The most consequential provision is without doubt the 16th Amendment to the constitution, which imposes a lifetime term limit of eight years (two parliamentary terms) on the prime minister. Effective retroactively, the measure is obviously targeted at Viktor Orbán. Given he’s already served for a total of 20 years, the new law bars him from ever returning to office. Quite apart from its nakedly ad hominem character, which critics have already dubbed the “Lex Orbán”, the provision has no defensible logic. Why should voters be prevented from re-electing a leader, or rather a parliamentary majority that supports him, if they choose to do so? Indeed, virtually no parliamentary democracy — where, unlike in presidential systems, executive power is shared with a cabinet and remains fundamentally dependent on maintaining a parliamentary majority — imposes a term limit on the head of government.

But the new government didn’t stop there. Another provision, the 17th Amendment, sets a 12-year term limit for members of parliament. Again the ad hominem — or in this case ad partem — nature of the law is clear. Conveniently, no sitting MP from Magyar’s Tisza Party is affected: only the opposition. Fidesz and its allied party KDNP, having dominated frontline politics since 1990, stand to lose their entire senior cadre. One might call this Lex Fidesz, though other parties are caught in the net as well. The blow falls equally hard on the political Left, disqualifying most of its veteran figures and rendering a progressive resurgence all but impossible.

Equally striking is the manner in which the new government ousted the incumbent president, Tamás Sulyok, who had been elected by the previous parliament in February 2024 and whose term was supposed to run until 2029. Magyar, who accused Sulyok of being an Orbán puppet, targeted him from the moment of his victory speech and did everything possible to force him to resign. When Sulyok refused to step down, the new government could have initiated an impeachment procedure, the only mechanism for removal provided for by the Fundamental Law.

Instead, Magyar chose simply to slip a line into one of the constitutional amendments which literally reads: “the term of office of the incumbent President of the Republic terminates today”. Meaning: removal by legislative fiat, what we may call Lex Sulyok. Even Amnesty International Hungary criticized the constitutional coup aimed at unseating the president. It is worth noting that Sulyok also appealed to the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe body that advises states on constitutional and rule-of-law questions, to review the amendment. The Commission’s reply, following a brief trip to Hungary? That it would rule on his motion at its next plenary session in October, neatly coming months after his removal.

The judiciary has not been spared either. Magyar’s 17th Amendment reintroduces a mandatory retirement age of 70 for Constitutional Court judges, effectively removing the chief justice and three other judges, and handing Magyar the opportunity to flip the political balance of the court within his first term. The same amendment further establishes a new body, the National Office for Asset Recovery and Asset Protection, tasked with “the tracing and recovery of public assets that have been unlawfully managed or used” by the previous government. Creating a body to investigate alleged corruption might not seem particularly nefarious: until one realizes that Hungary, like every European country, already possesses institutions devoted to precisely this purpose.

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What makes this one unique is that it’s charged solely with investigating the alleged wrongdoings of a single party — Fidesz — outside judicial and societal oversight. As András Schiffer, the former leader of the green party LMP, put it, the body’s aim is to “make it morally impossible for Fidesz to compete through a series of trials — spiced with staged theatrical performances — and inquisitorial proceedings”. The new government’s decision to join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), itself a highly politicized body effectively operating under the Commission’s control, will only reinforce this.

Magyar has defended these actions by invoking “the exceptional mandate received from the electorate” and as a “precondition for the restoration of constitutional democracy”. The new prime minister’s argument is simple: since Orbán created a “mafia state” that trampled the rule of law, its restoration requires the complete destruction of the Fidesz system. The constitutional amendments, indeed, are only part of a much wider offensive, which includes shutting down the news output of the public media; closing Fidesz-aligned cultural institutions such as MCC and the Danube Institute; and launching a judicial raid on the offices housing Fidesz’s servers to seize its databases, taking the party’s website offline (it still is at the time of writing). For their part, Orbán and his party have accused the new government of dismantling the rule of law, eliminating the system of checks and balances, and persecuting the opposition — of creating, in essence, precisely the authoritarian regime that the liberal establishment always accused Orbán’s government of being.

