Political scientist Srirupa Roy’s newest book The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism shows how India’s experience from the Emergency up to the emergence of leaders like Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal can explain why the world has become enamored with strongmen. In this excerpt, she shows us the many different variations of the strongman trope that have emerged around the world and what their characteristic features are.
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This is the time of the strongmen. In recent years, they have come to govern many different countries around the world with a decisive electorate mandate, flexing their authoritarian muscle in raw displays of boastful power and upending democracy’s core precepts in the name of restoring power to the people. Brazil, the Philippines, Russia, Turkey, India, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia, the United States, Slovenia, Poland, we can go on. A common type of leader is at the helm of national politics across this varied geopolitical terrain. Nearly always, it is a singular male figure who promises to break the vise grip of elites over the diseased and corrupt system of political democracy and restore the people to their due place of power. The concentration of political authority in a self-fashioned outsider to “the system” who fires up a disillusioned electorate with his agenda of decisive action is a familiar feature of our present times.
Some scholars have related the strongman’s rise to the widening social inequalities and precarities created by the predatory reign of financialized capitalism and the failures of existing governments to mitigate its disastrous effects, from the relentless commodification of all human relations to the irreversible depletion of natural resources that imperils planetary futures. Strongman rule is a system-stabilizing reaction to this crisis, some argue. It is a structural recalibration of contemporary disorder around the promise of redemptive action. It is an attempt to divert the insurrectionary potential of mass anger away from the capitalist order and toward scapegoats, usually weak minorities, that strongmen leaders target as the cause of the people’s despair.
Taking a less functionalist approach, others have related the rise of strongman politics to the “crumbling of social foundations” and the steady decay of democracy’s organizational, institutional, and procedural features over the past decades. Strongmen political entrepreneurs thrive in the wastelands of imploded democracies in this telling. They seize the political opportunities opened up by the collapse of traditional political parties, and the availability of new kinds of media technologies for mass mobilization. The normative political languages and distinctive modes of publicity that strongmen deploy resonate widely with citizens who are disappointed and thoroughly disenchanted with democracy-as-usual. They ignite popular hope and belief that the messianic leader will make things great again.
Srirupa Roy
The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism
Navayana, 2025
Strongman regimes are not new. Ruth Ben-Ghiat emplots a century-long series that begins with Benito Mussolini in the 1920s. Twenty-first-century “new despots” resemble these earlier avatars but also stand out in several important ways. Chief among these is the context of political democracy in which contemporary strongman rule flourishes as a specific form of “elective despotism,” to use John Keane’s term. Unlike their predecessors, all the contemporary regimes included within the category are formal and constitutional democracies, although their specific attributes, dominant ideological orientations, levels of institutional consolidation, and substantive democratic records may differ. Millennial strongmen have emerged from within democracy; they morph rather than kill democracy. Strongmen regimes are hybrid political forms that combine democratic and authoritarian elements of rule and legitimation.
The authoritarianism-within-democracy mix means that consent as well as coercion is used to legitimize strongman rule. But this is not just about influencing individual belief and conviction. Elective despots strive as much to pervade as to persuade, to be publicly encountered as much as to be believed. As Esra Özyürek, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and other scholars of twentieth-century strongmen regimes have shown, Atatürk and Mussolini cults proliferated their monumental and miniaturized replicas across a wide range of public and domestic arenas, from the embroidery profile on a handkerchief to giant murals along public avenues.6 Close to a century later we see similar fractal effects at work. Innumerable statues, hoardings, masks, holograms, digital streams, and algorithms disperse, mirror, and multiply the strongman as a familiar everyday presence.
Strongmen regimes thus rely quite heavily on publicity, performance, and multisensory spectacles to constitute their political authority. There are often sharp ideological and political differences between regimes. Political Islam and “Christianism” respectively fuel the strongman politics of Erdogan and Trump; the socialist worldview of a Chavez is very different from the militarist-right nationalist orientations of a Putin. Despite these differences, strongman performances reproduce a common set of themes. The first is personalization. Strongman imaginaries are usually anchored to a singular figure who embodies and incarnates the true spirit of the people. Power is concentrated in both institutional-procedural and symbolic ways. The institutional checks and balances of democratic government are circumvented using a variety of means. These include the evisceration of parliamentary deliberation procedures that have historically served to counterbalance executive authority, and discretionary appointments to bureaucratic positions on the basis of personal loyalty to the leader rather than professional criteria of selection and promotion.
