The populist way out: Why contemporary populist leaders seek transnational legitimation

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to the growing academic debate on the transnational drivers and patterns of contemporary populism. As populist leaderships expand both politically and geographically, the very nature of the populist phenomenon is changing, as it is increasingly being projected on the international stage. Contemporary populist leaders show a growing willingness to transfer the discursive construction of a struggle between ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ to the regional and global levels as a way of obtaining internal and external legitimation. In so doing, they exploit the symbiotic two-level game that links national and international (de-)legitimation dynamics, seeking to gain ‘abroad’ the kind of legitimacy that they cannot obtain ‘at home’. This article suggests three mechanisms that explain the populist ‘way out’ from various legitimation traps based on the traditional distinctions between input, throughput, and output legitimacy. The article’s argument is illustrated with reference to prototypical cases of populism in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The incorporation of the literature on international legitimacy enhances our understanding of the strategic activation of populist attitudes through the transnational articulation of empty signifiers, the global diffusion of this phenomenon, and the possibilities for its contestation and mitigation.

Introduction

Once upon a time, populism was almost purely a matter of domestic politics. ‘Canonical’ populist leaders in the Americas, Europe, and elsewhere strategically used the local scene to construct a Manichean ideational antagonism between ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’. However, current populist trends are increasingly projected on the international stage (see Löfflmann’s introduction to this special issue). Not only are populist leaders emerging around the world; the nature of the phenomenon itself is changing, and it is becoming both inherently and strategically transnational. Contemporary populist leaderships are taking advantage of the persistent processes of democratisation, globalisation and denationalisation to project this struggle between people and elites into the regional and global spheres, with the aim of legitimising their power both locally and externally.

Above all, populist transnational performances have become an intrinsic part of electoral politics. There are numerous examples of this. Former US President Donald Trump triumphantly visited the border wall between the United States and Mexico to demonstrate his tough attitude towards Hispanic migrants, while exploiting the ‘victory picture’ of his ‘deal-making’ summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Right-wing populists across Europe and beyond disseminate pictures of themselves with Russian President Vladimir Putin to enhance by association their own symbolic appearance as assertive, muscular leaders. Members of the Visograd club, which is led by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski, broadcast to their respective constituencies’ images in which they jointly challenge the European Union (EU). Much like right-wing European populists, including France’s Marine Le Pen, Italy’s Matteo Silvani and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, left-wing European populists, such as Greece’s Alexis Tsipras, Spain’s Pablo Iglesias and France’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon, have jointly expressed their alliance against domination by ‘Brussels’, ‘Frankfurt’ and ‘Wall Street’. Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega recruited a transnational grassroots network to ensure the aesthetics of festive mass mobilisation at their rallies around Latin America, in opposition to unpopular, ‘Yankee’-oriented regional frameworks. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan promoted large-scale receptions among their national diasporas in their pre-election travels abroad. Israel’s former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used images of himself with Trump, Putin and Modi in television commercials and on large posters to emphasise his electoral slogan: ‘a league of his own’. All these performances of warm encounters with other populist leaders and audiences are counter-intuitive and therefore puzzling, if we consider the widespread view of populists as nationalist, isolationist and inward-looking political leaders.

How can the growing use of a ‘way out’ among contemporary populist leaders be explained? What are populists looking for ‘abroad’ that they cannot get ‘at home’? To answer these questions, this study draws on the literature of international legitimacy and develops an understanding of populism as a macro-strategy of legitimation. This macro-strategy is grounded in the narrow ideational core of populism; the discursive construction of a perpetual struggle between ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ (Hawkins et al., 2018; Mudde, 2004: 543–545). Based on this approach, the article argues that current populist leaders are trapped in their inability to legitimise themselves at the national level and are therefore driven to find a legitimating escape by projecting the categories of ‘people’ and ‘elites’ transnationally. In this way, populists take advantage of the two-level game that symbiotically combines the internal and external dynamics of (de-)legitimation. Given that the needs for legitimation and the forms that it takes tend to be diverse, the study suggests three distinct mechanisms that underlie populist leaders’ increasing tendency to seek transnational legitimation. These mechanisms are based on the traditional classification of the following three legitimacy standards: input, throughput and output (Risse and Kleine, 2007; Scharpf, 1999; Steffek, 2007; Zürn, 2000). Drawing on this model, the article argues that populists exploit these evaluation standards to indicate to their constituents that their leadership is right (input legitimation), that their approach to the struggle is adequate (throughput legitimation) and that their policies are fair (output legitimation).

In terms of methodology, the study adopts an exploratory phenomenological approach to the sources of populist leaders’ legitimation based on anecdotal evidence of idiosyncratic cases from the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The selection of these prototypical contemporary populist leaderships is consistent with the mainstream academic literature from each of these regions and with up-to-date datasets on populism that rely on quantitative analysis of various discursive and political characteristics (see Hawkins et al., 2019; Norris, 2020a; 2020b; Rooduijn et al., 2019). This approach, which is both geographically and ideologically comprehensive, enables a preliminary identification of shared needs and practices alongside local particularities, as prevails in the literature on populist foreign policies (see Destradi and Plagemann, 2019: 5; Hadiz and Chryssogelos, 2017: 400; Verbeek and Zazlove, 2017: 1–3; Wajner, 2021). A phenomenological exploration of how populists boost their own legitimacy through the international arena furthers our understanding of the global rise of populism and the growing challenges it poses to the liberal international order (see Börzel and Zürn, 2020; Lake et al., 2021). More specifically, incorporating theories of international legitimation can strengthen analyses of the impact of populist leaders’ strategies for reaching, attracting and politically activating different audiences (see Hawkins et al., 2012), as well as national and international reactions to populist leaders (see Hawkins, 2016; Mounk, 2018; Müller, 2017; Rovira-Kaltwasser and Taggart, 2016).

The article is organised as follows. First, it examines the conceptualisation of populism and the recent attempts among scholars of international relations and comparative politics to explore the transnational dimensions of this phenomenon. Second, it addresses the familiarity between populist leaders and the strategic practice of legitimation, emphasising the possibility of incorporating analytical frameworks of international legitimacy to address some of the existing theoretical gaps in the study of populism. Third, through the characterisation of three legitimacy standards, the article develops explanations of what contemporary populist leaders often fail to obtain at home (the legitimation traps) and consequently seek abroad (the populist way out). The article provides multiple examples of populist leaders ‘going outside’ to gain legitimacy from their strategic performances on the international stage. Finally, the article concludes with an analysis of the academic and policy implications of these findings and evaluates the potential of the research agenda on the transnational sources, patterns and effects of populist legitimation.