My purpose is not to convince you that Orbán is right. It is rather to reflect on what the post-Orbán transition tells us about the vanishing meaning of words like “rule of law”, “democracy” and “tyranny” in our post-everything age — and to highlight some of the contradictions within both the liberal and the Orbán camps.

Let us start by clarifying that, technically speaking, the new government’s measures are not illegal. Post-communist Hungary has always been defined by what might be called a hyper-parliamentary system: simply put, a government with a two-thirds majority can amend the Fundamental Law, or even replace it wholesale, in a single chamber, in a single vote, without facing any substantive review by judges. A two-thirds majority also controls the so-called “cardinal laws” — electoral rules, media, judiciary, central bank — and key appointments like constitutional judges and the prosecutor general. The Hungarian parliament thus faces far fewer obstacles in its legislative functions than most of its European counterparts, where constitutional revision tends to require multiple votes, referendums or even general elections. In Germany, certain constitutional fundamentals are outright unamendable — permanently beyond the reach of any parliamentary majority, no matter the size. In Hungary, by contrast, a government with a two-thirds parliamentary majority faces effectively no institutional veto at all.

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Orbán himself mastered this institutional logic better than anyone before him — and in fact reinforced it after 2010, severely curtailing the Constitutional Court’s power to review constitutional changes. The following year, Fidesz then used its own supermajority to adopt an entirely new constitution, redefining the country’s constitutional identity in explicitly national-conservative terms. From there it expanded the court from 11 to 15 judges, handing itself the opportunity to immediately pick four new justices, even as it consolidated a powerful pro-government media machine.

In this sense, you can argue that Magyar is simply following the democratic logic established by Orbán: that a government with a strong mandate should be free to implement sweeping changes that reflect the popular will, and use its constitutional majority to entrench the ruling party’s political interests. Somewhat ironically, Tisza itself benefited from Orbán’s 2011 electoral reform, which raised the share of single-member constituencies from about 45% to 53%, boosting the majoritarian, winner-take-all component of the system. As a result, Tisza’s 53% of the vote translated to roughly 71% of seats. Certainly, Fidesz’s accusation that Tisza is “dismantling the rule of law”, “eliminating the system of checks and balances” and “destroying the legitimacy of independent institutions” rings rather hollow — even as it mirrors the accusations the EU establishment directed at Orbán for years.

All the same, it is true that Tisza has crossed red lines that Orbán never dared to cross: no previous government, for instance, had ever ousted a sitting president by decree. In this sense, some of the new government’s actions, while not technically illegal, undoubtedly violate well-established constitutional principles — such as the inviolability of the president.

But are we sure this is a principle worth defending from a popular-democratic perspective? Setting aside the specifics of the Hungarian case for a moment, the reality is that many of the “independent” institutions that make up the edifice of modern liberal democracies — presidential offices, independent central banks, constitutional courts and the like — do not limit themselves to “upholding the constitution and the rule of law”. Rather, they pursue their own political and institutional logic, independent of that declared or pursued by the political leadership of the day, and more often than not reflective of entrenched elite (and increasingly supranational) interests. Supreme and constitutional courts, for example, frequently rule against government policies — especially when it comes to controversial issues like immigration. The way in which the Bank of England derailed Liz Truss’s infamous mini-budget is arguably another example.

In other words, they exist to limit the popular will — and indeed routinely rule against elected governments — according to the logic of what we might call “constrained democracy”. This is obviously not to claim that there should be no limits whatsoever on an elected government’s actions. But the current model is deeply flawed — and in this sense the fact that Hungary’s system is much less constrained than elsewhere should be viewed as a positive thing.

Returning to the Hungarian case, then, can we really blame the new government for not wanting to spend four years contending with a president appointed by its predecessor? And if the roles were reversed — if Fidesz had won a two-thirds majority and found itself saddled with a staunchly pro-EU president — would conservatives blame it for wanting to get rid of him? After 2010, indeed, Orbán made sure to appoint presidents aligned with his government’s agenda, and I would argue that this made perfect sense from a popular-democratic standpoint.

