualised, at least intellectually, the conclusion post-truth also is challenging to hold up to scrutiny. Nevertheless, it does not mean that prevailing manifestations of the construct of post-truth such as lies, dis/misinformation, and deceptions should be acceptable. However, it also must be acknowledged that the contemporary manifestations of post-truth politics are not novel in the domestic and international domains. In retrospect, the history of modern politics, mainly in a democratic setting, is hardly based on communicating pure facts and evidence. In international relations, the manifestations of post-truth politics has been there forever. This leads us to briefly look at the history of Western powers use of distorted facts, lies, and deceptions in public discourses for shaping public opinion.

The politicised utilisation of facts

Misinformation, fake news, lies, deceptions, and erosion of trust in facts and reality are identified as the manifestations of post-truth politics (Lewandowsky et al. 2017, 364). These ills are even considered deliberate efforts against the broader idea of sanity (Gopnik 2017). A retrospective look at the history of using facts in democratic politics, however, indicates that the contemporary understandings and outcries about the post-truth age are hyper-sensational and idealistic. In politics, distorting, bending, stretching, moderating, or appropriating facts and evidence for public consumption have always been practiced in political deliberations, both democratic or non-democratic.

Public consumption of facts and evidence (acquired or experienced) goes beyond the control and mandate of the scientific knowledge enterprise. The enterprises scope is limited to describing and explaining (positivist approaches) or constructing and interpreting (post-positivism) reality through producing evidence and facts. The utilisation of the discovered or constructed facts within domestic and international political arenas is a political process that contextualises, configures, or appropriates facts for public consumption. The Social Studies of Science (2017) refers to such a process as the configuration of the practices, discourses, and epistemic politics of modern facts. Studying the history of the modern facts, Poovey (1998) explains that facts need to go through a complex configuration with educational and government agendas to look more credible. In the contemporary world, even the hard facts related to environmental issues and catastrophe are appropriated and politicised by juxtaposing them with a politicised deep geological past that is likely to be confusing and forgettable (Davis 2016, 25).

Retrospectively, in international relations, the politicisation, configuration, and appropriation of facts for serving political agendas have existed since the Enlightenment. Therefore, facts, reality and truth have hardly been apolitical. On the contrary, they have been used as raw material for constructing discourses and legitimising power and oppression. European imperial and colonial powers formulated discourses based on distorted facts, lies, and deceptions to shape public opinion in their political domains. They were not concerned with telling the truth but with their interpretation of the truth (Du Bois 1946, 24). They went to the extent of holding their version of truth and facts as representations of nature. From misrepresenting and twisting the notion of natural law, the history of which goes as back as to ancient human civilisations (Neff 2003), to the reducing the state of nature to mans nature and reducing the latter to the good-evil dichotomy (see Hobbes 2011; & Locke 1986), the Enlightenment thinkers carelessly but confidently messed with the truth.

In service of Western imperial and colonial agendas, the Enlightenment thinkers relied on empirical or fact-based validation to construct abstractions that could justify and rationalize violence and subjugation. For example, the abstraction of sovereignty, a contested notion in the contemporary globalized world, was formulated to rationalize the violence against the illegitimate and invisible non-state people (Krishna 2006). Beyond literal meanings, such abstractions contain legal, moral, or political tropes for codifying societies. These are anything but objective, factual, or truthful classification criteria, and schemes. Indeed, ideological, moral, and even pseudoscientific imperatives were packaged and configured as facts and truth for advancing power agendas. Such falsifications were, and still are, needed for influencing Western public opinion about legitimising endeavours undertaken by their states and governments. The philosophical and intellectual foundations for such fabrications were provided by the very Enlightenment ideas such as Lockes government by consent and natural rights (Locke 1986); Kants metaphysics of morals and perpetual peace (Kant 1983); Mills promotion of happiness (Mill 1963); and Cobdens natural harmony of interests, to name a few.

