oh a thank you very much thank you very much for that lovely introduction and uh shout out to my twitter where according to my wife i spend way too much time what i'm going to do today is in about 35-40 minutes i will pretty much summarize that little booklet called populism a very short introduction by looking at kind of what populism is who populists are um what the consequences are what the causes are of their success and what the consequences are of their success and in the end in the conclusion i will indeed make that point that i make on twitter as well which is that i think it is time to move away from using populism just by itself and start to talk more about the far right so without further ado the definition which is in the end what it's all about and um it's very customary to to why not to say well no one knows what populism means everyone is disagreeing about it etc etc to a certain extent that's true but that's true for virtually every major concept in politics democracy freedom socialism fascism all of those have very different definitions about 20 30 years ago populism was truly defined in all kinds of different ways an economic platform a social movement an ideology today i think that the vast majority of authors within um i would say broader the social sciences irrespective of what region work with what we call the ideational approach in which populism is first and foremost seen as a set of ideas now i personally consider it a thin centered ideology i will say more about that later other people see it as a style or as a discourse but the differences for the rest of it are not that big and so i define populism as a fin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups the pure people and the corrupt elite and which argues that politics should be an expression of the voluntary general or the general will of the people there are three elements in that definition that are important to note the first is ideology particularly finn centered i see it as an ideology because i believe that populism is not just a strategy to win power and once populists are in power this vision informs not just how they justify actions but what actions they take second of all populism is a monist ideology in the sense that they don't consider society to really consist of different groups with different values and and different interests for them society really is only the people and all members of the people have exactly the same interest and exactly the same values there's only one group that they that they accept or that they recognize as being part of that same space and that's the elite but the elite all are corrupt and because they are corrupt they do not deserve the same protections as the people and that comes to the last part which is moralism the distinction between the people and the elite is not about class as it is in marxism it's not about money it's not even whether or not you're in the government it is about values whether you have the values that are pure or whether they have values that are corrupt and this explains why you have so many very rich people who can sell themselves as the voice of the people because it is not about whether they have money or were even born into money it is about whether or not they stand with the values of the people and so people like silvio belasconi or donald trump obviously do not live as the common italian or the common american in the sense of having i don't know how many different houses and i mean golden elevators as trump has but trump eats at mcdonald's trump put ketchup on a steak trump doesn't go to the opera right and so he is with the people in that and that is the reason now the consequence of having primarily a moralist distinction rather than an interest distinction is polarization and we'll talk about that more but if you have a marxist distinction between the people and capital the worker in capital let's say the worker wants more money 10 bucks an hour let's be modest here um and of course capital doesn't want to pay that so they say six you can compromise at eight and you don't lose anything specific but if the pure compromise with the corrupt the pure are corrupted and as a consequence politics becomes a zero-sum game so the relationship between populism and democracy is really why we are so fascinated with this topic simply stated populism is pro-democracy but anti-liberal democracy what do i mean by that democracy is in essence popular sovereignty and majority rule it means that the people elect their leaders liberal democracy goes further than that it adds separation of powers it adds minority rights it adds rule of law populism is not like fascism it believes that the people should elect its leaders but it does not believe that minorities should be protected now i'm not speaking about ethnic minorities here i'm speaking about political minorities and the reason is simple in the populist mind there is only one group that doesn't think exactly the same as the people the elite and the elite are corrupt and therefore they don't deserve the protections of the state because it is a fin-centered ideology populism itself doesn't tell us much about how the state should be structured or how the economy should be structured and this is why virtually all populist parties that are successful combine populism with what we call a host ideology that tends to be a much thicker ideology which gives much more answers to how economies or society should be structured simply stated on the left populism is combined with socialism some form of it and on the right in most cases populism is combined with nativism a xenophobic form of nationalism now of course there are exceptions and italy is very good at exceptions and one of the most important exceptions is the five-star movement