Ultimately, then, I would claim that the new government’s measures should not be challenged on procedural grounds — with arguments that often echo those the EU establishment deployed against Orbán in the past — but on their substance. The real question is what the government’s measures are for, not how they are done. And on this point there is little doubt: they are aimed at essentially destroying the opposition in Hungary — at making sure Fidesz never returns to power — and thereby “locking in” Hungary’s EU-dictated economic and foreign policy agenda forever.

What that agenda entails is no mystery. It means dismantling Orbán’s heterodox economic model — starting with price caps and energy subsidies, and which the new government has already started to unwind. It also means phasing out Russian oil and gas, whatever the cost to Hungarian households and industry. And above all it means full alignment on Ukraine: within weeks of taking office, Magyar had lifted Hungary’s veto on the European Peace Facility, the Orwellian-named off-budget fund through which the EU, whose own treaties bar its budget from financing military operations, reimburses member states for weapons shipped to Ukraine. At the same time, Hungary no longer now opposes opening accession talks for Ukrainian EU membership, with Magyar further signalling that he would no longer block sanctions against Russia.

Beyond the policy questions here, there is simply no way this brazen attack on the opposition can be defended on democratic grounds — and indeed Orbán himself, for all the EU establishment’s claims about the allegedly autocratic nature of his government, never dared to legislate his opponents out of existence. This brings us to the contradictions of the liberal camp. Because regardless of what one makes of liberal-democratic dogmas, there is no doubt that the Magyar government’s measures represent a blatant violation of the rule of law as defined by Brussels itself. It is remarkable watching the EU establishment, which spent a decade and a half accusing Orbán of being a proto-dictator on “rule-of-law” grounds, now reward much graver violations by the new government.

Indeed, the EU’s main response to Operation Purgatory has been to unblock €10 billion in post-pandemic funds which Brussels had blocked Orbán from receiving. Nor is it just the EU. Hungary’s liberal legal scholars — the same experts who spent years cataloguing Orbán’s every constitutional sin — have proved remarkably accommodating now that the shoe is on the other foot. As one of them put it on Verfassungsblog, the house organ of European rule-of-law orthodoxy: since “the previous legislator has obviously violated the fundamental values of the EU”, and the new majority is “laying the foundations for a new republic, committed to EU fundamental values”, it follows that “the swift removal of the head of state is, exceptionally, acceptable”. In other words, the rule of law may be suspended, provided it is suspended in the name of the rule of law — and, crucially, in the name of “EU fundamental values”.

We have seen this film before. After coming to power in Poland in 2023, the pro-EU coalition led by Donald Tusk launched an unparalleled attack on the rule of law: seizing control of the public media and the judiciary, sidelining constitutional norms and undermining institutional independence. Yet as in Hungary today, all this was met with silence or enthusiasm in Brussels — in that case as well, funds that had been frozen for years were rapidly released. All of which is further confirmation that the European Commission’s insistence on democracy, values and the rule of law is, more than anything, a convenient pretext for targeting dissenting governments that resist aligning with the EU’s expanding supranational authority and broader political agenda. Indeed, when it comes to supporting its own emissaries, there is apparently no red line the EU will not cross — up to and including greenlighting the outright annulment of entire elections when they go the wrong way, as we saw in Romania in 2024. As for Hungary, the strategy seems clear: the EU is bent on punishing the rebellious colony — by making sure it can’t rebel ever again.

Things might not be quite so simple. There is a school of thought that Kim Ju Ae is being used to distract from the existence of a male heir, perhaps one who is studying abroad under an alias. And, as observers of North Korean politics can attest, much can rapidly change after long periods of apparent stability. Even if Kim is planning a handover, it might not go as planned.

Yet the prominence of this 12- or 13-year-old girl is itself remarkable, for this is a country where choreography is central to the Kim dynasty’s cult of personality. Kim wants the North Korean public, and the world, to be aware of his daughter, and to see her as part of his demigod lineage. And in the event that she succeeds her father, whose health is suspect, Kim Ju Ae will become the world’s only female autocrat. While there are no parallels to her rule today, there have been female autocrats going back all the way to first-dynasty Egypt 5000 years ago. We can look at them to give us an idea of how Kim Ju Ae, as the newest member of this select group, might choose to rule.

