In the end, Vučić surprised everyone — with an early concession. “It is clear,” he said, as he took meekly to the podium at SNS headquarters, “that we have lost these elections.” The most powerful man in Serbia for 14 years, a leader who had carefully cultivated a strongman image, stepped down without even a hint of resistance. What made his acknowledgment of defeat even more miraculous was who he lost to: the Student List (SL), a new outfit that emerged out of two years of mass protests. Every one of SL’s 250 candidates had been selected through decentralized student plenums; none was a professional politician. Among them were academics, doctors, lawyers, artists, and athletes. For political novices, the scale of victory amounted to an electoral coup. According to CRTA, an independent pollster, Student List received 52.45% of the vote, while Vučić’s “United Serbia” list received just 39.2%. At just under 70%, turnout was the highest it has been in decades.

Vučić’s defeat sent thousands of people streaming onto the streets across Serbia. Belgrade’s Slavija Square, a traffic roundabout with a large fountain in the middle, became a spontaneous meeting point for mass celebrations. With all traffic stopped, revelers commandeered trams, climbed on top of bus shelters and the rooftops of buildings, and danced the kolo, a traditional folk dance. More than one stranger collapsed sobbing into my arms. It was a multigenerational celebration: university students brought their parents, and toddlers perched on shoulders. Some waved red football flares and set off deafening fireworks. Countless members of the crowd kept repeating “14 years” in a daze and in disbelief. Others chanted “pobeda!” — “victory!”. Some removed chairs from “Ćaciland”, a pro-Vučić encampment across the street from the parliament building, which had become a symbol of the confrontation between the student movement and the government. 

“We’re celebrating our freedom for the first time in 30 years, not 14 years, but 30 years,” Katarina, covered in pins and other Student List regalia, explained to me amid the cacophony. The “30 years” refers to a widely held belief that after the revolution that brought down Slobodan Milošević on 5 October 2000, not nearly enough changed. In Serbia, some even like to say “there was no October 6th”, meaning there was no real reckoning with the past or the atavistic authoritarian strain in society. Following Milošević’s fall, Serbia never underwent a thorough transitional justice process, leaving broad swaths of the security sector unreformed and former ministers like Vučić free to again take power. Student List has vowed to remedy this, and to undertake a rigorous purge that will hold former SNS officials accountable.

It’s about time. Past protest movements against Vučić had always generated excitement, only to peter out within a few months. But the student-led protests never slowed down. The trigger for the two years of unrest was grief, which quickly transmuted into rage. On 1 November 2024, a train-station canopy collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people. Many believed a recent renovation of the canopy had been hindered by corruption. The slogan of the ensuing protests was “corruption kills”, and their symbol was a bloody red handprint. The canopy renovation reportedly cost more than five times as much as the original estimate said it would, and the main project was awarded without a conventional public tender. For many in Serbia, indeed, the canopy collapse was symbolic of a deteriorating country. Under Vučić, critics say, Serbia has become a place where building contracts are awarded based on personal connections; where state institutions are staffed and stripped for parts by regime loyalists; and where health and safety are barely an afterthought.

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Indeed, the Vučić government’s corruption scandals have been legion. In April 2016, masked men demolished buildings in Belgrade’s Savamala district near the planned luxury development Belgrade Waterfront in the middle of the night. The buildings had been blocking construction of the Emirati-funded development, which was part of a deal overseen by Vučić. For years, many have believed that he or someone in his inner circle had ordered it, and on the eve of the election, the former Belgrade chief of municipal police confirmed it. Vučić is also widely said to have a close working relationship with violent football fans and organized crime.

Little wonder, then, that some of the student protests were attended by more than 300,000 people, by far the largest since Milošević’s fall. With little access to the Vučić-dominated media, the students managed to find new ways to boost their visibility. They blockaded the faculties of universities, resulting in nearly six months of disruption to academic life. Hoping to gain the attention of EU officials, who for years regarded good relations with the strongman as a necessary evil for maintaining regional stability and keeping more dangerous ultranationalists under control, some students rode from Serbia to Strasbourg and Brussels on bikes. And, during countless street protests, they held silent vigil while standing in the street, always for exactly 16 minutes — one for each life lost in the canopy collapse.