the five-star movement is one of the few successful populist parties that actually doesn't have a host ideology there isn't something that is more important but lega is a very good example of what i call a populist radical right party it combines populism with nativism like rasambland national and many others today populism is slightly more left-wing in the south and more nor more right-wing in the north in both europe and the americas but it is changing a bit one of the reasons why i argue that we should move a little bit away from just populism is that overall left-wing populism seems to be on a decline not just in europe but in latin america as well the recent success in latin america of course was bolsonaro and here in the south um left-wing populism is weaker too so just a very quick overview of populism around the globe populism emerged in russia and the united states at roughly the same time but in very different movements in the u.s it was called the people's party or the populist which was an agrarian populist movement they thought that the the farmer a very specific type of farmer which is called the yale man in in the american tradition was the real people they had the pure values and this agrarian populism in the us was very popular but didn't have a good structure it didn't have a leader it didn't have an organization and when the people's party finally contested presidential election they actually had to get a leader from the democratic party it's very classic for generally right-wing populism and i would say the far right in the u.s it's strong at the grassroots but it's not very strong in terms of organization now it went through various permutations but of course in the end we ended up with a very an unexpected and atypical um populist which is donald trump now to be honest i didn't consider trump a populist pretty much up until he got the nomination i'm 100 certain that he is not a populist at heart donald trump does not believe that he is just one of the people donald trump is absolutely certain that he is way better than everyone else but that is irrelevant to donald trump the political phenomenon in the primaries he actually sold that he sold the donald his argument was we all have these problems and only i can solve them because i am the deal maker but the only thing in which steve bannon ever was relevant which is important for journalists to note as well because they keep writing about him is that when he took over the campaign he rephrased donald trump as a movement and a movement of the people and actually his inaugurational speech in 2017 january was a beauty in terms of populism it said pretty much that he had brought the people back into the white house thereby saying i am one of you now south america or latin america is really the heartland of populism throughout the 20th century we have seen three different waves of populism the first was juan peron pretty much the 20s 30s that this started it was a left-wing form of populism in the 70s 80s we saw a more neo-liberal form of populism and then by the turn of the century we saw another left-wing populist moment with people like hugo chavez in venezuela evo morales in bolivia and rafael correa and ecuador the last populist to window is one of the right more specifically the far right which is bolsonaro in brazil europe was the other birthplace of populism in the form of the naropniki which was a very small group of urban intellectuals in russia they were agrarian populists like the americans but they were not grassroots they were also very unsuccessful they moved into the rural areas went to the farmers which were starving under a horrible feudal system and said you guys are the real people you should have the power most farmers were not particularly impressed because they had to eat so they didn't have time for politics so the narotniki got frustrated and thought we tried another way so they killed the czar which is a quite a legacy but was also the end of the narotniki now rodniki had some effect in the early 20th century in central and eastern europe where in poland and bulgaria there were various agrarian populist movements and parties and it actually had an effect on particularly lenin who had read some of the narotniki and toyed with some ideas but populism was almost dormant in much of the 20th century there were a few explosions like budgetism in france late 1950s a kind of an ignored part of populism was actually pasok in greece which was long the dominant party there and more recently we have had an explosion of populism of the left but particularly of the right and of course at the moment the man of the hour is your own matteo salvini who is now the personification of european populism even though actually his attempts to create one big group seem to be pretty much failing outside of these areas we have had very few and isolated cases of populism although the biggest party in the world which is the bjp in india is a populist party more specifically a populist radical right party some other examples are the economic freedom fighters in south africa so overall what is important here is that populism was not a major phenomenon in most of the world in the 20th century it had its origins in the mid 19th century it was agrarian after that it was predominantly right wing but wasn't really successful until the end of the century and it really took off in the early 21st century this is an overview of the electoral scores of populist parties in europe by decade and i've made a difference between west and east and as you see the difference actually not as big as people always think we have this idea that populism and anything bad is primarily strong in the east and not in the west this is not really the case although it depends a little