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As she will already know, North Korean society is highly patriarchal. In this it is no different to Korean society across history. The last woman to rule any part of the Korean peninsula, Queen Jinseong of Silla, abdicated in 897 AD, making it more than one thousand years since a woman has held direct power there. In the region as a whole, female rule has never been common. Japan’s last reigning empress lived in the 18th century, with female succession banned at the end of the 19th. China’s ineffectual male emperors were puppeteered by Dowager Empress Cixi in the late nineteenth and early 20th century, but the country’s only female head of state, Wu Zetian, died in 705. 

Fear of an established leader, such as Kim Jong Un, can make it appear that a non-standard succession has been agreed, but in a society as male-dominated as North Korea, there are very likely grave concerns about a female ruler. This skepticism, though, will be well-disguised. Kim Ju Ae, like many female rulers,  might not find out about it until the moment her father dies. Matilda, for instance, was the only surviving legitimate child of Henry I of England, and was readily accepted as heir by noblemen who swore fealty at her father’s court. But when Henry died, in 1135, these oath-takers abandoned Matilda in favor of a male cousin. Similarly, the teenaged Tamar was given a well-attended coronation to rule as junior king alongside her father in Georgia in 1178, But when he died, six years later, she Tamar faced rebellion. More recently, the accession of Maria Theresa to the Habsburg Empire in 1740 directly led to the devastating War of the Austrian Succession. North Korea is, of course, a nuclear state, making the stakes all the higher.

One way that Kim Ju Ae can seek to safeguard her position will be already familiar to her. North Korea’s leaders always establish a cult of personality, something that Ju Ae will undoubtedly look to do. With this goal in mind, she must first show reverence towards her predecessors, even as she subtly stresses her likeness to them. Kim Jong-Un will probably join his father and grandfather in the pantheon of “eternal leaders of Korea”. His daughter will therefore become one of many female rulers who have found it expedient to stress their links to famous male members of their dynasties. Margrete I of Denmark and Norway, who was so powerful that she conquered Sweden in 1389, still considered it politic to refer to herself as “King Valdemar’s daughter” long after her father’s death, making an overt link to her kingdoms’ last effective male ruler. It is a technique that has been used many times. The acknowledged heiress to the Aztec empire took the baptismal name Isabel Moctezuma after the Spanish conquest in 1521. She did so in order to tie herself more firmly to her father, the last emperor Moctezuma, in the hope of securing a financial settlement from the Spanish conquerors. We can expect that Kim Ju Ae will make much of her descent, likening her character, and even her appearance, to those of earlier members of her dynasty.

Having underscored her place in this lineage, Kim Ju Ae will then need to establish her own cult of personality. Such cults are marked by very public displays of devotion to the ruling family. Kim Jong-Un’s cult emphasizes his strength as a leader, as well as portraying him as, effectively, the father of his country. State propaganda also stresses his military strength and his prestige on the international stage, something that was bolstered by his meeting with Donald Trump in 2018. These values are distinctly masculine, and are in keeping with traditional views from around the world of what a leader should embody. These values can pose problems for women. It was the view of Matilda’s contemporaries that her arrogance cost her the throne, even though arrogance might not have been considered a problem in a man. 

One successful strategy is to attempt to turn the disadvantage of being female into a blessing. Elizabeth I of England did this remarkably well in the sixteenth century, portraying herself as “Gloriana”, or the unchanging Virgin Queen, and as the wife or mother of her kingdom. We still view Elizabeth, who stares down blank-faced and unageing from portraits, through the prism of this personality cult of hers. The same can be said for Catherine the Great, who, in the 18th century, rebranded herself from minor German princess to contender for the Russian throne. In Catherine’s 34-year-reign, she expanded Russia’s territory, enacting complex reforms, and helped elevate her country to the highest echelon of cultured European life. If Kim Ju Ae succeeds her father, she will attempt to depict herself as being on equal terms with the male leaders of North Korea’s allies. She will also, like Elizabeth I of England, invoke the ideas of marriage to her country, or the symbolic motherhood of her people.