During the past two years of protest, Vučić attempted to stem the discontent in a number of ways. First, he thought he would simply wait for the protesters to wear themselves out, just like their predecessors had. When that didn’t work, he tried sacrificing some of his closest associates. Early last year, Vučić had his Prime Minister, Miloš Vučević, resign, in an effort to appease the students. But when that failed, Vučić took more drastic measures. In one particularly jarring episode, the government allegedly used a so-called “sonic weapon” against protesters, prompting people to scatter in a sudden panic. Police and SNS-linked thugs have also beaten protesters, in some cases severely.

All the while, Vučić depicted the protests as a Western-backed “color revolution”, while his surrogates have alleged that the movement is supported by “Ustaše”, a reference to the fascist organization that ruled Croatia during the Second World War, and which massacred Serbs, Jews and Roma. The government has also used Pegasus, a powerful Israeli spyware tool, to surveil protesters through their phones. And, in the days preceding the vote, police raided SL offices and the private homes of several SL activists. At least seven people were arrested, accused of planning election-day unrest. But the students and their supporters were undeterred. As more than one told me, “We’re not afraid anymore.” Faced with determined opposition, and with his own party’s support in steep decline, Vučić likely decided that stepping down was preferable to a bloody street revolution.

The students’ most impressive feat was transforming street protest into a viable electoral vehicle. First, SL was adamant that no single leader would come to dominate the movement. This prevented opportunists from hijacking the protests for their own agenda, and excluded the kinds of narcissistic personalities who have historically gravitated toward Serbian politics. This also guarded against replicating the same personalist style that has disfigured Serbian politics for decades. The leaderlessness of the movement made it harder for Vučić to launch salacious smear campaigns against opponents in pro-government tabloids, a signature of his rule that always kept his political rivals cowed. Serbia’s official opposition were also excluded from the movement from early on, as they were often tainted by association with past scandals. As Savo Manojlović, a member of the Belgrade city assembly, and leader of a movement that supported Student List told me, “a crucial role in this process has been played by the emergence of new, uncompromised faces on the political scene”.

Student List is also ideologically heterogeneous, encompassing conservative nationalists, pro-EU liberals, and Leftists in its ranks. Indeed, the diversity of political thought in the movement is itself a testament to the obloquy in which Vučić is held. On Sunday night, Serbian flags and Orthodox Christian iconography predominated among the crowd of revelers, but there were also socialists celebrating in keffiyehs, and even some muted expressions of “Yugonostalgia”. Yet if that “big tent” approach proved effective at winning elections, critics can rightly point out that the lack of clear ideology will ultimately make it difficult to govern. Indeed, absent the singular, unifying cause of bringing down Vučić, SL members may soon find that more divides them than unites them. It helps, at least, that SL claims it does not necessarily aim to transform itself into a traditional political party like the SNS. Instead, members hope to use the movement to dismantle the Vučić regime: then create the conditions for fair ideological and political competition in future. In other words, SL is the custodian of Serbia’s transition to a genuinely democratic system.

SL has also been deliberately ambiguous about most aspects of foreign policy. This was partly a strategic decision, made to keep the focus on Vučić’s domestic malfeasance. As Vuk Vuksanović, a lecturer in foreign policy and grand strategy at King’s College London, tells me, SL’s victory actually means that foreign policy will change the least of any area of Serbian governance. “The Balkans are now a region where people are preoccupied with things closer to home,” Vuksanović says. Indeed, much of SL’s official program deviates little from the SNS line. Under Vučić, Serbia maintained good relations with both the US and Russia, along with China and the EU. SL is already signaling that it will do the same. Yesterday, sociologist and SL representative Jovo Bakić went on RT to pledge that there would be no changes to Serbia-Russia relations, and that SL would continue Vučić’s policy of opposing sanctions on Russia.

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The one area where SL’s foreign policy does dramatically depart from its predecessor is on Israel. Vučić cultivated close ties with Tel Aviv through arms sales, and oversaw the recent inauguration of a new joint Israeli-Serbian drone factory near Belgrade. But SL explicitly says that it would end arms sales to Israel and increase aid to the Palestinians. SL deplores Israel’s wars on its neighbors and view Tel Aviv as one of Vučić’s strongest backers. On the issue of relations with the EU, meanwhile, SL has had to tread more lightly. The movement contains both europhiles and euroskeptics, so has sought to balance between both. “SL has been playing a middle ground,” Vuksanović tells me. “They cannot fully reject the EU because it’s Serbia’s biggest trading partner, meaning the economy depends on it, but they also can’t do hyper-globalism because it irritates conservatives.”

