Careless democracy? When right-wing populism meets liberal democracy in Europe and beyond

This paper brings together two largely disconnected bodies of scholarship on (1) rising right-wing populism and processes of de-democratization linked to it and (2) social reproduction and care in an attempt to define the current political moment in Europe. We propose the term “careless democracy” to describe a potential trajectory for liberal democracies of Europe due to the ongoing normalization of right-wing populist ideas (Wodak 2019; Brown, Gordon and Pensky 2019) which crucially entail anti-feminist and anti-gender sentiments (Sauer et al. 2016). Carelessness is a key characteristic of capitalism (Aulenbacher et al. 2015), including its most recent neoliberal stage, defined by the low material and symbolic value accorded to care and those who perform it. However, we also argue that carelessness is gaining new political and scholarly relevance in the present moment as it is closely linked to processes of de-democratization and more en vogue than ever. If a “caring democracy” (Tronto 2013) is the vision of a democracy in which everybody’s care needs are recognized and the burden (and joy) of caring for oneself and others is equally redistributed among the members of a society, a careless democracy can be defined as one where care is deliberately withheld from and further offloaded onto marginalized groups (e.g., migrants, women, the poor, trans), thereby threatening to push these groups below the threshold of social reproduction and replenishment in a sustainable manner and under dignified conditions (Dowling 2018; Rai 2025). To illustrate our argument, we primarily focus on Austria, a country with a long-standing history of right-wing populism and anti-gender mobilization to sketch and better understand the conditions of the emergence of a careless democracy where liberal (or conservative) actors converge with right-wing populists not only rhetorically but also in concrete political demands and actions. But we also integrate current examples from the USA as well as from the Global South and East to demonstrate that growing carelessness as a mode of government and governance can be observed with democracies beyond Europe.