As for her rule, we might wonder whether we can expect different behavior domestically from a female leader. Many reigning queens have shown a natural inclination to be merciful, with Elizabeth I of England highly reluctant to sign death warrants during her reign. Elizabeth of Russia — who was the only surviving child of Peter the Great, and had been initially passed over because of her sex — vowed when she took the throne in 1741 that she would order no executions. Astoundingly, Elizabeth kept her vow throughout her twenty-year reign, though she also beat her servants. As for plotters, they were exiled to Siberia after having their tongues cut out. Women are, on the whole, less aggressive than men, but a certain level of aggressiveness must be maintained by a female ruler if she is to ensure she is respected and obeyed. 

This is a difficult balance for Kim Ju Ae to have to learn. We tend to better remember women’s crimes than men’s. Wu Zetian, of 7th-century China, is remembered for her purges, while her literary achievements tend to be understated. Everyone knows “Bloody Mary”, the first crowned queen of England whose reputation rests on the nearly 300 of her Protestant subjects that she burned. Her father, Henry VIII who, on a conservative estimate killed 30,000 of his subjects, never acquired the nickname “Bloody”. 

A complicating factor for Kim Ju Ae, should she inherit the kingdom, is that its ruler’s safety depends on his or her implied aggression. North Korea lives a precarious existence. To deter interference, it issues frequent and bellicose threats to South Korea and other antagonists. North Korea’s military is therefore central to its self-image and how it is viewed on the world stage. 

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It might be inconvenient for the claim of Kim Ju Ae, then, that most wars in history have been started by men and that many female rulers have shown a reluctance to go to war. Maria Theresa of Austria-Hungary, for example, having won her throne after the long years of the War of the Austrian Succession in the 1740s, was always reluctant to commit herself to warfare. An exception was her participation in the Seven Years’ War of 1756-1763, though her aim — to regain the province of Silesia, seized by Prussia more than a decade earlier — was, in Austrian-Hungarian eyes, restorative rather than acquisitive. 

Given North Korea’s circumstances, Kim Ju Ae would need to project the impression that she is no more likely to back down from a conflict than her father. The concept of a warrior queen — such as Zenobia of Palmyra, who conquered Egypt in the third century AD, or Isabel I of Castile, who famously conquered Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, in the 15th century — can be extremely helpful to female rulers in how they are perceived internationally. Female leaders are less likely to be expected to act as generals or to direct military strategy, but they can burnish their reputations with appearances at military parades or in international negotiations. We cannot expect a female autocrat to be a pacifist. If Kim Ju Ae has the remotest sense of self-preservation, the dismal situation on the Korean peninsula will remain deeply entrenched.

If she marries, she will need to consider the threat that her husband might pose: a perennial problem for female autocrats. Elizabeth I never married, and was more secure a ruler for it. But Kim Ju Ae will be expected to produce an heir to continue the Kim line, and will one day have to consider her own succession, just as her father did before her. Behind the carefully-managed choreography, there will be plotting and rivalry. Whether any of this will improve the lives of the benighted North Korean people is impossible to know.

This isn’t, in fact, all that surprising. The more capitalism shatters traditional pieties, disregards frontiers and uproots whole communities, the more strident become the defenders of family, religion and fatherland. The more narratives of God, People and Nation are spurned as outdated, the more potently they return.

Those for whom identity is flexible confront those who know who they are only too well. For every Texan CEO knocking back free booze in the VIP lounges of airports, there’s a bearded patriarch with a rifle for whom the Other is to be found just over the river. There are some glamorous nightclubs in Istanbul, while around Mardin and Diyarbakir in the Kurdish south-east of Turkey people pray on the pavements and donkeys wander through filling stations.

Tradition and modernity are complicit as well as conflicting. A world of constant flux and restless innovation is in danger of eroding the values by which it legitimates itself. This wasn’t a problem for the Victorians, who despite the pace of social change and the clamour of the marketplace still clung to certain eternal verities. They were aware that you couldn’t legitimise what you did in purely secular, pragmatic terms, not least if it included herding people into slums and workhouses. Instead, there were certain foundational principles to which they could appeal, from the laws of God to the sanctity of the family and the supreme value of the individual.