The strongman also centers himself in the symbolic narrative of people and nation, conflating love and loyalty to the people and the nation with himself. Nationalist ideologies promote abstract and collective forms of passion and devotion—the love for land, religion, language, or community. Strongman regimes cultivate love for the individual leader as the true and the only incarnation of the people. The idea of incarnation is quite different from representational claims about the relationship between the leader and the people/nation. The leader’s work of expressing and safeguarding the consciously determined and fully formed will of the people is emphasized by the latter. In contrast, the figure of strongman-as-avatar showcases the leader’s fidelity to a core essence that eludes popular awareness and knowledge. The claim of popular incarnation is thus a claim about a different and a better access to the authentic truth of the people that they themselves do not know. Asserting the superior knowledge and agency of the leader, the strongman is placed in a hierarchical relation to the people.
The second recurring theme is that of masculine power and virility. As the publicity campaigns around leaders like Trump, Putin, Duterte, and Bolsonaro make abundantly clear, strongman authority is expressed and legitimized through heteronormative displays of “toxic masculinity” and violent misogyny. The leader’s fit and muscular body (Putin), sexual prowess and unconstrained sexual enjoyment (Berlusconi, Duterte), and easy and abundant access to women (Trump) are among the sexualized metonymies of political authority that proliferate quite freely in strongman regimes, endorsed by state functionaries and party supporters as well as by non-state media and private citizens. Reflecting national variations in sociocultural norms, in some instances the gendering of strongman authority as male requires performances of celibacy and austerity rather than virile swaggering. The publicity around Modi and Erdogan foregrounds their sober respectability as paterfamilias figures, not their sexual excesses. However, this does not challenge the basic normative premise of masculinity as the defining attribute of strongman leadership.
Third, the strongman is invariably identified as an outsider to the system and to the tightly knit circles of elites who are seen to have usurped power from the people. The idea of the outsider, like that of the system and the elites, is multifaceted. The strongman asserts his distance from the status quo in social, political, and economic terms. Moreover, outsider claims do not have a single and stable class referent. In some cases, the humble background of the strongman distinguishes him from the wealthy elites who have usurped power from the people. In others, it is exactly the opposite. It is because he is wealthy that he can stand apart from the corrupt temptations of political office. The divergent strongman narratives around Modi and Trump illustrate the doubled construction of outsider identity. Modi the humble chaiwala and Trump the billionaire both claim their legitimate authority as outsiders to the system. They are leaders untainted and fundamentally disinterested in the sordid hustle of politics because they, like the people, inhabit moral and social worlds that are outside the closed and corrupt system.
Finally, strongmen usually come across as larger-than-life protagonists. They are lone figures who are (literally) seen to thoroughly shake up the system with their forceful interventions. Strongmen boldly undertake decisive actions that shatter social and political conventions in all kinds of unexpected ways and capture public attention with their unfettered originality. In a variety of different strongman regimes around the world, the political theater of “eventocracy” is a familiar recurrence. Aligning with prevailing commercial and social media logics of sensation and stimulation, policy decisions and the ordinary and even mundane business of governance are repackaged as unique events that dominate media interest and confirm leader-centric narratives about political authority and agency. Examples include Narendra Modi’s demonetization policy announcement, Rodrigo Duterte’s dramatic declarations of a war on drugs in the Philippines, and Jair Bolsonaro’s national addresses from a hospital bed during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, which visually conveyed both his ordinary vulnerability and his extraordinary powers of control and survival over the dreaded disease.
Enacted as dramatic surprises, like thunderclaps and skyfalls, events shore up the normative ideal of the unconstrained leader who breaks free of convention and conformity and transforms the status quo with his bold actions. The much-discussed contemporary phenomenon of “post-truth” that characterizes strongman regimes the world over has an analogous role. It is a set of public interventions that asserts the leader’s autonomy from all kinds of conventional restraints, including that of facticity and consistency. When critics lament the gap between facts/truth and the fantasies and conspiracies spun by strongman regimes, they fail to understand its legitimation functions. The existence of such a gap conveys the strongman’s transformative, rule-bending capacities and his ability to create and shape realities. In other words, it is because the strongman performances are fantastical and patently untrue that they legitimize the strongman as a transformational agent of popular redemption.
This is an edited excerpt where the academic notes and references have been removed. Excerpted with permission from Navayana.
Srirupa Roy is Professor and Chair of State and Democracy at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at the University of Göttingen.