SL’s success at transforming a student-protest movement into an electoral vehicle capable of taking control of the state will undoubtedly be studied for years to come. Surely, many would-be Gen Z activists will see their success as a template ripe for emulation, especially as youth-led protests are spreading across the globe, from India to Albania, while riots rage across Western Europe. If nothing else, the SL example demonstrates that such movements can have other fates besides wanton destruction and fizzling out into nothingness. Indeed, what is perhaps most distinct about SL is that it never descended into street violence. In fact, it always actively discouraged it, aware that the government would use any acts of violence to demonize the movement and justify more repression. Last week, after the last major protest before the election on Slavija Square, students even picked up rubbish left behind by protesters. Yesterday, after the vote, the students cleaned up the park that once hosted Ćaciland. It was symbolic of the task ahead. Now that they’re in power, SL will be cleaning up the mess that earlier generations of Serbs have made for them.

The film presents this as a feat of sinister brilliance, in which the Kremlin ruthlessly manages reality itself. In doing so the movie conforms to a well-established genre: the glamorization of autocracy by Western intellectuals. The sordid, boring, vulgar and power-hungry bureaucrat is transformed into a Machiavellian prince. The film uncritically adopts the regime’s narrative about itself: that the Kremlin is a machine of cold-blooded sophistication, with tentacles in every corner of political life, and the opposition existing only when the puppet-master wills it to.

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What the movie cannot imagine is that the political machine it finds so intriguing might be a desiccated husk ravaged by decades of corruption. It gives us a Kremlin of great cunning even as the regime suffers the consequences of bad decisions by its purported wizards.

Take one such decision: the recent Yabloko fiasco. Yabloko is Russia’s oldest liberal party, founded in 1993. To call it anti-war would be an understatement. It is the only anti-war party. It opposed the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and is the only legally registered party in Russia to call for a ceasefire. But the last time the party had a representative in the State Duma was 1999. It got 1% of the vote in the 2021 election and has been politically irrelevant for a generation.

But in late July, Russia’s Election Commission approved Yabloko’s registration for the September elections. The party would run 269 candidates on its federal list and 135 in single-mandate districts under the slogan “For Peace and Freedom”. The Commission chair told reporters: “We treat everyone equally, and it’s up to voters to decide.” This was a startling claim to make when over the preceding months, authorities had fined 58 Yabloko members, raided five regional offices, detained 29 people, labeled 10 as foreign agents, and jailed six; 32 members had been barred from running under laws introduced after the invasion. The party had been harassed by every available instrument of the state, and then the state let it on the ballot anyway.

A source close to the Central Election Commission told a reporter that the logic behind the change was straightforward: give citizens a safe channel through which to express discontent. Better that unhappy voters mark a ballot for a small, manageable, long-neutered party than spoil their ballots or drift toward the Communists. The idea has a long pedigree in the study of autocratic regimes: semi-competitive elections serve as release valves and informational sources for rulers, a way to take the population’s temperature without loosening control over discourse.

But then something went wrong. Polls revealed Yabloko drawing real support, and some projections showed it could even win seats. A party that had been irrelevant since the last century had suddenly become a vehicle for anti-war sentiment that happened to be far greater than the Kremlin had anticipated. On 8 August, the nationalist party Rodina filed suit to have Yabloko removed from the ballot, and two days later, the Supreme Court agreed.

After more than four years of war, the managed opposition is no longer so easy to manage. Coverage of the ban has focused on what it tells us about the state of Russian civil liberties, but the more interesting question is what it says about the regime’s informational blinders. The Kremlin allowed an anti-war party onto the ballot, and the party turned out to be too popular. The regime built a pressure gauge, got a reading it did not expect, and smashed the gauge shut. This is not the behavior of an all-knowing puppeteer, but of someone increasingly ensconced in an informational bubble.

Why do autocrats even bother with allowing opposition parties or holding elections? Scholars who study the roles of elections in closed regimes have come up with several answers beyond “keeping up appearances”. Elections project strength and legitimacy to the population, co-opt elites, and provide a way to distribute patronage. Mexico’s PRI held elections for decades because the results told the party leadership which regional bosses were effective at delivering votes. In Mubarak’s Egypt, elections resolved internal conflicts over who got access to state rents.

But elections perform another key function for rulers: generating information about people’s actual preferences. Information is an artificially scarce resource for rulers, who face what scholars call the Dictator’s Dilemma. The same repression that keeps rulers in power cuts them off from honest information about what their people want. Fear induces silence, making it harder to anticipate unrest. Subordinates tell the ruler what he wants to hear. The security apparatus focuses on threats it has a bureaucratic interest in inflating. The ruler sits at the center of a system that keeps him ignorant of what’s really going on.