bit on classification this is in national elections the guardian helped me by publishing an article that actually shows the scores in the european elections by and large the populist score is 29 in the last european election it's an increase of about five percent and and that all is really fascinating because that's actually a pretty big jump but of course we act as if it isn't but what it also shows is that a sizable portion of it is of the far right so why do we have populism but more importantly why do we have it now that's actually something oddly enough that we don't have much literature on we have a lot of literature on why the far right is successful but that doesn't necessarily explain why left-wing populism should be successful so let's look at the most important reason for why people vote for populist radical right parties anti-immigration every every study shows that but why would someone who has anti-immigration vote for podemos or syriza which are the most pro-immigration and pro-multicultural parties in their countries so certain things that explain the populist radical right do not necessarily explain populism per se one of the most important explanations is that important issues are not adequately addressed by elites now that sounds pretty straightforward but it isn't because this is not an objective measure politics is not really much about objective indicators this is about whether people feel that the elite adequately addresses issue so they're they're related but they're not the same i give you an example too actually both immigration and european integration were barely discussed in the 1980s and the 1990s almost all major parties felt the same about it and didn't want to make it into political issue and so objectively you could argue in quite a lot of countries that these were kept from the debate i would even argue that in the netherlands in the 1980s it was true that you couldn't say every anything negative about immigration however that sentiment was only shared by a small group of dutch people today there is a sizable portion of the dutch population that truly believes that you can't say anything negative about islam in the netherlands and yet we haven't done anything else than say negative things about islam since 2001 in the netherlands so it's not so much whether something is true it is whether people feel that it's true and people who vote for populist parties feel that key issues are not addressed or adequately addressed they also feel that the elites the different parties are all the same now this is not without reason particularly in the 1980s and the 1990s almost all major parties in western europe were pro-immigration with all kind of limits to them were pro-neo-liberal economics and were pro-european integration the differences between the center right and the center left became significantly smaller under politicians like tony blair but also david cameron and so quite often we didn't have that much choice and in central and eastern europe it was even stronger everyone wanted to be in the european union which pretty much determined everything else you could do at the same time there are of course still significant differences between political parties and so this disbelief is exactly that and what it mostly means is that on the issue that they are busy with they think they are the same but take that to the issue of immigration if you feel that immigration is the most important issue and that the border should be closed then you only have two positions borders closed or borders open whether a million come in or a thousand that's for you the same on a more optimistic note and i think a very much um kind of underplayed element society has changed profoundly people today are much better educated than they were decades ago consequently they're also differently educated education has become much less authoritarian and hierarchical than it used to be now i'm sure that there are a lot of students in this room who think like my classes are still pretty authoritarian true but ask your parents it was probably worse consequence of this education change is that today most people feel that they are that they can judge politicians they feel they have self-confidence on politics i was a student in the 1980s and i did a survey once and we asked people for their for their views the idea was to get the first person on the phone who picked up who was adult and we would ask them and i can't tell you how often we got a woman who was over 40 who as soon as we said as i said we would like to talk to you about politics she would say i will get my husband the suggestion was i don't understand politics in the 1950s 60s this was not just a matter of gender this is a matter of class as well the majority of people did not feel competent to judge politicians that was something that smarter people did today were all that smarter people we all know better than everyone else and so what we do is exactly what democratic theory wants us to do we make political decisions independently that is good but that's also problematic because it means that we get volatile we don't vote the same thing all the time it also means we're critical you can't just tell us anymore well this is the only way because we're way smarter we can come up with a way if if in the 1950s the leader of the catholic party says this has to be done the priest would also say it and you thought okay well if the priest says it then it must be done so the democratization of education has led to what is called cognitive mobilization which means that we feel that we are better informed and we feel better informed very importantly the media structure is today much more favorable than it used to be i'm not talking here about social media which i believe is pretty