Enlightenment era ideas, such as equality of citizens, limited state power and property rights, served Western societies and their domestic politics. These ideas became instruments for European powers to legitimise violent imperialist and colonialist agendas by constructing discourses grounded in unscientific and untruthful ideas. For example, while Kant promoted republic constitutionalism in the Western world, his pro-slavery and culturalist ideas of mental and cultural incapability of native Americans, Indians, and Africans gave imperialist powers all the [pseudo]intellectual and moral reasons to justify their imperialist endeavours and brutal oppressions in those lands. Similarly, Mills unscientific construct of promotion of happiness, and his pseudoscientific classification of non-European as barbarians and savages provided European powers with intellectual and moral contents to justify their brutal practices elsewhere under the discourse of civilising barbarians and savages. Even Mills idea of non-intervention within and among civilised nations was to effectively create internal harmony among these powers to implement their outward expansionism.

Against the backdrop of Enlightenment thoughts, the news, oral stories and published materials from non-Western colonised or occupied territories presented the Western audience with moral and intellectual reasons to justify Western interventions. They, therefore, legitimised the brutal practices of oppression and domination of their states as it seemed a burden over their shoulders to humanise the less human. The sources of such a mandate were nothing but the very reasons, morals, facts, truths and knowledge fabricated by Enlightenment thinkers. In brief, the intellectual revolution of the era, on the one hand, domestically helped Western societies in terms of subjecting government power to public opinion and consent. On the other hand, it enabled the same powers to construct discourses based on fabricated facts and truth orchestrated by intellectuals to legitimise oppression and brutality.

As a result, the Enlightenment era provided intellectual materials for forming a highly stratified and racially driven and codified international society. The Western powers and their public were unanimous about the subjectivity of [non-European] races to be ruled and about the well-deserved and earned right of the [European race] to rule and expand its rule beyond its own domain (Said 1995, 30). Therefore, in addition to having controversial racial histories, the thinkers of the Enlightenment were instrumental in shaping public opinion via untruthful facts. By doing so, these thinkers served as enablers in legitimising European violence and repression. Hence, post-truth is not an ahistorical contemporary phenomenon but a historical one which goes as least to the onset of the modern age, the age of reason and Enlightenment.

Similarly, since the end of the Second World War, fabricated facts and overstretched truths have been influential in defining power dynamics and the relationships between the Western powers and the rest. To advance their international agendas Western powers package distorted facts and truths within constructed discourses with moral and normative appeals for the domestic audience. Modernisation, development, freedom, security, globalisation, democracy, terrorism and other such terms are examples of discourses that have been shaped and presented as objective facts and undeniable truths for stratifying international society. The main instrument for the Western powers to disseminate fabricated facts and untruths is through the media.

Conventional media is an integral part of this enterprise that furthers the discourses by adding additional layers and contents. From the colonial era, including during the professionalisation period of journalism in the early 20th century, media has routinely used hoaxes, sensationalism, and exaggeration (Finneman and Thomas 2018, 112). In addition to serving specific ideological and strategic goals, the media also has an economic incentive in promoting and disseminating constructed discourses. Using hoaxes, sensationalism, and exaggeration has remained means of selling newspapers from colonial times to today (Fedler 1989). So, if lies, deceptions, and untruths have been shaping public opinion since the beginning of the modern era, why is the concept of post-truth now becoming a lexicon in political science and international relations?

Post-truth or the end of a monopoly?

In the current age, the problem is not the invention of the post-truth political malaise but the dissolution of monopoly over the means of constructing discourses and their subsequent propagation. Since the Enlightenment, such a monopoly was in the hands of states machinery and mainstream traditional media. The populace was only at the receiving end to consume or recycle the presented discourses containing lies, fabrications, and untruths. With the democratisation (or proliferation) of information production and dissemination tools, the one-way top-bottom dynamic of manufacturing and dissemination of discourses has drastically transformed. Popular and alternative information creation and dissemination sources have become relevant, significant and influential in todays world. This has challenged the authoritative grasp and monopoly of elite sources, including the mainstream media, over the production, configuration, and dissemination of facts. Such a challenge has caused the emergence of the current alarmist narratives about post-truth politics. Among others, the proliferation of social media is crucial in challenging the domination and monopoly of political and ideological elites to influence and shape public opinion on given issues.