Transnational populism

The claim that populism has crossed national frontiers no longer seems novel. Half a decade after journalists and pundits declared a ‘global rise of populism’, comparative politics scholars widely acknowledge having largely ignored the external dimensions of the populist phenomenon, while scholars of international relations increasingly accept that populism is not exclusively a category of domestic politics. This shared understanding is expressed in the proliferation of research with a broad geographic and disciplinary scope, which has already made a valuable contribution to the development of preliminary theoretical insights (Chryssogelos, 2017; De Cleen et al., 2020; De la Torre, 2018; Destradi and Plagemann, 2019; Drezner, 2017; Grzymala-Busse, 2017; Hadiz and Chryssogelos, 2017; Moffitt, 2017; Stengel et al., 2019; Verbeek and Zazlove, 2017; Wajner, 2019a). The academic debate has also gained from studies exploring how populist leaders influence the implementation of foreign policy relating to international institutions (Copelovitch and Pevehouse, 2019; Voeten, 2020), regional integration (Söderbaum et al., 2021; Wajner, 2021; Wehner and Thies, 2021), trade (Milner, 2019; Skonieczny, 2019), security (Biegon, 2019; Homolar and Löfflmann, 2021; Krebs, 2021; Löfflmann, 2019), and media (Boucher and Thies, 2019; Chatterje-Doody and Crilley, 2019; Moffitt, 2016).

However, several links are still missing in the search for an understanding of the transnational dimensions of populism. One of these links, often taken for granted, is a contradiction rooted in the very nature of the phenomenon: what is substantially ‘transnational’ in populism? It could be argued that the concept of populism, as a national category, contradicts any transnational projections. If populism, in its ‘thinnest’ form, is about constructing the idea of an antagonistic struggle between ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ (see Hawkins et al., 2018; Mudde and Rovira-Kaltwasser, 2014: 377–379; Müller, 2017: 18–21), policymaking beyond ‘the people’ is not an essential property of the investigated object but an external feature based on behaviour. Consequently, the widespread agreement that populism has arrived on the international stage does not mean that the phenomenon itself has evolved. To put it differently, to claim that populist leaders are increasingly interacting with one another in different ways and with different effects is not to claim that the very nature of populism is changing. This debate extends widely and is reflected in questions such as ‘Is the topic under discussion the “foreign policies of populism” or a “populist foreign policy”? Can a claim be made regarding a particular kind of “populist grand strategy” or is the focus on the “grand strategies of populists”?’

This study aims to contribute to these debates by arguing that the current populist phenomenon is both inherently and strategically transnational. On one hand, to explain why populists ‘go abroad’, as this article seeks to do, it is first necessary to understand that ‘going abroad’ is an integral part of being a populist leader today. The expansion of democratisation, globalisation and denationalisation processes has affected populist attitudes, causing populist leaders to pay more attention to their own constituents as well as to actors and audiences around the world (Schäfer and Zürn, 2021). Since most of the problems that affect people in a de-territorialised world, such as relating to trade, migration, terrorism and the environment, have crossed borders, political responses to the analogous challenges have also become inherently transnational (Chryssogelos, 2017: 2–6, 2020: 1; Verbeek and Zazlove, 2017: 6–7). Furthermore, as Michael Zürn (2018: 6–13, 95–107) has shown, these processes have increased the political authority of non-majoritarian institutions on these key issues both inside and outside the nation-state, causing current international interactions to be increasingly shaped by societal politicisation and state contestation (see also Dingwerth et al., 2020; Koopmans and Zürn, 2019: 21–23). This trend is catalysed by rapid real-time communication, which has increased the interconnectedness of individuals and led to more direct political awareness, participation and mobilisation (Moffitt, 2016: 74–81). Certainly, these changes affect not only populists but all kinds of political leaderships. However, the populist’s intrinsic concern with setting the boundaries of the ideas of the ‘people’ (to incarnate) and the ‘elites’ (to rebuke) makes addressing these changes quintessential to their appeal.

However, not all change is exogenous; the populist shift towards transnationalism was also endogenously driven among specific types of populist leaders and geographic areas (De Cleen et al., 2020; Grzymala-Busse, 2019; Moffitt, 2017; Wajner and Roniger, 2019). This fact requires acceptance of the idea that theoretical categories can evolve over time through strategy-oriented learning processes. Since classical populist leaders’ construction of ‘people’ and ‘elites’ does not satisfy the political needs of contemporary populists nationally and internationally, these leaders have managed to internalise the changes, learn and adapt their strategies accordingly. Indeed, populists have learned similar lessons throughout history, one example of which is the conversion of cultural backlashes into political claims (see Bonikowski and Gidron, 2015: 1595–1596; Canovan, 1999: 12–13). This meaningful learning process of strategic rearticulation may be one of the reasons why populist leaders in the Global North failed to come to power two decades ago but have succeeded more recently. Learning mechanisms can also help explain why right-wing populists, perceived a priori as nationalist, isolationist and inward-looking in their programmatic orientation, have recently employed internationalist strategies that have historically been used by left-wing populist leaders (see De la Torre, 2018; McDonnell and Werner, 2020). ¹

Based on these premises, a theoretical perspective that combines populism and legitimacy is especially relevant to analysing the transnational dimensions of the current populist phenomenon and is particularly useful in this study, which focuses on the strategic aspects of populist transnationalism. This combination of analytical frameworks on legitimation and populism may be especially beneficial for the emerging literature on the activation of populist attitudes in multiple audiences and its implications for the possibility of contesting and mitigating populist trends, as discussed in what follows.

