Catherine Fieschi

Catherine Fieschi is a leading European politics expert and global analyst.  Her main focus is on the rise of populist and authoritarian politics in advanced democracies and the destabilization that such politics bring to policy-planning and markets. She is a longstanding adviser to progressive political leaders and campaigns across the globe.

A Senior Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University in Florence, Europe’s foremost policy and research institute, Catherine is also a Senior Advisor to the London-based  geo-political advisory firm, Macro Advisory Partners. 

Catherine is a member of the OECD’s Expert Group on Foresight, a member of Singapore’s Centre for Strategic Futures, and is on the International Board of the National Centre for Social Research in the UK.  The founder of Counterpoint, a UK-based think tank that provided governments, businesses, and NGOs around the world with strategic insights on how to manage new forms of social and political risk, she served as its Executive Director until April 2023. Previously, she served as director of the UK’s leading think tank Demos, and as Director of Research at the British Council.  

Widely published in academia and beyond, Catherine has a regular column in the Chatham House magazine, The World Today, and is a regular political and social commentator (FT, The Guardian, Politico,  BBC, CNN, etc). She is the author of, most recently, Populocracy: The Tyranny of Authenticity and the Rise of Populism (2019); And is currently writing a book on women and the far right. 

A native speaker of French, Italian and English, Catherine holds a PhD in Comparative Politics from McGill University in Canada and lives in Paris.