This change has three main aspects. First, with the proliferation of social and alternative information sources, the domain of discourse formulation and dissemination has diffused to the public sphere. Referred to as the universalisation of symmetry or the democratisation of epistemic (Fuller 2016), the monopoly over influencing and shaping public opinion is no longer the exclusive enterprise of the government and conventional media. Now the populace has platforms and tools to construct discourses and shape the opinion of their own kinds. Secondly, this democratisation subjected politics and power structures, mainly in democratic societies, to polarised public scrutiny through (mis)informed reflection shaped by alternative sources. Thirdly, and perhaps the most crucial but overlooked aspect of the post-truth age, is the changing relationship between the populace and the mainstream/ conventional media.

The popularity of the alternative means of information over the mainstream may not necessarily mean denial of facts or science, but the rejection of master narratives and discourses channelled from (mostly) mainstream media sources. Polarised public opinion may not indicate rejecting specific policy but resisting political discourse channelled from ideologically oriented mainstream sources, including media, corporations, and networks. Farrell (2015, 373) found that the increase in the climate change contrarian/denialist materials in five US media sources from 19932013 was not directly the rejection of climate change but the attached discourses. The study revealed that networks and corporations successfully influence the production and dissemination of denialist discourses, as they have broader interests in the privatisation of science and the influence of corporate lobbying around scientific issues (Farrell 2015, 373). As such, the public scepticism or rejection of media and corporate discourses does not imply the rejection of facts and science. Boussalis and Coan (2016, 98) found that relative to arguments against climate policy, the amount of denialist materials against mainstream climate science has increased since 2009. The study concludes that scientific scepticism often has political roots. This indicates that the polarised popular approach in the post-truth age is not necessarily against facts or truth but against monopolising facts and truth by elites, establishments, corporations and mainstream media.

The hyper-sensationalism about post-truth politics does not indicate the emergence of a new age in the relationship between the public and the truth. It is about the diminishing monopoly of conventional sources over controlling the construction and dissemination of master narratives. On the contrary, alternative sources effectively sway public opinions away from the mainstream influence on different issues. In such an antagonistic epistemic milieu, when the proliferation of epistemic sources and spaces disrupts the realisation of informed public reflection on issues related to public and global policies, what challenges are there for epistemic communities.

The Challenges of Epistemic Communities in the post-truth Age

In the age of post-truth, the epistemic communities approach to policy enterprise has practical challenges. These challenges, however, stem from the epistemological foundation of the approach, which is at a crossroads of constructivism and empiricism. Hence, before discussing the practical challenges, it is helpful to review its theoretical limitations.

Theoretical challenges

Constructivism challenged the fundamental tenets of the positivist IR paradigms. However, before the emergence of constructivism, the positivist tradition experienced an internal rift by reconceptualising the assumption of facts as natural. Thomas Kuhn, in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, rejected correspondence theory which claims that true statements correspond to facts about the world (Hacking 2012). The theory was fundamental in shaping the logical empiricist International Relations approaches that inferred conclusions about the nature of the international system from the overarching ontological assumptions such as nature of man and man in nature. Subsequently, constructivism reconsidered the fabric of facts and reality, which led to redrawing the fundamental theoretical premises of international politics and governance.

As an IR theory, constructivism discusses the role of ideas and structure in shaping world politics by redefining relationships between actors. While ideas shape the meaning and structure of material reality through interpretation, structures give the agents autonomy to interact with others inside the structure to reshape the structure (Wendt 1999). This challenged the fixed nature of actors interests, leading to restrained manoeuvrability in their behaviour on the international stage. Within the ideas and structures theoretical premises of constructivism, epistemic communities offer a model in which state and non-state actors construct their political realities through the knowledge provided to them by the experts. These actors formulate their interests and reconcile differences of interests (Haas 2015, 13). Haas argues that in their efforts to ameliorate uncertainty surrounding unfolding issues and hold some reality or truth about them, policymakers would turn to epistemic communities for knowledge. The communities will bring their knowledge- based interpretation of their casually informed version of reality and validity (Haas 1992, 21).