Populist (de-)legitimation

This article argues that the practices of legitimacy and (de)legitimation are intrinsic to the drivers, patterns and effects of populism when populist leaders try to reach power, once they are in power and even once they have left office. To this end, legitimacy is defined herein as a structural, relational property that arises from intersubjective beliefs about the external acceptance of an actor and their actions. Legitimation, the other side of this agent–structure coin, is understood as the agency-oriented process of justification that aims to shape and boost such perceptions within a specific context and audience (Clark, 2005: 1–4; Hurd, 2007: 9–11; Tallberg and Zürn, 2019: 585–586; Wajner, 2019b). As Ian Clark (2005: 2) notes, ‘The actors within international society are engaged in endless strategies of legitimation, in order to present certain activities or actions as legitimate’.

In this sense, populism itself can be understood as a macro-strategy of legitimation. Political scientists have extensively debated the very essence of the populist phenomenon, questioning whether its core is discursive (Laclau, 2005; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, 2014), ideological (Canovan, 1999; Stanley, 2008), strategic (Barr, 2018; Müller, 2017; Weyland, 2001), communicational (Moffitt, 2016) or, as seems to be mainstream today, ideational (Hawkins et al., 2018; Mudde, 2004: 543–545). There may be some truth in all these perspectives, so the discussion about which is the primary feature should continue. For now, this article sets aside this discussion by affirming that all these tools can be a part of the populist’s strategic toolkit for achieving their political goal; to legitimise their ways in which they accumulate power, authority and influence. This macro-strategy is grounded on a narrow ideational ‘nucleus’; the discursive construction of a permanent struggle between ‘The People’ and ‘the elites’. ² Consciously or instinctively, populist leaders often know best how to translate their constituents’ feelings into practice and articulate these empty signifiers accordingly (Boucher and Thies, 2019: 713; Moffitt, 2016: 8). Hence, a transnational perspective on populism that draws on (de-)legitimation mechanisms should focus on populists’ strategic attempts to project abroad the central notions of the populist conceptualisation – people versus elites – for the specific purpose of legitimation.

The argument that populist leaderships seek legitimation more than non-populist leaderships requires a thorough explanation. In fact, most political actors and institutions are concerned with legitimising their authority within their constituencies as part of their quest to multiply their power and achieve stability (Claude, 1966: 368; Wight, 1972: 153; Zürn, 2018: 63–65). As Weber (1993) indicated, socio-political orders enjoy the voluntary acceptance of their rules by their members, which legitimises authority. Legitimacy gives a political leader more leeway over the population they lead, as legitimate leaders need not rely solely on coercion to promote their political interests and obtain the population’s compliance (Franck, 1990: 8–9; see also Beetham, 1991; Habermas, 1975).

This reservation is even more relevant when this argument is projected transnationally. Like all other actors on the global scene, populist leaders worry about the recognition of their authority, status and prestige among the other members of the international community and how these legitimacy beliefs among outside observers may affect the legitimacy beliefs of the leader’s own constituencies. ³ Indeed, in international relations, there is no supreme ‘legitimator’; the practices of legitimation and delegitimation are essentially anarchic (Wajner and Kacowicz, 2018). Legitimacy constitutes one of the very foundations of the authority of international actors and strengthens or constrains governance capabilities (Clark, 2005: 12–20; Hooghe et al., 2019: 732–735; Hurd, 2007: 8–9; Hurrelmann et al., 2007: 1–2; Goddard and Krebs, 2015: 5–9; Reus-Smit, 2007: 158–165; Risse and Stollenwerk, 2018: 404–409). Certainly, the weaker the actor, the more relevant legitimation dynamics are to them (Gilley, 2009: xiv). Still, as Andrew Hurrell (2005: 188–189) put it, ‘even the most powerful [actors] need to legitimise their power’.

That said, a glance at the everyday lives of populist leaders shows that they are particularly affected by struggles over legitimation, especially at critical junctures (Wajner, 2019b). This conjecture begins by paying attention to populists’ constant reference in their speeches to their own popular legitimacy over that of their opponents, and vice versa. It continues with the enormous efforts and resources that both sides dedicate to delegitimising the actions of the other. External actors provide additional testimony, giving a rich account of populists’ involvement in legitimation deficits and crises, which generally attract foreign audiences more than non-populist leaders. These (de-)legitimation performances are inherent repertoires of populist leaderships, in which they reaffirm their roles and power both for themselves and for others, just as movements do through protests and armies do through military parades. It is precisely populists’ internalisation of the importance of popular legitimacy to their accumulation of power that leads them to be considered ‘masters of legitimation’.

Although the rich literatures on legitimacy and populism seem to be naturally associated, the theoretical frameworks of (de-)legitimation have largely been ignored in the literature on populism, whereas students of legitimation practices among different types of political actors have mostly overlooked populist leadership. Certainly, integrating these two approaches is not simple, since both concepts are widely perceived as ‘essentially contested’ and have been criticised as being ineffective, soft and cumbersome as categories of political analysis (see Hurrelmann et al., 2007: 12–13; Mudde and Rovira-Kaltwasser, 2017: 2–3). However, the encounter between these two traditions furthers our understanding of the mechanisms behind the relations between populist leaders and their audiences. Analytical models of legitimation strategies help scrutinise how populists frame their ideas of ‘people’ and ‘elites’, how they activate these framings among specific audiences with populist attitudes (see Hawkins et al., 2012), and the possibilities of contesting and mitigating the populist appeal (see Mounk, 2018; Müller, 2017; Rovira-Kaltwasser and Taggart, 2016). The research agenda on international legitimacy also benefits theoretically and empirically from analyses of populist leaders who are facing legitimation deficits, crises and struggles. As legitimation dynamics have been broadly addressed in international organisations (Dellmuth and Tallberg 2020; Dingwerth et al., 2020; Tallberg and Zürn, 2019), regional organisations (Lenz et al., 2019; Mace, 2020; Spandler, 2020; Wajner and Kacowicz, 2018), non-governmental organisations (Press-Barnathan and Lutz, 2020; Wajner, 2017), nation-states (see Gilley, 2009; Goddard and Krebs, 2015), and world powers (Lake, 2009; Reus-Smith 2007), the focus on this overlooked political actor is quite novel.

The claim that populists are particularly concerned about their legitimacy, though, is not enough to answer this article’s main question: Why go abroad? As explained and illustrated below, populist leaders have several reasons for making an exceptional effort to strengthen the symbiotic link between national and international (de-)legitimation practices.