Elections are a way for rulers to manage the dilemma. By allowing a controlled opposition to contest seats, the regime creates a channel through which popular sentiment can register in a credible way. Yabloko’s registration was a textbook application of this logic. The Kremlin had a party that polled at 1% in the last election. It let the party run on an anti-war platform, expecting it to absorb a small, containable share of dissatisfied voters and produce a signal about public sentiment.

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The irony is that the Kremlin did get a signal, just not the one it wanted. It learned that anti-war sentiment was far larger than it had assumed. But it learned it in the worst possible way: through a public result it did not anticipate and could not contain, forcing a ban that advertised the regime’s miscalculation to everyone watching. The September election will now feature only parties that support the war, guaranteeing an uninformative result.

The Kremlin’s informational problems do not stop with the Yabloko incident. Analysis by ISW and the Financial Times suggests Russian generals are showing Putin maps of victories that did not happen. US intelligence reached this conclusion as early as March 2022, when officials said that Putin’s advisors were “too afraid to tell him the truth” about his military performance and the economic impact of sanctions. This was true four years ago; today the problem of informational isolation has only gotten worse.

An autocrat stumbling around an increasingly darkened room is both good and bad news. On the one hand, an uninformed autocrat makes bad decisions, which hastens the regime’s demise. There is evidence for this: Putin’s belief that he can take the Donbas by autumn, based on maps his generals have fabricated, may lead to operational choices that squander forces Russia cannot replace. And the fuel crisis is already straining a social contract built on the promise that war would not touch ordinary life. Another mobilization based on bad information would compound these problems.

On the other hand, ignorance may be a form of bliss for Putin. The cinematic wizard of the Kremlin manufactures a false reality for others, but his real-life counterpart is increasingly manufacturing a false reality for himself. A leader who is only being told what he wants to hear does not become more cautious as real conditions get worse. If the intelligence reaching Putin about his military position, his economy, and his population’s tolerance is as skewed as the evidence suggests, then his behavior becomes only more difficult to predict from the outside. The room might be getting darker, but that makes it ever more difficult to peep through its window.

This handsome village, nestled on the Pembrokeshire coast of West Wales, isn’t dead, exactly, more in a state of semi-hibernation. Nowhere is this more true than up a narrow hedgerow-lined road a short walk from the center. Here sit several stone cottages and bungalows, with names such as Sandalwood and Green Bank, their windows shut, their curtains drawn. Key safes, like limpet mines, cling to porch walls, while neatly assembled recycling bins stand undisturbed at the bottom of empty driveways.

All the telltale signs of holiday lets and second homes, before the summer surge. Some are for sale. Sure enough, it’ll be a different story come June, as Saundersfoot transforms into a bustling honeypot. Its shops, bars and restaurants will welcome these part-time residents with open arms, as a vital source of funds in a county short of cash. Yet even here in Pembrokeshire, long known as “Little England Beyond Wales”, these seasonal arrivals are resented too — their coming prompting fights over land and identity that could yet spark a political flashpoint.

All coasts and countryside, it’s easy to understand why anyone would want to own a home in Pembrokeshire. And, compared to British idylls such as Cornwall, it remains cheap. According to the latest data from the Office of National Statistics, the average price for a detached house here is £308,000; a similar-sized property in Falmouth or St Ives might set you back £100,000 more. No wonder Pembrokeshire has some 4,300 second homes. Only Gwynedd, home to Snowdonia, has more in Wales. In Saundersfoot and nearby Tenby, Pembrokeshire’s most popular tourist resort, one-in-four properties are reckoned to be second homes or holiday lets.

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But investors in getaway properties here are starting to question whether they really are welcome. Using discretionary powers allocated by the Welsh Labour government, Pembrokeshire County Council slapped a 200% council tax premium on second homes in 2024, effectively tripling their rate. Though the charge was subsequently lowered to 150%, and is due to fall even further this year, it has spooked second homeowners, who are now looking to sell up. That’s shadowed by changes elsewhere in Wales. In Gwynedd, for instance, the council proposed legislation that would require homeowners to apply for planning permission to convert residential properties into second homes — though it was later forced to backtrack after residents and businesses complained.