This account of reality and truth is embedded in constructivist epistemology, which argues against the true existence of reality out there in the social world (Holznere and Marx 1978). However, by claiming an authoritative claim to policy knowledge, epistemic communities epistemic attitude converges toward positivist orientation. While constructivism conceptualises reality as socially constructed and is suspicious of the existence of objective reality, the epistemic communities approach monopolises its construct and interpretation to a close expert circle. Haas argues that the communities do not necessarily generate truth (Haas 1992, 23). However, monopolising the construct of reality to experts is not compatible with the fundamental premises of constructivism. As such, while originating from constructivist epistemology, epistemic communities as an elitist approach re-introduces policy enterprise to empirical orientation. In the post-truth age characterised by the proliferation of epistemic sources and spaces and a hyper-polarised political struggle for dominance within the domain of policymaking, such a monopoly over the construction and interpretation of reality is counterproductive. Instead of offering a solution, epistemic elitism further polarises the struggle for authority and dominance within policy and knowledge enterprises.

Policy enterprise, by nature, is in a dialectic tension between knowledge and politics (Torgerson 1986, 3359). This tension was crucial in derailing the public policy field from its initial envisioned post-positivist and democratic epistemological orientation towards empirical enterprise (DeLeon and Vogenbeck 2007, 3). The latter is characterised by the objective separation of facts and values (Fischer 2007, 223). As a result, the empiricist orientation introduced epistemological and methodological limitations to public policy enterprise, including over-generalising facts to non-related contexts. Initially, the facts-values paradox prompted the overlooking of political and social values that could not be translated into brute facts or pure scientific ends. As a result, the paradox practically distorted the effectiveness of the policy field for much of its evolutionary age. Rigorous quantitative analyses did not prove practical for social problems. With the shift of policy enterprise to post- positivism, the facts-values paradox seemed to resolve by reconciling empirical and political ends. However, the epistemic communities approach revives the facts-values paradox by pushing policy enterprise into the empiricist-constructivist epistemological juncture. It designates exclusive circles to reside over constructing facts, reimaging values, and, hence, shaping public policy as an exclusive expert or elite-oriented policy enterprise.

Such an epistemological realignment of public policy is not a solution but a problem in the post-truth age, characterised as the democratisation of the epistemic. In such a contested milieu, claiming expert authority cannot overrule the significance and relevance of other sources of authority claimed by other actors such as moral authority by activist and advocacy groups, or delegated and institutional authorities of elected officials and technocrats. As such, to claim exclusive expert authority in the age of post-truth is to conspire with political elites to monopolise facts and truths. The monopoly of expert and political elites over facts and reality production is not a novel idea, but a tradition that has been in practice at least since the Enlightenment, where intellectuals created norms, morals, ideas, and knowledge, and the imperialist and colonialist statesmen built upon them and created their own truths and realities about the world.

Practical Challenges

Given its elitist orientation, a question arises about the functionality of epistemic communities in the realm of democratic politics in the post-truth age. How can expert communities influence public opinion that socialises within unconventional and alternative epistemic spaces? The first practical challenge the approach faces in the post-truth age is its disconnect with democratic deliberations. The elitist orientation of epistemic communities to dominate policy enterprise contradicts the competition and pluralism principles of democratic deliberations.

In democratic settings, competition between actors is integral to policy processes. These processes are undertaken in a crowded and contested field of actors who claim different sources of authority and legitimacy to influence policy proposals and outcomes. In addition to expert authority, delegated, institutional, or moral are sources of authority in the policy arena (Sending 2015). This shows that scientific reasoning is only one instrument among many means of influence and reasoning at the disposal of different actors to advance their ideas and interests. Pluralism is another characteristic of democratic policy deliberation incompatible with the epistemic communities expert-centred approach. Public participation is crucial for policy initiatives and a core normative value in functional democracies (Fischer 2002, 01). To realise this, public opinion (directly or indirectly) in policy deliberations is an unavoidable condition, and elected officials are entitled to moral, delegated, or institutional authority by virtue of representing people. Within the contemporary political landscape, socio-cultural, ideological, and identity- related values and discourses are crucial in defining and shaping polarised public opinion and perspectives. Opinions on given issues, domestic or global, shape a unique character of contemporary democratic politics the rise of both right and left populistic orientation to public policy. Epistemic communities, claiming to offer an apolitical instrumentalist approach to policy processes, are impractical options whilst policymaking is becoming more politicised.