Explaining the populist ‘Way Out’

Populist leaderships seek the kind of legitimation that they cannot achieve at the national level in the international arena. Multiple incentives and constraints in the political context prompt populists to ‘go abroad’ to satisfy strategic, psychological, and ideological needs, which cannot be met ‘at home’ and generate costs in terms of legitimacy. The ‘way out’ therefore constitutes a strategic escape from the legitimation traps in which populists are caught and that put their own political survival as national leaders at stake.

In this complementary way, populist leaders take advantage of the symbiotic interplay between the internal and external dynamics of (de-)legitimation. Given that these two levels are highly interdependent, the intersubjective beliefs of an actor whose membership and/or actions are accepted on the international scene can shape domestic constituencies’ perceptions of this actor, and vice versa. In order words, international legitimacy can be used as a source of domestic legitimation, while domestic legitimacy can also be used as a source of international legitimation. This logic is reminiscent of the interaction between the domestic and international levels referred to in Putnam’s (1988) ‘two-level game’, by which actors try to translate backing received abroad into domestic support from their constituencies. Certainly, it can also be argued that all political actors in international relations use legitimacy perceptions generated beyond state borders to influence the legitimacy perceptions of state citizens, and vice versa. The argument presented here, though, is that this pattern is more prominent among populist than non-populist leaders and particularly among the latest waves of populism, which are more outward-oriented than previous waves (see Wajner, 2019a: 202–203). Furthermore, although these legitimation practices are particularly apparent among the populist leaders currently in power, it can be argued that they also apply to populists interested in coming (or returning) to power.

In analysing the kind of legitimation challenges that populist leaders face at the national level and that drive them to find a legitimating escape abroad, this article draws on the characterisation of three different types of legitimacy standards: input, throughput and output. Fritz Scharpf (1999) and Michael Zürn (2000) popularised the distinction between ‘input’ and ‘output’ for assessing the legitimacy of European institutional governance, and this characterisation was later adopted by several other scholars in legitimacy studies (see Hurrelmann et al., 2007; Risse and Kleine, 2007; Schmidt, 2013). Input legitimacy refers to the substantive suitability of the rule-maker and their reception among those who are ruled; whereas output legitimacy is related to the evaluation of the outcomes of policymaking, that is, whether performance meets shared expectations. While the former follows the ‘logic of appropriateness’ in persuading audiences that the rule is normatively desirable for a particular context, the latter adopts the ‘logic of consequences’, in which legitimacy assessments depend on the policy’s efficiency and/or effectiveness and the actor’s problem-solving abilities (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998: 891; Hurd, 2007: 66–71; Steffek, 2003: 252; Voeten, 2005: 537). The additional notion of throughput legitimacy, originating in judicial approaches, focuses on the procedural dimension of the legitimation task – the process of rule implementation in between inputs and outputs. That is, throughput legitimacy is determined by whether the actor’s decision-making processes follow common standards of normative, accountable behaviour (see Mace, 2020; Risse and Kleine, 2007; Schmidt, 2013; Steffek, 2019). Hence, while the input legitimacy of rulers in modern times is primarily tied to a political system based on popular election (‘formal democracy’), throughput legitimacy addresses subsequent rulemaking practices, norms, and values (‘substantive democracy’), including respect for the rule of law, representative institutions, and minority rights. ⁴

Although it must be borne in mind that there is some tension between the three legitimacy standards, the literature tends to see them as interacting and even overlapping. For instance, the rightness of the actor’s role may affect the suitability of their procedures, which may also influence legitimacy perceptions regarding the actor’s behaviour. In this way, features derived from history, culture, law and ethics contribute to the intersubjective assessment of the leader’s actions as (il-)legitimate. Using several cases of contemporary populist leaders as examples, we next scrutinise how these standards and their trade-offs affect populists’ ‘way out’ from their legitimation traps.

Input legitimacy: The ‘right’ leader for the ‘right’ people

Every political actor must justify their authority in sources of legitimation that their constituents deem appropriate; that is, they must establish their ‘right to rule’ (Franck, 1990; Gilley, 2009). In modern times, the popular election vote is the main source of input legitimacy for national leaderships, especially in political systems that claim to be representative democracies (see Beetham, 1991; Clark, 2005; Coicaud, 2002). However, for populist leaders, it is not enough to claim to represent a part of ‘the people’, and this fundamental deficit increasingly catches populists in a legitimation trap. Moreover, since those whom current populists designate as ‘enemies’ are (inherently) transnational, the populist ‘people’ also needs to be reformulated (strategically), associating or dissociating from specific transnational aspects. Therefore, to circumvent this legitimation trap, contemporary populists tend to broaden and recreate the notions of ‘people’ and ‘elites’, thereby (re-)legitimising this antagonism as a relevant source of input legitimation.

Indeed, ‘rightfulness’ in the populist zeitgeist is grounded in the anti-pluralist claim that populists incarnate the singular will of ‘the people’ in their struggle against ‘the elites’ (see Mudde, 2004: 543–544). The populist leaders themselves ARE ‘the people’ – the sole figures chosen to speak on the people’s behalf and represent their interests. However, since populists portray themselves as democrats through-and-through, they constantly face a legitimacy gap in obtaining recognition as the ‘right’ leaders; a gap that they try to bridge by redefining the ‘right’ people. In other words, the transnational reconstruction of ‘the people’ serves primarily as a form of self-legitimation (see Von Billerbeck, 2020). Given the foundational role, they pretend to play and internal dissent in the face of their demand for unified popular sovereignty, populists require a kind of psychological reaffirmation that their leadership is ‘right’; that they alone represent the singular will of ‘the people’. When this ‘empty signifier’ transcends national borders, incorporating old–new transnational imaginations, populist leaders achieve external confirmation of the ‘true’ archetype for which they claim to speak (see Chryssogelos, 2017: 2; Moffitt, 2017: 410–412). Contemporary populists have thus internalised that projecting the ‘people-making’ practice transnationally is essential to their quest for input legitimation.