much hyped in terms of its importance the traditional media today is very differently structured than it was in the 1980s and before the 1980s and before almost all media were either public controlled by the mainstream parties or private and linked to political parties either to a catholic subculture a socialist subculture a liberal subculture what that meant was not necessarily that the media was bad although obviously in a socialist newspaper you didn't read about the corruption scandals in the socialist party and in the catholic newspaper you didn't read about the caf the corruption scandals in the catholic party but what it meant was that mainstream parties could act as gatekeepers in the media if you would challenge the system then they could keep you out and they did keep you out they might at times write about you but it was very rare for populists to get interviews in the 80s and 90s in the 1990s we saw the rise of private television which was fundamental but also we saw the privatization of a lot of media which became more detached and more independent from the different subcultures and the different parties they were no longer subsidized by them which meant that they now worked on the basis of a profit model in a profit model you do what americans call chase eyeballs which means that you try to find you try to get people to read you to watch you to listen to you now what works what sells scandal and conflict and who provides that populist populist cell newspapers if you want to see the evidence of that look at the u.s new york times has never had so many subscribers as today washington post through the roof cnn has become a relevant channel again all because of trump right and so that new structure of independence and profit motive was perfect for populists and finally populist actors have become more attractive many of the successful populists are actually pretty good at what they do now they do different things but first and foremost they try to break into the system you have more than enough examples in this country but let's take salvini matteo salvini is constantly campaigning and that's pretty much the only thing he does although he's a minister of interior he has a devoted team to his social media account which is probably bigger than the social media accounts of pretty much all the other parties combined he's constantly on twitter everything that he does is send out and everything is targeted whether it's twitter instagram or facebook many of the populists understand this medium far better far better than the traditional parties i mean just look at for example the number of followers of individual politicians or of parties it is at times absolutely amazing to see parties that get 40 of the vote or by 20 of the vote these days that have about 60 000 followers an average afd politician will be much higher but it's not only social media again traditional media also wants to sell everyone talks about trump as having made his success through twitter but that's the wrong interpretation first of all the only reason why people follow trump on twitter is because they know him from traditional tv the apprentice his tv show that made him big was on nbc one of the mainstream networks in the campaign he wasn't only dominant on twitter first and foremost he was always on tv i couldn't go anywhere or i would have cnn on and trump would be there so it is through twitter that populist play the traditional media and the reason is very simple journalists live on twitter and journalists think that what their twitter feed is the real world it isn't but it's the world that is very conducive to populist so why do we care it should and always be the most important reason like why do we care are populists really important do they do anything that others don't do they do they do both positive and negative things one of the most important things of populist that they have added to our liberal democratic systems is they have politicized or re-politicized certain issues issues that parts of the population find important without the populist radical right we would not have had the debate about immigration in the 1980s or 1990s you can take issue with what that debate has become but immigration and multicultural society are far too fundamental to not debate european integration is exactly the same without the populist radical right we wouldn't have debated european integration without the populist left we wouldn't have debated austerity policies we would still talk in terms of tina there is no alternative and so one of the positive elements of populism is that they re-politicize politics one of the most important problems of populism is that they polarize the political debate populists don't have opponents they have enemies you don't compromise with enemies but polarization rarely comes from one side and one of the things that we see in many countries where populists are powerful particularly if they get into power is that the opposition liberal democratic most of the time will adopt a kind of an anti-populism which is almost a mirror image of populism but now the populists are the corrupt and evil people and the liberals are the good ones worst example of this hillary clinton's remark of the trump support as being deplorables but in the wake of the brexit referendum i've seen it on so many twitter accounts how people speak about levers how people speak about pretty much anyone who is in favor of brexit and so generally populist success leads to anti-populism which only strengthens polarization there's also an increase of the opportunistic use of publicitarian instruments mostly referendums populist love referendums but mostly in opposition the reason is simple of course they think that all the other parties are the same and they