In the post-truth age, the malleability of public opinion to emotional appeals and personal beliefs should not, and cannot, defy the public deliberation principle of policymaking in democratic settings. While the functionality of democracy is linked with well-informed citizens (Kuklinski et al. 2000, 790 816), misinformed or ill-informed reflections on policy issues cannot override the principle of public participation. More importantly, with the emergence of post-positivist approaches to knowledge and reality, the notion of informed or ill-informed became more subjective to meaning and interpretation. This challenges the legitimacy of the elitist authoritative claim to policy knowledge. In general, these limitations point to a gap in dialogue and communication between epistemic communities and democratic politics. By relying on scientific language, experts may not convince a politician whose arguments may be focused on public interest or opinion.

The second practical challenge is that the instrumental rationality of epistemic communities is incompatible with the bounded rationality that drives policy practices. Epistemic communities hold expert knowledge as an exclusive means to policy ends. Policy practices, on the contrary, are driven by bounded rationality which is defined as incomplete human understanding of social phenomena due to limited cognitive, attentive, or scientific factors that drive policymakers to be part of a given problem at the expense of others (Andrews 2007, 161). As such, such a tension weakens the robustness and practicality of the epistemic communities authoritative claim to knowledge.

The expert-focused approach of epistemic communities reinforces the challenges for its practicality in post-truth politics. Focusing exclusively on instrumental rationality as the means of influence overlooks the significance of dialectic/communicative discourses and participatory action practices of democratic politics and policy deliberations. Communicative rationality makes the democratic policymaking processes contested with dialogue and argumentation to reach a consensus. Rather than merely scientific, such argumentation is based on various discourses normative, socio-cultural, ideological, and identity. In addition, communication and interactions are necessary conditions in policy deliberation. It not only contextualizes rationality but also validates normative rightness, theoretical truth, and subjective truthfulness (Habermas 1992, 2857). In the post-truth age, in addition to scientific facts, these three elements of mental processes are crucial in driving public opinion. As such, the role of these elements in domestic policy deliberations has become substantive. They shape perspectives and public opinion.

Communicative rationality is a widespread practice within democratic policymaking processes. Epistemic communities, by offering policy solutions from a highly centralised and elitist source, on the contrary, is an authoritative approach and is incompatible with dialogue and argumentation. Focusing exclusively on instrumental rationality as the means to influence, the approach overlooks other practicing communicative discourses and participatory action practices of democratic politics.

A fundamental epistemological assumption of constructivism holds human agreement on social facts independent from the voluntary contract between actors. On the contrary, the exclusive contract between experts and policymakers that excludes public and democratic deliberations prevents epistemic communities from transforming into structures capable of offering language and meaning for generating agreement. Furthermore, in the age of post-truth, characterised by the proliferation and dissemination of sources of inferring meaning, any efforts to monopolise processes of inference and interpretations in the hands of experts are counterproductive. It further pushes public opinion on facts, reality, and truth towards novice alternative sources and spaces. This can happen as a reaction against pushing policy enterprise further away from democratic deliberations toward the expert- policy nexus.

Furthermore, global policys uncertain and complex nature challenges epistemic communities claim of authoritative expert knowledge. Paradoxically, given the changing nature of global issues, such a claim seems subjective and unsubstantiated. For instance, about global immigration, in an intellectual and scientific milieu, where different studies of various disciplinary nature and at different analytical levels suggest conflicting impacts of immigration on a national economy what authoritative knowledge can a given epistemic community offer to policymakers? Similarly, the authoritative claim to knowledge cannot be objectively verified when globalisation and its master discourse of neoliberalism affect and transform contemporary social and economic issues differently in different socio-economic and political contexts. As such, any authoritative claim to facts and reality lacks objectivity and rigor and is more inclined to secure dominance and primacy in a contested global policy milieu crowded with different actors claiming various types of authorities.