Historical processes help to explain why the ideational constitution of the ‘people’ as a source of input legitimation is currently insufficient if it is not projected on the transnational level. Various processes of state transformation catalysed by the end of the Cold War have exposed the contradictions between ‘peoples’, ‘nations’ and ‘citizens’. The combined processes of globalisation and regionalisation have made it increasingly difficult to define the boundaries of political mediation, leading to legitimacy deficits often referred to as ‘crises of representation’ (see De Wilde et al., 2019; Zürn, 2018). This denationalisation of ‘the people’ strongly challenges populist claims to represent the people’s singular will. Indeed, as Sofia Näsström (2007) elaborates, the claim to speak ‘in the name of the people’ (pre)requires ‘the legitimacy of the people’. There will always be conflicting views regarding the shared definition of the composition and boundaries of any political community. The very constitution of ‘a people’ raises a claim of legitimacy, since there is no ‘people’ that can be considered legitimate a priori. Consequently, the legitimacy of any political leadership presupposes the (re-)construction of that people (Näsström 2007: 625–638). The transnational projection of ‘the people’ allows populist leaders to base their authority on a current legitimacy claim, which they lack if they remain attached to the national zeitgeist that prevailed in previous waves of populism.

Certainly, as Benjamin Moffitt (2017: 415–477) argues, ‘there is no “people” out there just waiting for the populist leader to speak on their behalf’. The discursive construction of a people that transcends national borders implies more difficulties, as it is ‘harder to characterise’ and more ‘diffuse’. The distinction between people, nation and citizen demands from populists a special focus on the groups that can accentuate this separation. For instance, direct relationships with national diasporas allow populists like India’s Modi, the Philippines’ Duterte, Brazil’s Bolsonaro and Turkey’s Erdoğan to invoke the existence of a ‘fully unified people’ that is broader than the national label, while claiming a unique representation that transcends geographic distance and bypasses intermediary institutions (see Destradi and Plagemann, 2019: 6; De Cleen and Stavrakakis, 2017: 308–310). Contemporary populists understand that the smaller the overlap between the definitions of national, popular and individual ‘interest’, the more the distinction between the inside and outside of populism fades (Chryssogelos, 2020: 8–11; Wojczewski, 2020: 404–407).

Since the construction of a transnational people is generally insufficient for legitimising the projected antagonism, populist leaders tend to accompany it with a negative campaign in which the ‘people’ identifies their ‘enemies’ abroad. Selecting the ‘enemies’ is easier since they are transnational by definition (Chryssogelos, 2017: 12; Moffitt, 2017: 412–413). There are two types of enemies reconstructed above the national level: ‘the other’ and ‘the establishment’. On one hand, constructing the ‘self’ (‘who we are’), as in every expression of identity politics, often pre-requires alienating an ‘other’ (‘who we are not’; Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2008; Müller, 2017). Populists resort to the practice of ‘othering’ by stereotyping ‘foreign’ groups, such as migrants and ethnoreligious communities, as threats to the ‘ordinary people’ (Wojczewski, 2020: 406–409). In Donald Trump’s US administration, the evil ‘others’ undermining the ‘ordinary people’ were generally Hispanics who entered the United States illegally through Mexico (Boucher and Thies, 2019: 713–715). A similar case is the framing of Europe as a Western or Christian civilisation under threat from Islamists by right-wing populists in power such as Orbán in Hungary, Kaczynski in Poland and Silvani in Italy, as well as among populist leaders in the opposition in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland (Chryssogelos, 2020: 10; Verbeek and Zazlove, 2017: 3–4). This alienation of ‘others’ is certainly not restricted to populism in the Global North, as it has featured frequently in many populist leaderships of the Global South. In Erdoğan’s Turkey, the further the processes of de-Europeanisation and authoritarianism advanced, the more ‘the West’ took on the form of ‘the other’ (Altinörs 2021; Özpek and Yasar, 2018: 203–205). Anti-Westernism has also been historically present in several Islamic populist leaderships in Southeast Asia and the Middle East (Hadiz, 2018). Narendra Modi’s portrayal of India as a (solely) Hindu nation – civilisation is discursively shaped in opposition to Islamist fundamentalism (Plagemann and Destradi, 2018; Wojczewski, 2020: 408–412). Certainly, ‘exclusionary populists’ and ‘inclusionary populists’ generally act differently in this regard (see Filc, 2015; Mudde and Rovira-Kaltwasser, 2012; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, 2014). However, both left-wing and right-wing populists may find their own transnational ‘others’ to alienate – the former through nativism and ethnoreligious xenophobia, the latter through socio-economic classification. Indeed, the negative framing of the ‘Yankees’ has been prominent among not only left-wing populist leaders in Latin America allied to Venezuela’s Chavismo (Sagarzazu and Thies, 2019; Wajner and Roniger, 2019) but also those in Europe, including the leaders of Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece (although becoming more moderate after assuming governmental control). ⁵

However, populist leaders present themselves in normative opposition to the ‘establishment’; a ‘blob’ of supranational authorities and like-minded local technocrats, portrayed as ‘hostile’ to the interests of the ‘real’ people. As Michael Zürn (2018) explains, supranational bureaucracies have assumed authority without being fully subject to popular election, sparking a challenge to their (input) legitimacy and fuelling a politicisation that emphasises the return of popular or national sovereignty. As a continuation of the defiance of domestic elites, populists react against these ‘foreign’ conglomerates, who ‘fail to reflect the vox populi’ (Voeten, 2020: 407–415). These backlashes point to the restoration of popular sovereignty (‘Make 13691481211069345 Great Again’, ‘take back control’, etc.), not only regaining authority for the ‘original’ people but also giving voice to it (Bonikowski and Gidron 2015: 1595–1596; Inglehart and Norris, 2016: 1–3). As best demonstrated during the Brexit, European populists of all stripes show a special disdain for the establishment of the EU, ‘Brussels’ (EU institutions) and ‘Frankfurt’ (the European Central Bank), accusing them of responding to ‘foreign’ interests. Projecting these enemies transnationally frames populists as authentic leaders fully dedicated to rescuing their powerless ‘folks’ (Moffitt, 2017: 41; Wojczewski, 2020: 400–404). Foreign policy is particularly useful in disseminating this message when it draws on historically grounded narratives of the past glory of ‘genuine’ leaders versus ‘foreign’ elites (Drezner, 2017: 28).