Precepts like these were particularly important if you were trying to run an empire, a discreditable affair for which you need a whole raft of high-minded rationales. It’s true that there can be an embarrassing gap between your principles and your practice, as there is in today’s United States. Having spent the week bribing officials and shafting your competitors, you gather in church on Sunday morning to celebrate the metaphysical aspect of your existence. On the whole, however, the two sides of your life peacefully coexist, rather as Jacob Rees-Mogg is Victorian toff and modern entrepreneur in a single surreal person.

There are limits, however, to this coexistence. Sooner or later, the fluid, unstable, provisional nature of life in the shopping mall and marketplace is likely to infiltrate the moral sphere as well. It’s then that people begin to talk about postmodernism. Eternal verities drop away, and along with them the stout foundations on which you used to rely for defending your way of life. Talk of God, Progress and the Destiny of the Nation starts to sound hollow in the world of Tesco and Google. It served capitalism well in its earlier, more triumphalist phase, but it doesn’t ring true in the era of Britain’s Got Talent. Instead, moral values become relative and subjective: you may object to serial killing, but personally I find it a lot of fun. This kind of thing may be harmless among friends, but it’s no way to run a country. To do that, you need a firmer framework and a tighter consensus, not least at times of political or economic crisis. Yet what if you have just relativised all that out of existence? What if modern capitalism saws off the branch on which it is sitting?

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It’s at this point that turning to nationalism, populism, religion and traditional ethics has its appeal, whether in Ankara or Washington. It’s particularly attractive if you are confronting an enemy such as Islamism, which has no trouble at all with moral absolutes and metaphysical foundations. You don’t want to be left ideologically disarmed in this struggle, even if you’ve done most of the disarming yourself. So large patches of the globe shift towards authoritarianism, which isn’t necessarily the same as coercion. In the recent Turkish elections, for instance, millions of people have just consented to be coerced, or at least consented to a political regime which works in large measure by authoritarian means.

Like any other form of government, such regimes will only survive in the long run if they can persuade enough citizens to identify with them. People must feel that their identity is at stake in supporting this power. They must find themselves reflected in the Leader, as a child may see itself in the fond look of its parents. Because power, law and the state are abstractions, it’s easier to get people to internalise them if they take on tangible form. In autocratic states, power is incarnate in a single figure; but this means that some of the people might identify not with power itself but with the individual who represents it. To avoid this happening, Nature in its infinite wisdom has made a lot of those individuals either faceless or repulsive. Erdoğan, who looks like a harassed, slightly down-at-heel schoolteacher on the point of retirement, is an example of the former. Adolf Hitler was an ill-favoured little runt, Stalin looked like a crafty walrus and Mao was in sore need of a spell in the gym.

Most of these men were dictators, not just authoritarians, and the power of a dictator is absolute. The word “absolute” means free or unrestricted, which includes being unrestricted by circumstances. To say that torturing a baby is absolutely wrong is to say that it’s wrong irrespective of any circumstances you might specify in order to justify it. Absolute power is power which is in principle unconstrained. It may rein itself in, or even show mercy and compassion, but it does these things only when it feels like it.

Nietzsche believed that the Superman should treat ordinary folk with kindness, but he saw this as an act of condescension, not as a moral obligation. It is a form of sovereignty which rests entirely on itself, and is therefore arbitrary. If it had to appeal to law or custom or tradition to validate itself, these things would take precedence over it and it would cease to be absolute. Besides, there are no laws for how the law is to be established in the first place, which means that law has a close affinity with lawlessness. Many political set-ups rely for their stability on people coming to forget the blood and tears in which they were born.

Because absolute power is unrestrained, it can be hard to distinguish it from anarchy, even though it is often anarchy which it is out to suppress. The two are sides of the same coin. In Maurice Sendak’s children’s classic Where The Wild Things Are, the hero Max becomes king of the wild things, a phrase which contains a crucially ambiguous preposition (of). Does it mean that Max is king over the wild things or the wildest thing of all? The answer, needless to say, is both.