keep them out of the public debate and so they use referendums to circumvent party politics when they're in power though referendums are less important they often do it at the beginning because they often still have there are some vestiges of power of the old establishment but as soon as they really have all the power referendums don't become that useful anymore because there's only one thing really threatening to a populist that is to lose a referendum that you organize yourself if you say that you're the voice of the people and the people in majority say you're not the core of your legitimacy is undermined and so referendums become risky we see a weakening of non-majoritarian institutions courts and media italy went through this under berlusconi he wasn't very good at this and as a consequence structurally he didn't change much bit the same as in the us at the moment trump is endlessly attacking courts and media isn't fundamentally changing things but there is more to that what you do see is self-censorship the way that traditional media write about trump is much more cautious they will for example hardly ever say that he lied they will have all kind of euphemisms about it and so those attacks don't have to be institutional just attacking independent courts independent businesses independent media can lead to self-censorship which is also useful but when it really goes bad populism can change a liberal democracy into an illiberal democracy which is a system where still the majority votes and determines its leaders but you no longer have separation of powers you no longer have a rule of law and you no longer have the protection of minorities my friend victor orban is pretty much the most skillful populist and populist radical right leader in europe unlike berlusconi he came to power fully and with a plan hungary today is not even an illiberal democracy anymore it is now a competitive authoritarian regime the opposition is allowed to exist but cannot actually win elections so let me conclude populism has long has a long but a relatively marginal history around the world until the late 20th century with the exception of latin america and more specifically a few countries within latin america populism is peaking in the early 21st century but its popularity is still overstated think about the last european elections we are now actually celebrating that the non-populist forces have won it's a ridiculous thing to say the populists were never going to win i haven't seen any polls that predicted that populist would get the majority of the vote but we have talked ourselves into such a frenzy that we by and large implicitly talk about the people as the voters of the populist we think that the populists are the real voice of the people and consequently mainstream parties will do anything to appear as pandering to the real people or in other words the voter of the populace populism can be both a corrective and a threat for liberal democracy it's mostly a corrective in opposition and the key correction is repolitization of the debate it will bring important issues on the agenda and force other parties to deal with it sadly when in power populism will almost always lead to a weakening of liberal democracy both in its values and in its institutions i think the best way to think about populism is as an illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism obviously that's a nice play of words which was constructed to get more citations but there's actually an idea behind it i think i have explained why populism is a liberal democratic it supports majority rule but it undermines minority protections but it responds to decades of liberalism that actually was in spirit rather than in procedure undemocratic the european union is a good example the european union was forced into becoming a more democratic space but up until the mid 1990s almost no issue of relevance to the european union was discussed in the political debate it was never part of national elections it wasn't part of european elections and actually the last european elections over the weekend are no exception there was not any debate in any of the various 28 member states that was a clear campaign about european elections with different visions of europe at stake and yet in the next legislature there will be various new policies with very big consequences that are going to be pushed through and so it is this idea that neoliberalism and european integration have been pushed through by technocrats and democrats that the populists respond to and they say there is no alternative is wrong if we don't want it we don't have to do it if the eu says that you need to do it we get out of the eu none of these things are set in stone it's all up to the people finally populism is increasingly far right as i wrote in the guardian populism is that long live the far right the point that i want to make here is we started to talk about populism roughly around the great recession because what we saw was that this kind of protest which up until then was mostly on the radical right now also found its form on the left syriza podemos if you look at the last election left-wing populism is over podemos is barely populist and barely popular syriza has become pretty much like the best pupil in the class of the eu doing everything that the eu wants even though it sparsely still uses some populism domestically millenshaw is completely marginal when we talk about the rise of populism today we talk about bolsonaro we talk about trump we talk about brexit we talk about salvini we talk about orban all of them are populist but not only populist they're populist they're nativist they're authoritarian and actually it is the nativism that is at the core of their ideal ideological project and the populism