To be fair, the idea of a second home tax — mandating that owners of non-primary residences must contribute to the local economy beyond visiting their local fish shop in the summer — doesn’t appear wholly unreasonable. For hard-up Pembrokeshire County Council, whose latest budget revealed a funding gap of £27 million, that extra money could go some way to tackling real problems of housing and local services. “This isn’t an abstract policy debate,” says Josh Phillips, a Labour candidate for the Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire constituency in the looming Senedd elections, and who himself grew up in Solva, a picturesque Pembrokeshire fishing village with a high concentration of second homes. “It’s about whether people’s children will be able to live anywhere near where they grew up.”

Phillips, a former publican, understands the economic value second-homers bring. Yet he’s nonetheless tired of seeing the “hollowing out” of villages where houses lie empty for months at a time. Herein lies a crucial distinction between empty second homes on the one hand — and those with visible signs of occupancy on the other. Speak to people in Pembrokeshire and, without exception, they have no time for totally vacant properties, blaming them for everything from falling property prices to vandalism to vermin infestations. In January, the Pembrokeshire Council backed a last-ditch proposal that would force the sale of properties left empty for over a year back to the community.

From afar, the debate around Pembrokeshire’s second homes can seem framed in anti-English terms, given how many second homeowners come from across the border. Though plenty hail from Cardiff too, it’s an easy assumption to make. I speak to one English former second-homer outside Tenby who tells me his family ended up selling a few years ago, after being made to feel unwelcome in the village. As he puts it: “I don’t think it helped that we were from Kensington.”

That’s arguably echoed by a rise in nationalist activism, with second homes a predictable focus. Cymdeithas yr Iaith, a campaign group, claims Welsh speakers have effectively been priced out, turning their villages into “holiday parks”. It brings to mind a recent story about the coastal hamlet of Cwm-yr-Eglwys, which, reportedly overrun with second homes, had just one remaining Welsh speaker.

The truth, though, is that the origins of that moniker “Little England Beyond Wales” extend far beyond the modern age of tourism. The phrase first featured in a 16th-century text by the topographer and historian William Camden, who discovered a distinctly English-speaking culture upon his arrival in the region.

Camden was specifically referring to southern Pembrokeshire, whose Anglicization began with the Norman Conquest of the area in the 11th century, followed by the later arrival of Flemish settlers. Indigenous Welsh speakers were forced to move to the hilly country in the north, then kept in check by a boundary of castles built by the Normans and Flemish, known as the Landsker Line (deriving from the Norse for “divide”). This is why most place names in the south of the county, such as Saundersfoot, Haverfordwest and Milford Haven, are English sounding, a vivid contrast with the Maenclochogs, Crymychs and Trefdraeths further up the coast.

Hints of this history remain. Compared with neighboring Ceredigion, and Gwynedd to the north, Pembrokeshire is not a traditional voter base for Plaid Cymru. Nor is it synonymous with Labour like the former industrial valleys of South Wales, where “The Internationale” once rang out from miners’ welfare halls. Instead, the county swung between Labour and the Conservatives for decades before increasingly turning blue. The Tories prevailed in the last Westminster and Senedd elections here, buoyed substantially by the rural vote. (The county council, for its part, is made up of a hodge-podge of independents).

Now, though, rising frustrations with the national Conservative and Labour parties — and Westminster politics in general — are likely to impact the looming Sennedd election: potentially changing policy around second homes. Reform, which is standing candidates in Pembrokeshire, has pledged to increase Wales’ housing supply to tackle the issue. A party spokesperson tells me that it also intends to “take a wrecking ball to a number of anti-tourism measures” implemented by its rivals. Such is the frustration that even Plaid is in with a shot. After winning a council by-election seat in February, the party now also hopes to snatch a Pembrokeshire Senedd seat or two, its manifesto promising to “work with local authorities” on second homes.

Yet look past the politics of holiday homes — or even just politics generally — people here clearly have more humdrum worries too. In a back room of Pembroke Rugby Football Club, signed Wales shirts pride of place in a glistening glass cabinet, club chair Richard Jelley says the county’s biggest problem is a lack of jobs for young people, which has contributed to a brain drain. While the tourism industry is all well and good as a provider of seasonal employment, he says, it’s not enough to keep working-age people around, with many leaving to seek opportunities elsewhere, often in Cardiff or Bristol.

Jelley points to the closure of the Murco oil refinery in Milford Haven in 2014 as an inflection point for the county’s fortunes. The refinery had supported thousands of local jobs, which effectively went overnight. “We used to have two thriving senior sides here, but now we just have one,” says Jelley, a compact 60-something with a shock of fair hair. “That’s because the kids get to a certain age, there’s no work, and they move away.”