The absolute and the anarchic are also related in another sense. Absolutists are people who fear that the only alternative to rigid laws and precise regulations is total chaos. Unless you have a rule forbidding players to pass the ball back to the goalkeeper, then — key phrase — before you know where you are, all the players will be passing back to the goalie all the time and the game will never get started. One might call this the essence of the authoritarian mind-set. Allow people their freedom and they will abuse it. The fact that they aren’t really people without it is overlooked. How could you possibly have pavements on which people can walk in opposite directions at the same time? Everyone would obstruct everyone else and nobody would ever get anywhere.

It is logical, then, that Shakespeare’s autocratic Lear is accompanied throughout most of the play by the anarchic Fool. There is more than one sense in which the two are terrible twins. For one thing, anyone who wants to be a king must be a fool, at least in Shakespeare’s day. This is one reason why Lear is mad. Monarchs attract envy and aggression, which is why tribal chiefs in pre-modern societies are sometimes ritually beaten during their coronations. This didn’t happen to King Charles, but he still managed to look like a helpless victim throughout the ceremony, as a group of men around his throne kept doing things to him and he just had to sit there and take it.

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For another thing, the Fool’s debunkery strips the mask from his master’s authority, showing it to be just as arbitrary as his own antics. The problem with sovereignty is that, being perched on a height, it can’t see itself in the eyes of other people, and so can’t have its identity confirmed by them. This is why Lear begs for someone to tell him who he is. Without dialogue with others, selfhood simply implodes, which is another reason why Lear is mad. In one or two of his other plays, Shakespeare seeks to repair this situation by drawing on the legend of the ruler who moves incognito among the common people in order to learn about their daily lives. Today, minus the incognito, this is known as a walk-about.

Those who are driven mad by power in our own time aren’t so much kings or politicians as celebrities. Like Lear at the beginning of the play, they are told only what they want to hear, and thus see themselves mirrored everywhere they look. Only by encountering otherness can one know who one is, and thus retain a degree of sanity. Otherwise, like a certain famous entertainer, you will end up asking your assistants to stop the wind from blowing.

But then a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire at repeated abuse from the police, and the Arab Spring began. Ferjani and his family knew they had to return. Four months later, they finally did.

“It was completely and utterly amazing to me,” he remembers. “Tunisia had changed. What first struck me was something that might seem odd: there were garbage strikes everywhere. People were refusing to pick up the garbage because they were not being paid enough. That, to me, was symptomatic of a new day.”

Almost 12 years later, these words seem almost forlorn. If the yearning for Arab democracy began in Tunisia, it looks like it might finally have ended there, too, when last week the Tunisian President Kais Saied held a referendum that effectively cancelled democracy in the country.

Saied — more commonly known as Kais — has been President since October 2019. He is, in a mordant irony, a retired law professor who initially campaigned on a platform to allow citizens to recall elected officials, while claiming that many of the country’s problems came from widespread disregard of the country’s “many constitutional laws”.

But just under three years later, on 25 July, in a referendum he simply ordered (he’s been ruling by decree since July 2021), voters granted him full executive control of the country, supreme command of the army and the ability to appoint a government without the consent of parliament. Fewer than a third of voters turned out, but of those who did, 94.6% voted for a series of expanded powers that also weaken the judiciary and remove checks on the powers of the presidency. All in all, it’s what we might legitimately call a democratic coup.

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When Ferjani returned to Tunisia, his father Said was one of those given the job of mediating the peaceful move to elections in 2011, or as Ferjani puts it, “negotiating the country’s way into democracy”. In another irony, sinister this time, the first people Said had to deal with were the same who had been involved in his torture in 1987. “It was necessary: he needed to help create a sense that there would be laws protecting the transition — that it wouldn’t just be a free for all,” Ferjani tells me. “And to that extent, I think my father did something that he should be proud of, because the situation didn’t escalate into street killings or acts of vengeance or anything like that, which was what so many people feared would happen.”

If that was a high point, it didn’t last for long. The new government soon found it hard to provide for the enlarged expectations of its citizenry. People began to feel they weren’t being represented. The new 2014 constitution — the explicit goal of which was to “build the state, for freedom from tyranny, responding to its free will, and to achieve the objectives of the revolution for freedom and dignity” — was not properly implemented.