Lastly, the increasing complexity of domestic and global issues confounded by the prevailing manifestation of post-truth politics necessitated an additional task in the policy enterprise public education and learning. The task of scientific policy professionals would be to provide technical information for problem-solving and combine it with a new function of facilitating public deliberation and learning (Fischer 2004, 2127). Fischer proposes that public deliberation and learning are highly relevant to domestic and global issues of democratic politics to expand and enable popular participation and informed reflection in the policy process.

With the polarisation of public opinion on domestic and global issues, policy formulation and making processes have become more contested by a struggle between science and politics or facts and values. In addition to competing for authority and power within these processes, the need for the contemporary science-based policy intermediaries including expert networks and think tanks to facilitate transferring learnings, communicating knowledge, and fostering public debate on policy issues and solutions to the grassroots multiplies. In its expounding, the epistemic communities approach mostly overlooks these undertakings in policy-related practices. While the role of science and facts in policy endeavours is becoming more crucial in a time identified as post-truth, focusing exclusively on the experts-politicians dynamics excludes an increasingly crucial element from the nexus the significance and the role of informed public reflection.

Conclusion

Contemporary narratives on post-truth alarm us about the emergence of a new age in the relationships between truth and public opinion. These accounts describe the post-truth age as a circumstance in which emotions and beliefs are more effective in shaping public opinion and political actions than facts and truth. However, in the realm of international relations, objectivity, pure facts, and the truth of reality do not often have the currency for informed reflections. On the contrary, since the Enlightenment, untruths,

distorted realities and fabricated facts have enabled Western powers to domestically shape public opinion to justify their inflicted injustices, oppressions, and brutalities elsewhere. The current hype about post-truth in Western societies has less to do with facts and science but more with a dissolving monopoly of power circles political establishment and mainstream media over constructing and disseminating master narratives and discourses. The proliferation of alternative epistemic sources and spaces has provided the populace with instruments and tools to construct and disseminate their own narratives about given issues. Such epistemic democratisation pushes public policy endeavours on domestic and global issues towards a populist orientation. Accordingly, having a pure scientific orientation, epistemic communities approach to public policy seems promising in counteracting the post-truth politics both in domestic and global policy arenas. However, the approach has theoretical and practical limitations in effectively shifting policy practices from populist toward scientific socialisation.

The post-truth age reinforces epistemic communities challenges to be an effective and transformative policy approach. Its expert-centred epistemic practices are not aligned with some crucial aspects of policy processes in a democratic setting. The elitist orientation defies the competitive and pluralistic nature of democratic policy practices. Furthermore, the instrumental rationality of the approach is not compatible with the practical bounded rationality of public policy. In the post-truth age, instrumental rationality is far from having an authoritative command on peoples perspectives, perceptions, and understandings shaped by emotional appeals and personal beliefs.

With the spread of populism, where emotions and beliefs shape public opinion and political actions and where the arguments of politicians are centred exclusively on public opinion the scientific nature of the language employed by epistemic communities may not be convincing. Such divergence creates a strategic gap in dialogue and communication between epistemic communities and democratic politics. Lastly, as post-truth politics is characterised by being informed by polarised and ill-informed public opinion, epistemic communities approach to policy offers no initiatives to facilitate an informed public reflection on policy issues through public deliberations and learning. By offering an exclusive expert-policy nexus, epistemic communities overlook the significance of communicating knowledge and fostering public debate on policy issues.

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The Challenges of Epistemic Communities in Shaping Policy in the Age of Post-Truth - E-International Relations

I have found through my constant exposure to them through the years that the EUs intellectual cheerleaders among geopolitical analysts funded as they so often are by the very institution they are supposed to be impartially analyzing are as numerous as they are clueless.

