Gabor Scheiring

How Democracies Revive: Lula wins in Brazil; students defeat farright in Serbia! 🎖️🥳✨

Illiberalism Studies Program

I started my book talks @mortaracenter.bsky.social, @gwu1821.bsky.social, @kettering.org with a personal anecdote. A small room in the 2000s packed with activists & big hopes, when many believed another world is possible. The came #illiberalism. How will #democracy revive? Snapshots from sunny DC.

Gabor Scheiring reposted

Kettering Foundation

@kettering.org

Germany’s far-right surge is not just a German story. In this week’s #ResilienceResistance, 2025 CFK Global Fellow Gábor Scheiring looks beyond the latest election results to examine the deeper democratic crisis fueling the AfD’s rise and why its implications reach far beyond Germany.

Gabor Scheiring reposted

@illsp.bsky.social

Join us on Oct. 21 for How Democracies Revive, with @gscheiring.bsky.social and @msnegovaya.bsky.social. You won't want to miss it! Register here: tinyurl.com/2v5wzhce @ieres-gwu.bsky.social

Hey friends in DC! I'm arriving later today for two weeks. Drop by if you want to hear what we've been up to with Jávor Benedek at one of the three talks introducing our forthcoming Stanford University Press book, How Democracies Revive: Why Illiberalism Keeps Winning and What to Do About It. 1/4

eventbrite.comHow Democracies Revive: Why Illiberalism Keeps Winning and What to Do AboutJoin us for a discussion with Gábor Scheiring about his new book, How Democracies Revive, moderated by Maria Snegovaya.

2. GWU Illiberalism Studies Program, in conversation with the multi-talented Maria Snegovaya October 21, 4–5 pm EDT, Elliott School, 1957 E Street NW, Suite 412 www.eventbrite.com/e/how-democr... 3/4

globaldemocracycoalition.orgKettering Foundation Book Talk with Gábor Scheiring – Global Democracy Coalition

3. Kettering Foundation, in conversation with Paloma Dallas, Senior Program Officer for Democracy around the Globe. Streamed live. October 22, 12–2 pm EDT, 1299 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Suite 1120 globaldemocracycoalition.org/event/ketter... 4/4

events.georgetown.eduHow Democracies Revive: Why Illiberalism Keeps Winning and What to Do About ItThe MA in Democracy and Governance, Mortara Center for International Studies, and Democracy Initiative host a talk with Gábor Scheiring, Assistant...

1. Georgetown University, The MA in Democracy and Governance, Mortara Center for International Studies, and Democracy Initiative October 15, 12:00–1:30 pm EDT, 3600 N Street NW events.georgetown.edu/event/41208-... 2/4

Gabor Scheiring reposted

Flamman

@flamman.se

Alternativ för Tyskland växer bland unga, arbetare och företagare – och starkast där industrisamhället gått sönder. Demokratiforskaren @gscheiring.bsky.social menar att ytterhögern inte är ett kulturuppror utan ett svar på en ekonomisk modell som slutat fungera. www.flamman.se/inget-altern...

flamman.seInget alternativ för TysklandFramgångarna för Alternativ för Tyskland förklaras ofta med invandring. Men den verkliga förklaringen finns i en ekonomi som slutat fungera.

Contract signed across three continents, so now I am ready to believe it: @stanfordpress.bsky.social will publish our book with Benedek Javor: How Democracies Revive: Why Illiberalism Keeps Winning and What to Do About It. ✨📖🤓🧵

There is good news too. Democracy is reviving in Hungary, Uruguay, South Korea, and in the US resistance to Trump. The book draws out what these cases have in common and ends with concrete recommendations for strategy and policy. More on that later.

For now, let us just pause at this milestone and sit with this certainty that SUP is going to publish the book next year.

The book blends scholarly research with insider political experience. We trace illiberalism to a hierarchical global economic order that produces a triple devaluation of economic status, cultural worth, and political voice, which illiberal movements mobilize.

Existing accounts (cultural backlash, economic grievance, the illiberal playbook) each explain part of the picture. None captures how comprehensive the challenge has become, or how closely it is tied to the weakness of pro-democracy forces.

It was an absolute pleasure writing this with such an amazing co-author, reconnecting with our old shared memories and reviving them with new analytical insights. Thank you, Bence! When we started on his suggestion, we were committed, but this milestone seemed a long way off.

And this is only the end of the beginning. The book will come out by next fall at the latest, and we are already planning the book talks. Recommendations and invitations welcome!

New piece just out on the AfD's 44% in Saxony-Anhalt and why the standard explanations for the far right keep failing, currently on @jacobinmagazin.bsky.social's front page. #populism #FarRight @polisky.bsky.social #democracy #illiberalism #Germany #Europe 🧵1/13 jacobin.com/2026/09/afd-...

Polanyi saw two exits from this paralysis: fascism, or social democracy. So far, today's "polycrisis" has produced only the first answer. As long as we keep reading the far right one variable at a time, nobody will offer the second. Link in the first post. 12/13

jacobin.comThe Rise of Germany’s Far Right Reflects a Systemic CrisisPundits have widely explained the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland in terms of cultural backlash or the eastern German psyche. Yet its rise is no passing disturbance but a symptom of ...

jacobin.com/2026/09/afd-... 13/13

The far right is a symptom of the exhaustion of the postwar class compromise that made liberal democracy possible in the first place. Polanyi and Gramsci worked this out for the 1930s, and their frameworks fit today with uncomfortable precision. 10/13

German real wages have stagnated since the early 1990s; 89% of AfD voters in Saxony-Anhalt fear they cannot pay their bills; the state has lost a quarter of its population since reunification. Wherever industrial crisis concentrates, the far right is strongest, including the old SPD Ruhr. 11/13

