Projective identification, anxiety, and ontological (in)security in populist leadership: erdoğanism and trumpism

Periods of uncertainty and perceived decline create conditions in which populist leaders emerge, polarizing societies through rigid identity boundaries that contain collective anxiety and consolidate political authority. This paper argues that populist movements function as collective psychic defenses against ontological insecurity through a three-level process. Ontological insecurity generates fertile ground for attributional bias as tolerance for ambiguity diminishes; hostile attribution bias transforms this vulnerability into the perception of persecutory enemies; and Kleinian mechanisms of splitting and projective identification organize these hostile attributions into coherent narratives of victimhood and threat. Drawing on Klein’s object relations theory, Bion’s group psychology and Volkan’s large-group identity framework, the paper demonstrates how populism transforms ontological insecurity into antagonism that offers temporary relief while reproducing and institutionalizing the anxieties it claims to resolve. The argument is illustrated through Donald Trump and Tayyip Erdoğan, whose movements demonstrate how the affective component of populism relies on splitting and projective identification to transform ontological insecurity into political cohesion. The paper contributes to ontological security studies by specifying the psychic mechanisms through which anxiety is governed, to political psychology by bridging psychoanalytic and social-cognitive frameworks, and to populism studies by demonstrating how the paranoid-schizoid position is institutionalized by these movements.