At my political risk firm, the joke goes that if Brussels is for something entrusting its energy security to the Russians, confidently predicting that Europe will emerge as the dominant superpower in our new era, or ignoring the threat that China poses we should instinctively bet against them, so often and regularly are they proved mistaken. Beyond the mirth, there are two concrete reasons EU analysts are so unerringly wrong.

First, the corkscrew way EU cheerleaders reason dooms them from the start. In a sort of Kafkaesque example of magical thinking, they believe that while EU policy success confirms the upward trajectory of Brussels, failure also somehow means the bloc is about to arrive. Success obviously means the EU is headed in the right direction; failure, in a bizarre form of Hegelianism, means Brussels will inevitably learn from whatever it has done wrong, immediately and rationally make the necessary corrections, and move onward unto sunlit uplands. As ever with wish-fulfillment, these cheerleaders fool no one so much as themselves.

Their second major intellectual mistake is to confuse analysis with what they would like to happen. Brussels advocates invariably tout the death knell of populism, the EUs sworn enemy, because across Europe it embodies the very things Brussels most hates it is nationalistic, suspicious of experts, and democratic rather than elite-driven.

So, EU cheerleaders excitedly (but wrongly) thought European populism would be extinguished as a result of the pandemic crisis, when the vital need for the supremacy of technocrats became self-evident (at least to them). Instead, these experts were proved wrong time and again from vastly overstating the efficacy of lockdowns, to the quasi-religious primacy of mask-wearing, to wholly subordinating economic, social and democratic rights, all in the myopic service of a health dictatorship.

Next, with the invasion of Ukraine, these same experts felt populism would come to an end, because the overriding imperative of international cooperation (a supposed strength of Brussels) over the conflict was self-evident. Once again the EUs cheerleaders got it wrong, while populists learned the realist lesson that a countrys specific national and geostrategic interests are paramount; plus actually having an army neither of which are policy areas in which the EU is anything other than a pipsqueak.

What did Italys newly victorious Giorgia Meloni do, even before coming to power, that so threatens the Brussels establishment?

Dr. John C. Hulsman

Recent political facts confirm my political risk call, rather than that of my cheerleader foes. In Sweden, the rightist populist Sweden Democrats, rather than disappearing as most EU analysts had confidently predicted, now hold the balance of power. Even more importantly, last week in Italy there was an overwhelming populist rightist electoral victory over the remnants of the Brussels-installed center-left political establishment. One of the great powers of Europe, contrary to the fever-dream of the EUs favored pundits, decisively elected a government deeply skeptical about the very nature of Brussels itself.

Of course, confronted by the imminent election of a government not to its tastes, the EUs authoritarian visage, so often hidden behind banal verities about its innate goodness, became plain for all to see. Just a week before the Italian election, a grim European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, referencing serial troublemakers Poland and Hungary, threatened that Brussels had the tools to deal with wayward members not content to sing along with the EUs supranational, elite-driven hymnal.

What did Italys newly victorious Giorgia Meloni do, even before coming to power, that so threatens the Brussels establishment? Or, to put it another way, what explains the meteoric rise of her rightist populist Brothers of Italy party from 4 percent of the vote in 2018 to a dominant 26 percent now? First and foremost, Meloni crucially decided to stay out of the EU-imposed government of national unity run by Brussels darling Mario Draghi, which managed to last for only 18 storm-tossed months.

Meloni proved to be highly effective in opposition, artfully questioning whether Draghis authoritarian response to COVID was serving basic democratic ends, given his habitual governing by authoritarian decree rather than the usual parliamentary process. As ever, biography proved to be destiny; Draghi, a technocrat to his fingertips, thought the pandemic crisis too important to be left to the vagaries of democratic scrutiny. Meloni brilliantly made her commitment to democracy (despite the present hyperventilating of the mainstream media) abundantly clear, while yet another unelected, Brussels-imposed prime minister ignored any shred of democratic practice.

Second, this Brussels-imposed elite (incredibly, Meloni will be Italys first elected prime minister since the odious Silvio Berlusconi was ousted by the EU in 2011) has utterly failed at the policy level. Extraordinarily, Italian GDP per capita is lower now than it was before the country adopted the euro in 1999. This lost economic generation is only a few years away from irrelevance, more likely to end up a crumbling, irrelevant Greece than to emerge as the new Germany.