Misdiagnosis produces dead-end strategies. The firewall creates a dual political sphere that leaves the theme of change to the far right and produces coalitions that cannot govern. Copying its migration program fails too: Merz tried in Jan 2025; the AfD doubled its vote four weeks later. 8/13

"Let them govern and watch them fail" rests on one Austrian data point from 2002 that the FPÖ has since thoroughly falsified. I also have sixteen years of "demystifying the far right in power" with Orbán to offer as a counterexample. 9/13

And the cultural backlash story of old uneducated men, still the most influential and by now the most thoroughly refuted theory of populism, fails on the basic facts: the AfD was founded by neoliberal economists, and its chief whip has a Hayek portrait on his office wall. 6/13

It won 41% of first-time voters, and its biggest donors are a diagnostics magnate and a real estate billionaire. This is exclusionary nationalism as a rebranding of neoliberalism, the path Fidesz, the Republicans, Reform UK & co have all taken. 7/13

The institutionalist story fails because the far right is global: it's now Europe's most popular party family, and every country blames its own local quirk. 4/13

The Ossi-bashing story fails too: the same servile-national-character thesis was applied to Poles and Hungarians, among many others, right up until they voted their illiberal governments out. 5/13

Already in the run-up to the election, the German commentariat went looking for the "one" variable. The bureaucracy is too slow: cut it. East Germans have a defective political culture: educate them. It's immigration: toughen up. 2/13

Merz concluded the government simply hadn't explained its excellent policies clearly enough. Thirteen years of uninterrupted AfD growth, 20 years of rising illiberalism globally, and the diagnosis is a communication problem. What level of intellectual nihilism is this? 3/13

31 Aug

It was such an honor and pleasure to talk with Zarqa Parvez for her podcast. We talked about my intellectual formation: the formative years in activism and politics, the move from international economics to sociology, political economy, and comparative politics. 1/3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUwB...

31 Aug

We also got into my research: how global economic shocks feed populism and produce health inequalities, and what lived experience contributes to that kind of analysis. And teaching. Specifically teaching at Georgetown in Doha, where the classroom is about as internationally diverse as it gets. 2/3

youtube.comEpisode 4- Dr. Gabor ScheiringYouTube video by TheOutlierPodcast

31 Aug

Zarqa is an excellent interviewer. She gave me the room to think out loud about all of this, which is rare in academic interviews. I am grateful to her for it. 3/3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUwB...

24 Aug

Orbán governed Hungary for 16 years with more centralized power than most governments. The international far right copied him. He still failed at development, and then he lost. My new open-access piece in New Political Economy explains the rise and fall of Orbanism. 1/3 doi.org/10.1080/1356...

24 Aug

He ran an accumulative state: real institution-building, coherent intervention in markets, but all subordinated to the short-term interests of his coalition of nationalist politics, national bourgeoise, and transnational capital. Dualism deepened, value moved outward, and then the shocks came. 2/3

24 Aug

Income moved upward, labor was repressed. The lessons travel. Serbia, Türkiye, Egypt, and others - not predatory but neither developmental states. Strong authoritarian states build institutions and still lock an economy into dependency. What decides the outcome is how capacity is constituted. 3/3

Daron Acemoglu wrote the establishment's favorite book on prosperity, Why Nations Fail (2012). His new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy? (2026), attacks that establishment. In response, The Economist calls him "oddly unconvincing." A thread on why the old Acemoglu was wrong. 1/11

The Hungarian numbers are stark. It was the only country in the region where the wage share of GDP kept falling through the 2010s. Domestic value added in exports is among the OECD's lowest. Innovation capacity, above South Korea's until the late 1980s, is back to post-1989 lows. 10/11

doi.orgWhen authoritarian capitalism fails at development: what Hungary’s accumulative state and the exhaustion of Orbánism teach usWhy do some authoritarian capitalist regimes fail at development despite wielding robust state power? Existing explanations rooted in liberal institutionalism reduce this failure to rent-seeking, w...

The exhaustion of Orbánism does not point back to the pre-Orbán path. That path is where Orbánism came from. I'm with the new Acemoglu against the old: the way out leads toward a democratic eco-social developmental state. 11/11 doi.org/10.1080/1356...

Upgrading rests neither on liberal institutions alone nor on authoritarian strength. It needs a social coalition that charts a long-horizon plan and builds a bureaucracy able to enforce this developmental script against elites' short-term drive to accumulate. 8/11

I call the regime that ruled Hungary from 2010 to 2026 an accumulative state: high capacity, no autonomy, a loyalty-based apparatus serving its ruling coalition instead of disciplining it. The outcome was accumulation without development. 9/11

A rival reading, popular in pro-Orbán circles and some institutionalist political economists, is equally flawed. It treats the authoritarian state as a precondition for catch-up. Orbán just ran out of time to deliver the miracle, so the story goes. 6/11

In my new open-access article in New Political Economy, I offer a third reading that transcends both. The empirics are Hungarian, but the theory is about the conditions for development outside the capitalist core. 7/11

The clearest case is authoritarian capitalism in Hungary. For 16 years, Orbánism was read as an external disturbance: a flashback of Hungarians' "Eastern" (i.e., authoritarian) psyche, or the work of a devious strongman conspiring with other strongmen. 4/11

By that logic, the exhaustion of Orbánism and Fidesz's defeat in 2026 reads as a happy ending. History was derailed by forces alien to the liberal order, and now it returns to its natural liberal path. 5/11

Why Nations Fail argued that liberal institutions are the ultimate cause of long-run prosperity: property rights, rule of law, open markets set a society on a self-reinforcing upward path. Nations fall behind when anti-liberal forces like extractive elites choke off growth. 2/11