is secondary to them thank you very much yeah i guess this one is on two let me just say something though about barack obama too yeah i'm i'm not necessarily the biggest fan but what is important and totally forgotten is that actually barack obama also got a lot of protest vote and what made barack obama so attractive to many people was that he wasn't unknown that he actually had only been a senator for two years and so many saw him also as an outsider but what is also really interesting and that shows like that politics is about creation it's not about facts it's about interpretations of facts we now have a movement where the son of a billionaire is the voice of the people and a son of pretty low middle class people of mixed racial heritage is seen as the elite like barack obama who grew up in relatively modest circumstances is seen as the elite like donald trump who only made money because his father gave him massive amounts of money and there's even some calculation that said if he had just invested it he would be richer today than what he did with it is seen as the people and so this shows you like what politics is about it's about reinterpretations of reality i'm not a big fan of sovereigntist and sovereignness and whatever it is in part because i come from a germanic language and it's not very easy to translate it but i also think that it's actually a political ploy and obviously i'm very grumpsy in here but in the end politics is about redefining uh words it's about redefining struggles this is not just about being a sovereign nation you can be a sovereign nation with a lot of immigrants right this is about a native estate and in a native estate you're sovereign and you're homogenous right and so i think the sovereignness is is a way to come up with a less negative term for what is essentially like just a nativist movement so yes it is part of it and it's of course it's let's say it's their it's their pleasant face i could say taking our country back right but whom are you taking it back from and why are you taking it back sovereignism doesn't say much about it nativism does immediately i think the media should always be careful and much more careful than they are um with all terms but also academics i mean and just people i mean this is like why i say i don't think they should use populism if they only speak about the populist radical right right first of all leaving aside even the political struggle which clearly i'm part of it's also not particularly accurate right we regularly read like an anti-immigration proposal as a populist proposal but populism as the pure people versus the corrupt elite says nothing about immigration nativism does right and so it is the populist radical right that is anti-immigrant not populist yes the question will be in english so um yes you said that uh populism was a useful corrective as long as it's uh not too big but it's a big threat once it's in power so obviously one should try to have strategies to prevent it from going to power i'm belgium and so last sunday we had a big upsurge of the radical rights party despite something that's called investment the cordon sanitaire which means no coalition with the far right and also to some extent a mediatic a boycott by the media so is this strategy that consists in trying to uh tell to mute the radical right to tell them to shut up and to prevent them from entering any coalition uh still effective today given in particular the role of the social media and the fact that the radical right party for example in belgium had spent more on social media than all the other parties together meaning of course that most of their supporters get most of their information in that way and no longer through the traditional media or through exposure as a result of participation in power okay congratulations to your talk and i can agree to most of the points and arguments you brought forward but i do think one of your sentences needs some more elaboration and this is the sentence anti-populism only creates populism if this is true and if it is also true that the established political parties left a representational gap and if we do not want to leave it all to the civil society to react what is left as a political reaction thank you very much nintendo if you want to take these two questions yeah they're they're connected at a certain um level but let me just first speak to um to the belgian case which is a which is a very interesting case because belgium was actually the country with probably um the first success for um the modern populist and the vlam's block at that point in time was the first to enter uh a national parliament in 1978 as a as part of a list um it had its what they call in belgium black sunday in 1991 where it had its breakthrough and as a consequence of its earlier breakthrough it had this cordon sanitaire which according to the founder of it a green politician called jos heissels was only meant to prevent coalitions with the far right but was always broader it included a cordon in the media vlam's blank didn't get a voice in there they wrote about them but they didn't interview them it also by and large meant not speaking about what was seen as their issues most notably immigration but also crime now along the way the cordon sanitary was remarkably successful in the sense that vlans belong in the end lost uh 2008 it started and 2014 was the big defeat this was to a large extent because cordon a lot of people had voted for vlam's blank over and over again and all the time saw them being ostracized and they thought let's look for someone else that someone else was actually someone who was not that relevant jean-marie de dekker and then the nvr took over during that period when the vlans belong was very small the media cordon was