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This supports the argument that the proliferation of second homes and struggles of younger people might be more a case of correlation than causation. Wyn Harries, a school governor from Crymych, close to the Ceredigion border, makes a similar point, pinning the blame of depopulation of his rural part of the county firmly on “years of neglect” by a Welsh government stuck in the urban bubble of Cardiff Bay. “Their policy,” argues Harries, “is that people in the countryside shouldn’t be allowed to prosper,” adding that if there were decent rural jobs, the second-home issue would “resolve itself”.

In his 2019 book Wales: England’s Colony, the historian Martin Johnes argues that Wales’ identity has fundamentally been shaped by its relationship with its larger neighbor over the centuries, from its conquest in the 13th century by Edward I and subsequent annexation under Henry VIII, to parliamentary laws governing the use of the Welsh language in schools. This has led to a tendency, Johnes writes, to “blame England for everything that is wrong with Wales”.

Would it serve Wales better to turn the spotlight on itself instead? After all, devolution was meant to help the country steer its own path. Yet Cardiff Bay — or, more specifically, Welsh Labour, which has held a tight grip on the reins for the past 27 years — might well be accused of being as indifferent to the plight of the people in Pembrokeshire as their counterparts in London, contributing to the sense of alienation so clearly felt by locals. They’re frustrations sure to remain whoever triumphs in the Senedd next month, or whoever buys up the pretty cottage down the lane.

Yet despite these homages to the long arm of the Russian world’s spiritual and cultural influence, Moscow’s representatives here in Bulgaria are not as comfortable as they might seem. “For me, it was not easy to come here,” admits Father Vladimir Tyshchuk, the church’s archpriest, his stone-walled office surrounded by books and Orthodox icons. He came to Sofia from Vienna a few years ago, replacing a predecessor expelled from the country on national security grounds, much to Moscow’s chagrin.

Tyshchuk has had to live in the shadow of that event ever since. Just last month, an article in the Bulgarian press accused him of secretly meeting the ousted priest in Jerusalem: to receive instructions from Russian intelligence. The claims came without evidence, yet whenever Tyshchuk has crossed back into Bulgaria, he says he’s been held by the security services for extended passport checks. To him, these experiences stand in stark contrast to the treatment he’s received from many regular Bulgarians, for whom Russia is not an enemy — but something close to kin.

Bulgaria’s relationship with Russia is hardly straightforward. A member of the European Union and Nato for nearly two decades, its leaders have often taken an anti-Moscow line. Yet Bulgaria’s historical and economic ties to Russia run deep, arguably much deeper than any other EU state. Indeed, after seven parliamentary elections and several popular protest movements since 2021, Bulgaria’s electorate is now turning to yet another populist champion for Moscow: ex-president Rumen Radev, whose political alliance looks set to win the largest share of seats in snap elections this weekend, along the way making Radev himself Bulgaria’s prime minister.

While Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary has been heralded as a sign of the decline of Russian power in Central and Eastern Europe, Radev’s probable victory presents another, more nuanced challenge to the Brussels establishment. Radev is hardly a Kremlin stooge like Orbán, and Bulgarian society, despite its connections to Russia, is growing increasingly hostile to Putin’s influence. All the same, Bulgaria’s experience offers valuable lessons about how Russia can still exploit popular sentiments to fill gaps left by the waning West.

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In practice, these attitudes ensure a kind of political schizophrenia. Over the past 20 years, after all, Bulgarian governments have pursued strong ties with Brussels and Washington while signing energy deals with Russia. More recently, they’ve sent weapons to Ukraine since 2022 while allowing Moscow to maintain several high-profile properties in Bulgaria — in violation of EU sanctions and despite security risks to Nato operations. As recently as this year, Sofia adopted the euro, even as its oligarch-dominated economic and political system continues to be based on the post-Soviet Russian model, with connections to Kremlin money everywhere.

While openly pro-Russian parties are restricted to the far-Right, Russophilia in the Bulgarian mainstream is much less overt — exactly where Radev has learned to shine. Having been elected to the presidency in 2016, allegedly with the help of a former Russian intelligence officer, Radev took a number of Moscow-friendly positions on Ukraine, opposing sanctions and defending his country’s dependence on Russian energy. But after resigning from his largely ceremonial post in January, following a spate of anti-government protests, Radev read the room keenly, de-emphasizing his pro-Russian credentials to settle instead on a broad, anti-corruption platform opposed to Bulgaria’s oligarchic elite.