Throughput legitimacy: ‘Struggling’ through (re-)legitimation from abroad

Contemporary populist leaders also suffer from a structural deficit in ‘throughput legitimacy’, particularly after winning office, which leads to their perpetual engagement in legitimation struggles. Although they claim to be a democratic ‘corrective’ to earlier elite-oriented rulemaking, in practice, they are under constant scrutiny for promoting anti-democratic procedures. Local adversaries criticise populist practices on the grounds that they exacerbate polarisation, illiberal deficits and authoritarian threats, thus causing a ‘democratic regression’ (Schäfer and Zürn, 2021; see also Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018: 5–9; Müller, 2017: 3–6; Rovira-Kaltwasser and Taggart, 2016: 345–347). Populist leaders are therefore caught in another trap. In contrast to traditional authoritarian regimes, populists need to limit their use of openly repressive methods if they want to be perceived as endorsing principles of democratic accountability (see Inglehart and Norris, 2016: 7). This requisite to appear transparent and inclusive forces populists to look for a ‘softer’ means to respond to their opponents. One such means is struggling through (re-)legitimation devices.

Indeed, while it is initially domestic adversaries that challenge populist policymaking, this trend soon spreads to like-minded agents in global media bodies, international organisations and multiple types of transnational civil societies (Plagemann and Destradi, 2018: 286–289). When populists identify the projection of the legitimation struggle, they also seek (re-)legitimation from abroad. The transnational denunciation soon leads to populist alliances against these delegitimising enemies, underpinning the polarisation upon which they thrive domestically and feeding it back into the international scene (Chryssogelos, 2017: 4; Drezner, 2017: 27, 30; Stengel et al., 2019: 369). To this end, populists take advantage of real-time digital communication and their growing interconnection with allies and supporters elsewhere (Boucher and Thies, 2019: 712–716; Chatterje-Doody and Crilley, 2019: 77–79; Moffitt, 2016: 74–81). Venezuela’s Chavismo, the United States’ Trumpism, and Turkey’s Erdoğanism are recent examples of the use of interactive communication to bypass intermediaries in critical times and exploit transnational bonds of political participation and mobilisation.

The projection of this legitimation clash onto the regional and global stages ultimately targets the populist’s own constituents. In the face of widespread public scrutiny of the legitimacy of their rulemaking processes, populist leaders must demonstrate to their political bases that they find approval abroad for the practices that national elites reject. Certainly, international legitimation contests are not only evident among populist leaders, and populists are not the only political actors that seek foreign policy achievements as a form of (re-)legitimation. However, structural constraints make this throughput legitimation particularly important among populists, as it enhances the sense of popular consent and permanent revolution among their supporters (see Rovira-Kaltwasser and Taggart, 2016: 346). By subscribing to an existing international zeitgeist, populist leaders find reassurance in the way in which their peers oppose their own elites, which reaffirms the correctness of their own procedures. Hanging out with other populist leaders boosts their image as a representative of a victimised people and reconfigures their narrative of underdog at the international level (Moffitt, 2016: 70–72).

This need for (re-)legitimation through external endorsement may help explain populist leaders’ attitudes towards regional integration schemes, global governance institutions and, more generally, international cooperation. Contrary to the general belief that populists are inherently isolationists, anti-internationalists, or anti-regionalists in their foreign policies, they tend to seek alternative frameworks for multilateral interaction. Through the creation or reform of like-minded fora, populist leaders give symbolic meaning to their ‘soft-balancing’ of transnational elites. These ‘populists only’ clubs strengthen populists’ common sense of ‘We feeling’, as they legitimise one another by appearing as primus inter pares (Chryssogelos, 2017: 14; Destradi and Plagemann, 2019: 2–4; Söderbaum et al., 2021: 10–13). Aware that the perception of agreement within a community speaks with more credibility than any single political actor, especially if this sense of collectivity is embedded in cultural delineations, populists seek ‘collective legitimisation’ (see Claude, 1966: 368–369; Franck, 1990: 202–203). The populist (re-)articulation of transnational identities is illustrated in Chavismo’s reshaping of integration in ‘Nuestramérica’, Orbán’s promotion of ‘Central Europeanness’, Erdoğan’s weaponisation of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and Duterte’s identity-building in the ‘ASEAN family’.

The use of alternative transnational fora does not mean that populist leaders have become, ideologically speaking, ‘regionalists’ or ‘globalists’. The populist emphasis on sovereignty is certainly at odds with cosmopolitan sentiments, and even more with the elites who adopt them (see Börzel and Zürn, 2020: 7–9). These alternative encounters do not necessarily include institutional or policy substance; collective legitimation is primarily about performativity, style and identity symbolism (Drezner, 2017: 28–33; Moffitt, 2016: 7–8). This is highlighted in the preference for highly mediated meetings, either bilateral or multilateral, in ad hoc institutional settings, in a kind of à la carte international cooperation (Söderbaum et al., 2021: 10–13). For instance, right-wing populism in Europe promotes a club that embodies ‘Europeanness’, speaks for ‘Europe’s peoples’, and partially adopts the institutional form of the ‘Europe of Nations and Freedom’, but maintains a Eurosceptic attitude towards regional institutions (Chryssogelos, 2020: 11; Stengel, 2019: 6–7; Verbeek and Zazlove, 2015: 15–16). In this sense, it is difficult to see the potential formation of an ideologically based global populist movement, a kind of ‘Populist International’, as hypothesised elsewhere (see De la Torre, 2017; McDonnell and Werner, 2020).

Likewise, to overcome these limitations, populist leaders need to frame their transnational activism in opposition to institutional fora beyond the nation-state (Destradi and Plagemann, 2019: 2–4). The backlash against international institutions lies not only in portraying the ‘foreignness’ of their bureaucracies, but also their lack of ‘purity’ in decision-making processes (Voeten, 2020: 407–409). Populist leaders accuse technocrats in charge of regional and global governance for their ‘corrupt’ approach to the implementation of democratic procedures, in which they are not accountable to the people’s will (Biegon, 2019: 529–530; Müller, 2017: 19). For example, left-wing populist leaders in Latin America and Europe associate the corrupt transnational establishment with ‘Wall Street’, multinational companies such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Facebook, and international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (Wajner, 2021). Paradoxically, they found common ground with both Trump and Bernie Sanders in the United States, who took similar approaches in fighting against the ‘big corporations, big donors, and big banks’ that allegedly sold out US interests (Boucher and Thies, 2019: 720; Inglehart and Norris, 2016: 5; Skonieczny, 2019: 345–355).

