"Extremists and populist movements are exploiting people's fear of those who are not like us. We can see the consequences in the form of terrorism and racially motivated violence"
About this Quote
Bondevik’s line is built like a warning label: not poetic, not performative, but calibrated to make “fear” look less like a private emotion and more like a political technology. The key move is the verb “exploiting.” He isn’t describing a spontaneous backlash or a naturally occurring culture clash; he’s assigning agency to “extremists and populist movements,” framing them as entrepreneurs of anxiety who convert social unease into power.
“Those who are not like us” is deliberately elastic. It covers immigrants, religious minorities, racialized groups, even political opponents - anyone who can be cast as an invading “other.” That vagueness is strategic: it mirrors how populist rhetoric operates, thriving on implication and insinuation rather than specific policy claims. Bondevik also fuses “extremists” and “populist movements” in one breath, a subtle provocation from a centrist statesman: the respectable and the radical are not opposites here, but points on the same pipeline of grievance.
The second sentence tightens the screw by linking rhetoric to outcome. “Consequences” is a bureaucratic word, but he weaponizes it by naming two endpoints: “terrorism” and “racially motivated violence.” That pairing matters. It refuses the comfortable habit of treating terrorism as an external, imported threat while seeing racist violence as isolated domestic pathology. Subtext: the same fear-politics can radicalize in multiple directions, and the state should stop treating these as separate worlds.
As a Norwegian leader speaking in a Europe shaped by post-9/11 security politics, migration debates, and far-right normalization, Bondevik is arguing that democracies don’t just suffer polarization - they manufacture it when they let fear become a campaign strategy.
“Those who are not like us” is deliberately elastic. It covers immigrants, religious minorities, racialized groups, even political opponents - anyone who can be cast as an invading “other.” That vagueness is strategic: it mirrors how populist rhetoric operates, thriving on implication and insinuation rather than specific policy claims. Bondevik also fuses “extremists” and “populist movements” in one breath, a subtle provocation from a centrist statesman: the respectable and the radical are not opposites here, but points on the same pipeline of grievance.
The second sentence tightens the screw by linking rhetoric to outcome. “Consequences” is a bureaucratic word, but he weaponizes it by naming two endpoints: “terrorism” and “racially motivated violence.” That pairing matters. It refuses the comfortable habit of treating terrorism as an external, imported threat while seeing racist violence as isolated domestic pathology. Subtext: the same fear-politics can radicalize in multiple directions, and the state should stop treating these as separate worlds.
As a Norwegian leader speaking in a Europe shaped by post-9/11 security politics, migration debates, and far-right normalization, Bondevik is arguing that democracies don’t just suffer polarization - they manufacture it when they let fear become a campaign strategy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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