already abolished and so over the last couple of years vlam's belong politicians have been interviewed and even had op-eds in flemish newspapers but more importantly particularly since 2015 envia let's say the flemish nationalist party although it's more conservative party really really made immigration and security it's key issue and it was a perverse strategy because it actually worked and didn't work i mean the argument was we have to do this otherwise people vote for the vlam's belong but what actually happened was that the people who thought that the nva which had raised expectations didn't meet them went to the populist radical right flams belong at the same time the nva picked up a lot of votes from the moderate right christian democrats and liberals who thought okay if immigration and security is the key issue we should vote for someone who is tough on that but we don't want to go to the radical right and so it led to a massive shift to the right overall social media played a bit of a role but i think we give far too little credit to tom verrick the new president of the party and his team i mean this flames belong is a very different party and falls completely in line with liga and and and with other successful parties there are parties that are actually pretty active they target very well yes they spend more money on social media but overall they didn't spend more money than others they just spend it better to a large extent wolfgang technically well technically i think literally i didn't say anti-populism creates populism in the sense that anti-populism almost always follows success of populism i think it strengthens polarization um how so how do you respond i mean it's not that you can't say that populism is a problem but you can't you shouldn't say it in the sense that populists and populist voters are bad people or corrupt people with whom you can't compromise but more importantly i don't believe that the strategy that the struggle should the struggle should not be against populism the struggle should be for liberal democracy populism is a symptom of a broader problem even if we defeat populism and the easiest ways is to ban them what do you win you have a liberal democratic system that isn't challenged but is still not supported by a significant part of the people if you win people over for liberal democracy and i'm talking here about the system liberal democracy is a system in which we have christian democracy social democracy greens liberals like all of them if we win people back or new people over for our ideas which fall within liberal democracy by definition populism is weaker and so that's one part the second part is if we fight populism we play their game they set the agenda they determine the issues and most of the time they're better at it because that is what they are about we see it now in the us with trump if you make it into a conflict with him his supporters love that many of the democrats don't they don't come out to vote to punish trump they come out to vote to get health care to get better education and to get a better economic system so to me is about a positive agenda in which populism is almost a side note um a bit difficult i mean you could say that spain is doing pretty well um the spanish social democrats not only took the responsibility to govern they did it on the basis of their own platform and they were rewarded for it they've even stood up for refugees that a certain country that shall not be named they don't want to take up um at the same time immigration has never been a major issue in spanish politics and so it's it's difficult to compare well they have pretty high numbers but um i mean so the united states um which i only defend when i'm not in the united states it seems um actually has a remarkably pro-diversity uh debate if you look at the democratic party including hillary clinton when she ran like she had an amazingly positive and inclusive message towards both non like let's say minorities non-whites and immigrants without pandering to really to nativist she only started to do that after she lost sadly um we don't see that like we just don't see that macro seem to be that but has since walked it back with all kind of remarks and policies towards muslims in particular um again i i so there is of course a positive debate like there is a positive option many of the green parties are supportive of multiculturalism although much less than they used to be um and and somewhat immigration but i mean green parties have a relatively limited um audience within social democracy you don't see much within center right you see virtually nothing and the liberals are kind of i'm pretty silent about it but i think it should always be part of a broader agenda like you should talk about immigration and multiculturalism but only if you also talk about education about healthcare about welfare about pensions and importantly and that's also to the media you should also talk to the populist radical right about those issues one of the things that we see is that the populist radical right are only asked about immigration and security remember the debate between macon and marine le pen marine le pen was a very capable politician who got totally mixed up on our euro policy and according to all polls failed and paid a price for that we have many examples of that of populist radical right politicians who are who are kind of pushed outside of their comfort zone with very important issues because every study shows that education and welfare unemployment are high concerns of many people if we interview those politicians on those issues many are bad and others are just mediocre right and so if we bring the debate back to all the issues i think the radical right will already like be more be more limited you