A similar explanation can be offered for the marginalisation of career diplomats, foreign policy bureaucracies, international aid employees, and other ‘conspiring’ transnational elites, accused of undergoing a value shift towards post-materialistic values (Destradi and Plagemann, 2019: 14–16; Drezner, 2017: 27–33). These ‘globalist’ authorities are accused of being unpatriotic at best and traitors at worst, since their practices are perceived as associated with the defence of the rights of the ‘others’ (Wojczewski, 2020: 404–408). Indeed, in Europe as in the United States, criticisms of the decisions that facilitated border porousness have been the touchstone of the emergence of populism (Chryssogelos, 2017: 4; De Wilde et al., 2019). Right-wing populists all over Europe resent the ‘overly tolerant’ attitudes towards ethnic minorities, refugees, asylum seekers and guest workers (Chryssogelos, 2020: 9–11; Destradi and Plagemann, 2019: 3). Australia’s Pauline Hanson and New Zealand’s Winston Peters have delivered similar arguments regarding immigration procedures in their regions (Moffitt, 2016). International judicial authorities have also been widely singled out as ‘corrupt’ transnational elites with ‘double standards’, as have international agencies working on cross-border issues such as refugees and climate change (Drezner, 2017: 28; Verbeek and Zazlove, 2017: 12–17; Voeten, 2020).

Therefore, the populist quest for throughput legitimacy addresses accountability in decision-making processes. In opposition to these ‘corrupt’ transnational elites, populist leaders present themselves as transparent redeemers of the ‘pure’ people(s) who owe nothing to anyone (Casullo, 2019: 58; Inglehart and Norris, 2016: 5–6). An example of a contemporary populism enacting transparent and altruistic behaviours is Chavismo’s use of national oil resources to finance social programmes throughout Latin America, which they claimed to be regional sharing of Venezuela’s ‘petrodollars’ (Sagarzazu and Thies, 2019: 206; Wajner and Roniger, 2019). Erdoğan historically attempted to adopt a similar attitude with reference to the support of Muslim Brotherhood groups throughout the Middle East (Taş, 2020: 5–12). By projecting abroad a sense of persecution on one hand and sacrifice on the other hand, the populists’ ‘way out’ seeks to gain both national and international legitimation for their implementation of government policies and their personal conduct as rulers (see Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2008: 3; Chatterje-Doody and Crilley, 2019: 88–89).

Output legitimacy: Diverting frustration and performing success

Contemporary populist leaders are caught in yet another legitimation trap. They claim to carry out a revolution that will bring about rapid changes and achievements, especially when their popularity stems from economic and institutional crises. However, after assuming a governance role, populists soon face a key challenge to their output legitimacy; they cannot deliver the expected outcomes, at least not as quickly as promised. To avoid betraying their audience’s hopes regarding their problem-solving abilities and preserve the belief that victory is near, current populist leaders seek alternative sources to legitimise their policymaking performance despite their lack of efficiency and/or effectiveness. The ‘way out’ to the international stage provides populist leaders with a means to demonstrate the sincerity of their ideas, deflect frustration from allies and audiences, and thus justify the continuation, deepening and expansion of the ‘revolution’.

Seeking to justify the fairness of their policy results and tackle the public frustrations of their political constituencies, populist leaders transnationally project the demarcation between ‘peoples’ and ‘elites’. Populists thus divert attention from their own responsibility for the persistence of economic and political problems while assigning blame to the transnational elites, who are portrayed as the only chargeable authorities (Moffitt, 2016: 45; Verbeek and Zazlove, 2015: 15–17). As the Brexit demonstrated, the call to ‘take back control’ does not rest on a solely moral or cultural basis; it is also utilitarian, as populists claim that the people’s ‘wisdom’ allows them to better manage the people’s interests (Chryssogelos, 2020: 9). ‘The people’ cannot be the ‘puppet’ of anyone, and especially not of the transnational bureaucrats held responsible for their decline (Biegon, 2019: 525–526). Hence, by projecting the people – elites struggle abroad, populist leaders deflect social demands, alleging that effective reforms presuppose policymaking in the international sphere (Hadiz and Chryssogelos, 2017: 399–402; Moffitt, 2016: 44–45).

This argument helps explain why many populists experience a gradual radicalisation in foreign and security policymaking; the longer they are in power, the more they must ‘go abroad’ to deflect concerns about their failures at home. Blaming external elites for crises is particularly common in places where populism is a long-standing phenomenon, such as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico in Latin America, and European countries such as Greece and Italy (see Rooduijn and Akkerman, 2017; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, 2014). However, this trend is also increasingly expanding to the Global North, where populist leaders react against international institutions and bureaucracies that do not produce ‘fair’ political outcomes for ‘the real people’ (Inglehart and Norris, 2016: 1–2; Voeten, 2020: 418–422). Populists call for a return to ‘fair’ policies in terms of trade, investments, security, immigration and the environment, stopping free-riding in the provision of global public goods and prioritising the ‘people’s interests’ (Chryssogelos, 2017: 14; Destradi and Plagemann, 2019: 2–4). To justify the persistence of the revolutionary struggle, populists benefit from a political environment of drama and paranoid conspiracy theories about the elites’ responsibility for crises (see Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2008: 3; Hadiz and Chryssogelos, 2017: 407–408; Krebs, 2021).

Certainly, populist legitimation strategies exist largely in a discursive realm, but they cannot be completely detached from political reality for too long, since the actual performance of their policies ultimately has an impact. The populist ‘way out’ is not only intended to detract from poor results, but also to allow populist leaders to associate themselves with success stories. Since their constituents perceive other populist leaders around the world as particularly effective in addressing analogous problems, partnering with them facilitates the legitimation of similar responses (Chryssogelos, 2020: 2–6; 2019: 1; Drezner, 2017: 28–33; Moffitt, 2016: 7–8; Verbeek and Zazlove, 2017: 6–7). This type of diffusion helps explain why populist phenomena spread rapidly both regionally and globally. Interaction with populist leaders whose policymaking abilities are recognised confers on populists ‘performative verification’ and ‘continuous mobilisation’ of their support base (Destradi and Plagemann, 2019: 7). A good example is Putin’s international appeal, which stems from his perception as an assertive leader who helped his allies emerge victorious from their crises in Ukraine, Syria and Venezuela. Meeting with Putin has thus become symbolic for populists in Europe and beyond, given the admiration that Russia’s ‘strong-arm’ policies generate among their political bases (Drezner, 2017: 34–35). Likewise, Modi’s projection of India’s growing association with Netanyahu’s Israel indicates not only India’s international repositioning but also Modi’s own populist grandstanding in terms of vigorous and assertive foreign and security policy. This relationship is certainly mutual, as Netanyahu took advantage of his warm encounters with Modi (as well as with Trump and Putin) to demonstrate his policy achievements to the public, stating on large posters and in television commercials that he is in ‘a league of his own’.