In just practical terms, EU tutelage has been an absolute disaster for Italy, and for a long while. It is little wonder its citizens have revolted against its EU-shackled establishment.

John C. Hulsman is the president and managing partner of John C. Hulsman Enterprises, a prominent global political risk consulting firm. He is also a senior columnist for City AM, the newspaper of the City of London. He can be contacted via johnhulsman.substack.com.

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The EU, not Meloni, is the threat to democracy - Arab News

Bulgaria, where I serve as a legislator, is at a crossroads, and I fear that the U.S. does not have my country truly in focus.

I realized this recently following various meetings during my first visit to Washington. Ukraine was discussed, rightfully so, and of course Bulgarias support for the NATO effort. But the U.S. must be equally aware that Russia considers Bulgaria the soft underbelly of NATO and the European Union and that Vladimir Putin is deploying resources to influence our National Assembly elections Sunday. Depending on the outcome, Bulgarias support for the Wests objectives could waver in the near future.

The Bulgarian people have a strong bond with Russia in terms of history, Slavic culture, and religion. But Bulgaria took a definitive step westward, away from Russias influence, to create a fully democratic country in the 1990s. We followed this up by seeking membership in the EU and NATO. Bulgaria has since implemented sound economic and fiscal policies and has the lowest debt in Europe. It has not been destabilized by ethnic strife, as other countries have in the region. Despite ongoing problems with corruption, the rule of law, and media disinformation, we continue to reform and improve.

Still, Bulgaria is the poorest EU member state. I represent a corner of Bulgaria that suffers from the highest unemployment rate and the lowest amount of investment. Before the invasion of Ukraine, the average monthly income was only $600 for my constituents. Outside the capital city of Sofia, people are struggling and may be susceptible to false promises.

Bulgarias citizens are facing a very cold winter. Anti-democratic forces see this situation as an opportunity to exploit. A good example of this is the Vazrazhdane Party (Revival Party), a party led by Kostadin Kostadinov, who cultivates relations with Bulgarian minorities throughout the Balkans and is proposing a referendum to exit the EU and NATO. The partys support is increasing in the run-up to this election.

Bulgaria is strategically located in southeast Europe and on the Black Sea, another reason Russia sees us as a desirable target. Bulgaria was the first country in Europe to be shut off from Russian natural gas, on which our economy is highly dependent. This was a calculated attempt to foment unrest and weaken pro-Western parties. Some political figures have openly opposed the implementation of sanctions in support of Ukraine, telling people that Ukraine is responsible for Bulgarias economic problems. These anti-democratic forces are trying to create a regional distraction from the Wests important goals in Ukraine.

Today, Bulgaria needs a government to stand as a bulwark against such destructive, ultra-nationalistic populism encouraged by foreign actors. Such messages have serious consequences. In just the last year, three new far-right parties have been formed, underpinned by a populism voicing overtly pro-Russian sentiments. However, it is the covert Russian influence of some of the other populist parties that could tip the scales in the weeks ahead during the formation of a new government.

Bulgaria has relied upon and welcomed both American support and assistance, viewing the U.S. as a partner for Bulgarias democratic future. We could use some American help right now. The U.S. must encourage all pro-Western parties in the post-election period to cooperate and to form a coalition that will act as a bulwark against the ultra-nationalist and populist parties that are gaining ground with each election in the past 18 months. Now is not the time for division among like-minded parties.

A failure to cooperate will carry a high cost not only for Bulgaria but also for the EU and the NATO alliance. What we need from the U.S. is a clear sign that it staunchly supports all the pro-trans-Atlantic parties that will ensure Bulgarias firm anchoring in the West. This will ensure that Bulgaria continues to move forward, not to fall back into Moscows orbit and not to backslide on the reform work it has already undertaken.

Rossitsa Kirova served as deputy speaker in the 46th and 47th Bulgarian National Assemblies.

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Bulgaria's elections could threaten NATO and EU unity on Ukraine - Washington Examiner