Alongside these failures of governance was an explosion of disinformation in the media and online, particularly on Facebook. A favoured target was Nabil Karoui, a media mogul and candidate in the 2019 presidential elections, who was accused of hiring a Mossad agent to lobby for him in DC, which led to widespread accusations that he was an Israeli plant.

Into this chaos walked Kais — “an unremarkable teacher at university,” according to Ferjani — who was also a longstanding conservative who believed homosexuality was a conspiracy wrought by foreign powers. But he had one advantage. He was, quite simply, someone who could appeal to everybody. He spoke the language of nationalism to the Arab nationalists; of Islamism to the Islamists; and of law and change to the youth. In the end, everyone saw him as someone who was different — the change the country so desperately needed.

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Once in power, Kais began to speak out against anyone who might feasibly check his authority, especially the judiciary. He was always hinting at near-invisible, conspiratorial forces that were undermining the government and the rights of ordinary Tunisians. On 25 July 2021, he dissolved parliament and sacked the Prime Minister in the face of mass protests after years of government paralysis, corruption and a worsening economy. He has ruled by decree ever since.

In February, he dissolved the country’s Supreme Judicial Council, accusing it of bias. The council rejected his decision, saying in a statement that “it would continue carrying out its duties”. The move struck at the heart of Tunisia’s legal system because the council is charged with ensuring the independence of its judiciary. If it wasn’t clear before that Kais had abandoned even the pretence of being a democratic leader, there is no doubt about it now.

“We have seen a ruler undermine every single democratic institution that was built by Tunisian people following their careful development post-revolution,” says Rashad Ali, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Even worse, he explains, “European democracies have stood by, watched, or at times tacitly supported these regressive measures.”

Ferjani agrees. “Right now, it’s up in the air. There’s even been pressure to concede the referendum result because of fears for stability and threats of violence in the streets.” On 28 July, just days after the referendum, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed concerns that “Tunisia has experienced an alarming erosion of democratic norms over the past year and reversed many of the Tunisian people’s hard-won gains since 2011.” In response, through a statement on the presidential Facebook page, Kais affirmed “the independence of the national decision and his rejection of any form of interference in national affairs” and declared the “only voice is the voice of the people”.

Ferjani claims that the response to these words from European capitals was “mealy-mouthed”, which has only emboldened Kais. He sees EU powers as partly culpable for recent events in Tunisia. “The EU,” he says, “is part of the reason for the return of autocracy in Tunisia.”

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According to Ali, events in Tunisia now pose a danger to the whole continent. “Safeguarding democracy and democratic values and supporting those fighting for it is in Europe’s interest and recent events in Ukraine have shown the dangers of allowing regressive and authoritarian politics any foothold within or around European frontiers,” he concludes.

There are clear things that the Europeans can do. First, as the Blinken episode revealed, Kais Saeed and his inner circle are sensitive to messaging. Holding them to account in terms of their failure to meet democratic standards, not normalising claims that what is unfolding is democratic, is key. EU powers must therefore accept that the parliamentary elections coming this December will not be fair, rather than bolster the absurd government claims that they will be a democratic step which aids Kais enormously.

Second, they must ring-fence aid and tie it to enhanced scrutiny of Kais’s inner circle and Tunisia’s tender process. At present there is no real way of checking that the money earmarked for helping Tunisians, and ensuring the economy doesn’t collapse, is going to the right place. The finances of Kais and his inner circle need to be investigated and the results properly communicated, so that policy makers in donor states are aware of where the money is actually going. Not least because Kais and his inner circle are always blaming outsiders for the country’s financial problems.

And finally, they should be unequivocally supportive of the Tunisian voices opposing Kais. In the end, Ferjani’s message is simple: “If Europe wants help Tunisia, it needs to admit publicly that it is no longer a democracy.”

It’s common in European capitals to lament the curdling of the Arab Spring into winter; less common is to hear the same lament for multiple failings of EU governments. Most of what happened during those revolutions across the Middle East was and is obviously beyond their control. But the case of Tunisia shows that when you are content only to mouth the platitudes of democracy, you not only fail to support it but end up enabling its opposite: autocracy. In the end, while the diplomats in Brussels and Berlin sleep and dine in comfort, it is the people on the ground who suffer, as they always do.