“It’s really a candy bag,” says Professor Emilia Zankina, from Temple University Rome, of the coalition of voters Radev’s alliance has gathered together. “He gets nationalists, socialists, progressives, urban elite, rural disappointed people, and that’s because he’s seen as the new savior.” That alone is a notable achievement given Bulgaria’s notoriously fractured and chaotic politics, with Radev himself becoming something of an empty vessel for anti-establishment Bulgarians. His own background presumably helps too: as a former major general in the Bulgarian Air Force, who speaks calmly yet decisively, he enjoys a statesmanlike reputation.

That’s especially true now that Radev’s trenchant stance on Ukraine has been replaced by platitudes about reaching a “just and lasting peace”. Given that Putin’s invasion remains a polarizing issue, that may be intentional — but unlike elsewhere in Europe, the dominant historical narratives that underpin Bulgarian identity mean people here don’t always equate Putin with the Russian nation as a whole.

“I never had anything against Russia, because a long time ago Bulgarian people were together with Russians,” says Viktor Toshev on a dreary night on Vitosha Boulevard, a pedestrian street that stretches out toward the mountains past Sofia. Toshev works at a car wash, but gesturing toward the sky with frustration, he tells me he’d had to leave work early because the rain had robbed him of customers. “Russian people are innocent people, good people,” he adds, his voice husky, his hair mottled. “Only this war is no good.”

Toshev’s sentiments cut to the heart of the popular narrative Bulgarians have been sold about Russia: that the two countries have been bound by language, religion, and history since the dawn of Slavic Christendom. This logic served as part of the justification for Russia’s intervention in the Balkans following the Ottoman Empire’s violent suppression of a Bulgarian revolt in 1876. Following the Sultan’s subsequent defeat in the Russo-Turkish War two years later, the Treaty of San Stefano granted Bulgaria its independence for the first time in nearly half a millennium — under Russian auspices of course. An alternate plan for the new state ultimately divided it between the Moscow-aligned Principality of Bulgaria and the autonomous Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia, with the two eventually merging to form the modern Bulgarian state in 1908.

In the popular mythos of the fight for Bulgarian independence, Russia is an altruistic savior, an “older stepbrother” to quote one Russian journalist, to whom Bulgaria owes its very existence. And despite the fact that Bulgarians themselves also played a large role in securing their freedom from the Ottomans — and that Bulgaria far predated Russia as an independent entity during the Middle Ages, even introducing the Cyrillic alphabet to Moscow — many Bulgarians’ affinity for Russia as its guardian angel was solidified during the communist period following the Second World War.

“On the one hand it was a repressive regime, one party rule, no private property,” Zankina explains, describing Bulgaria’s experience as a Soviet satellite state during the Cold War. “But at the same time, the country was agrarian and rural before communism and during that period the country industrialized, so many people and families saw their lives change dramatically for the better.”

It’s no surprise, then, that the shock of the Nineties brought with it a heavy dose of Soviet nostalgia. According to Stoyan, a longtime activist-turned-techie, there was never even any desire for the communist years to end among regular Bulgarians. “When the wall fell, nobody gave a fuck,” Stoyan explains in his typically incisive fashion, adding a dash of the self-deprecation characteristic of so many Bulgarians. “The communist party here was never protested away, it was never taken down. Actually they won the first democratic elections.”

Perhaps for that reason, Russia’s influence continued uninterrupted as Bulgaria’s system transitioned from one regime to another. For years after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the dominant party remained the Bulgarian Socialist Party, a rebrand of the communist party that had governed the country throughout the Cold War, and which continued to serve as a vehicle for Russian interests into the 2000s. As late as 2016, indeed, the party supported Radev’s initial run for the presidency. Nor was this influence merely political. As Stoyan explains, many of Bulgaria’s bureaucrats and economic heavyweights gained power with Russia’s backing; even today, adds Zankina, many members of Bulgaria’s security services received their training in Moscow.

Stoyan, who says he’s been active in protest movements since he was a teenager, leads me to a public fountain next to the Bulgarian Parliament. It was here, aged 13, that he was first arrested for arranging an unauthorized protest against a far-Right, pro-Russian party. (A far-Right, anti-Russian party also exists.) Unlike some of his countrymen, Stoyan, who asks me to only use his first name for his safety, says he saw early on that the prosperity provided by Russia and the Soviet Union was nothing more than an illusion. Despite the relative growth Bulgaria experienced during communist period, it came at a heavy cost — up to 10,000 people perished as a result of forced collectivization and persecution at the hands of the Soviet-backed regime between 1944 and 1989.