Moreover, for populist leaders, the international field enhances not only the audience’s perceptions of their policies’ success, but also their own portrayal as successful leaders. According to the populist repertoire, the leader’s ‘soul’ must be prosperous (Casullo, 2019: 58–66). Interestingly, populists must claim that they are ‘underdogs’, but they must also prove that they can be ‘winners’. Since their political constituents appreciate victory and want to see their leaders defending their pride abroad, they cannot appear as ‘losers’. Certainly, charisma is a key source of legitimation for any political leader, as Weber emphasised, but is even more relevant to the populist ‘way out’. Contemporary populist leaders need to portray themselves as charismatic, brilliant heroes who reverse the decline of the people through ‘deal-making’ in the international arena. Indeed, Trump’s quest for recognition of his ability to ‘win’ and ‘make deals’ in global politics could have led him to pursue a ‘victory picture’ at any cost in negotiations with North Korea regarding the nuclear programme, with China regarding trade customs and with Europe regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (Biegon, 2019: 530–534). Similar reasons led Brazil’s Bolsonaro, a pioneer of a new type of right-wing populism in Latin America, to seek jovial appearances with Netanyahu, Putin and Trump with such enthusiasm.

Finally, with the aim of portraying their transnational status and differentiating themselves from the weakness of the opposition, populist leaders tend to resort to the organisation of festive and widespread political mobilisation abroad. To this end, populists are interested in projecting the cult of leadership abroad, creating affective connections between the ‘leader’ and their followers. These dynamics are highlighted in Modi’s efforts, during his visits abroad, to obtain a ‘rock star reception’ from Indian diasporas, his ‘people overseas’ (Destradi and Plagemann, 2019: 4–7; Wojczewski, 2020: 410–418). Likewise, left-wing populists in Latin America associated with Venezuela’s Chavismo-Madurismo, such as Argentina’s Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, devoted considerable efforts to promoting the euphoric visualisation of grassroots-led festive mobilisation. By performing liaisons of almost messianic mutual solidarity, these populist leaders promoted the myth of the leader’s martyrdom and projected it transnationally (see Levitsky and Loxton, 2013: 110; Wajner and Roniger, 2019). This is particularly relevant during dramatic critical junctures, such as coup attempts or referenda, when the populist sense of irreplaceability is challenged (Moffitt, 2016: 45). Learning from the coups against other populists like Chávez, Erdoğan internalised this need, as was evident during the coup attempt against him in July 2016, when he used Facebook Live in a call to his ‘people’ across the globe.

Conclusion

This article explored the strategic features of the populist quest for transnational legitimation. It examined how, seeking a ‘way out’ of the legitimation traps in which they are caught, contemporary populist leaders are increasingly willing to project the populist ideational core – the discursive construction of a Manichean struggle between ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ – onto the regional and global stages. To this end, the study addressed the existing academic research on the international dimensions of populism, as well as the potential combination of this research with the international legitimacy literature to fill existing theoretical gaps. Subsequently, drawing on the well-known classification of input, throughput and output legitimacy, this phenomenological study offered three specific explanations for why contemporary populists ‘go abroad’, which were illustrated with anecdotal evidence of prototypical populist leaderships varying in both geographic and ideological terms.

The main arguments developed in the article are that populist leaders exploit the transnational projection of the people – elites ‘empty signifiers’ to reaffirm to their constituencies the rightness of their leadership (input legitimation), the suitability of their decision-making processes (throughput legitimation) and the fairness of their policies (output legitimation). Using these various legitimation sources, populists carry out their interactions with actors in bilateral and multilateral settings, seeking to gain abroad the kind of legitimacy that they do not enjoy at home. With the aim of satisfying various psychological, institutional and political needs, contemporary populist leaders articulate their legitimation strategies transnationally, thus reaching, attracting and politically activating both national and international sympathisers.

That said, since the main energies in a phenomenological study are devoted to enriching and refining the explanations of an unresolved puzzle, further research is needed to confirm the external validity of these findings. Most specifically, the methodological preference for anecdotal evidence that would be sufficiently ideologically and geographically comprehensive to enable the preliminary identification and justification of these patterns limits the study’s ability to systematically demonstrate both the frequency and generalisability of the populist ‘way out’. In addition, it remains to be further scrutinised whether populist leaders have different legitimacy needs and reactions to these needs based on their background in terms of ideology (left vs right), geography (Global South vs Global North) and political regime (more authoritarian vs less authoritarian). Interactions with populist peers can also be affected by some leaders’ lack of international legitimacy, so it remains necessary to examine the conditions under which some populists have more transnational ‘appeal’ than others. Likewise, heuristic factors, such as previous experience in foreign policymaking or prior knowledge of diplomatic practices, may be at play in the manifestation of these patterns among contemporary populist leaders (see Wajner 2022). Systematic exploration of these nuances through in-depth case studies and comparative analysis can contribute to refining the arguments raised.

In the meantime, the insights offered in this article may contribute to the research agenda on transnational populism’s effects on the international scene. Addressing populist phenomena by theorising (self-, re- and de-)legitimation dynamics helps to improve our understanding not only of the strategic sources of populist power and its activation of populist attitudes but also of its subsequent diffusion and impact in the regional and global arenas. If populism has become a transnational phenomenon, it means that it has more capacity to challenge the very institutions of the liberal international order established following the Second World War and consolidated after the end of the Cold War. Such a shift demands a much closer analysis of the potential implications of the legitimation contests between the liberal ‘script’ and an alternative populist ‘script’ (see Börzel and Zürn, 2020; Lake et al., 2021). A comprehensive exploration of the transnational projection of populist legitimation can help the international community develop strategies to more successfully contest and mitigate populist threats worldwide.