Populist regimes recast criticized rival nations as positive role models.

Evidence

Populist governments also tend to compare themselves invidiously with their enemies or rivals – often states or organisations that criticise the populist regime. Orbán has used this line of argumentation to reject the penalties and criticism of his anti-liberal policies (most notably from the US and the EU) by suggesting that liberal democracy bankrupts the people, the society, and the nation, arguing, by contrast, that the ‘illiberal democra­ cies’ of Putin’s Russia, Tan’s Singapore, Xi Jinping’s China, and Erdoğan’s Turkey provide positive role models for twenty-first century Hungary. — Erin K. Jenne and Promise Frank Ejiofor, Ethnopopulism and genocidal…, 38