Such blunt displays of power are history, yet Russia’s reach has adapted to Bulgaria’s own changing fortunes, becoming less direct with each passing decade. Near the Bulgarian city of Burgas, Russian oil giant Lukoil today operates Bulgaria’s only oil refinery, providing the Sofia government with up to 80% of its fuel. If it weren’t for sanctions waivers from the Trump administration, which were renewed this past week, Bulgaria’s energy landscape would likely face catastrophe if forced to pivot away from Russian energy.

Bulgaria boasts more physical manifestations of Russian influence too. Perhaps most notable here is the Kamchia complex. Ostensibly a wellness resort, owned by the EU-sanctioned Moscow municipal administration, it was once envisioned by Putin’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as a hub for spreading Russian soft power. Even Tyshchuk, the priest, admits that diplomats at the Russian Embassy, which he occasionally visits, have expressed a desire for the Church to play more of a political role in Bulgaria.

The Russian Cultural and Information Center in Sofia, also owned by the Russian state, is another brick-and-mortar example of the Kremlin’s footprint in Bulgaria. After several unsuccessful attempts to get in touch by email and phone, I visit the building one overcast afternoon in the hope of interviewing its director. As I walk up the stairs toward the center’s glassy façade, I’m immediately approached by a security guard who asked me what my business was. After a brief conversation in broken Russian, I’m allowed through a metal detector into the cavernous main hall. I’m ultimately unable to secure the interview — but, before leaving, I take the opportunity to have a look around. In the main entrance hall, next to a life-size replica of a Soviet space probe and a mural of two cosmonauts, one Russian and one Bulgarian, I find a propaganda exhibition about Crimea, organized for “the year of unity of the peoples of Russia”. The security guard initially gives me the go-ahead to take photos — only to change his mind and beckon me to leave.

Such heavy security is hardly a mystery. Less than two years ago, it was in front of this cultural center that Bulgarian activist Lexi Fleurs burned a Russian flag, writing “murderers” in large letters on the sidewalk. She was confronted by security guards and eventually detained for over 24 hours by police who attempted to charge her with petty hooliganism even though Bulgaria has no laws prohibiting the burning of foreign flags.

In the aftermath, her arrest inspired similar acts by other Bulgarians, who burned Russian flags and held signs in solidarity with Fleurs, though this time without triggering any confrontations. Just another example of Bulgaria’s muddled relationship with its giant stepbrother, something Fleurs herself says makes concerted activism that much harder. “We don’t officially have a pro-Russian government,” she tells me, sitting in a park as evening falls. “It’s so much easier to go against an enemy that clearly states ‘I am the enemy’ than to go against an enemy that you need to dig and prove and spend even months to understand how deep the problem actually is.”

Even so, Bulgarians opposed to Russia are beginning to take matters into their own hands, connecting the dots between the corrupt status quo and the Kremlin’s influence. In the lead-up to the anti-government protests in December, Fleurs attended a demonstration that, while ostensibly directed at Bulgaria’s then-general prosecutor, quickly turned into a chorus of chants like “this is not Moscow” — or else the cruder “Putin khuylo” (something like “Putin is a cock”).

Though support for Russia, Putin, or both continues to be found across Bulgarian society, the clearest dividing line, if any exists, is unsurprisingly age. Younger Bulgarians, who grew up in the post-communist period and didn’t learn Russian in school, find it harder to relate to the tales of Russo-Bulgarian brotherhood, whatever the continued pull of Bulgaria’s national mythologies.

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In a cozy high-rise apartment in western Sofia, decorated among other things with a taxidermized bird of prey, artist Antoaneta Quick epitomizes these complexities. “Bulgaria, and generally the Balkans, are always the victims, the fucked up ones, and it feels like Russia is equally fucked up,” she says, who despite her ex-husband’s Swedish surname is the great-granddaughter of a Russian officer close to King Boris III of Bulgaria. “This is the east. It’s almost like a feeling of safety in the already existing chaos, mafia, distrust, and alcoholism.” For Quick, this is the real reason for Bulgaria’s long, toxic relationship with Moscow — a familiarity that, despite being regressive, feels safer than change, especially at a time when stability always seems just out of reach.

According to Krasimir Angelov, a Bulgarian software engineer who works in Britain, the appeal of this familiar safety is only amplified when it feels like the only satisfying choice available. “We do need strong leaders in times of crisis, and the West has generally struggled to produce them,” Angelov tells me by phone. “It has become a rather soft, politically correct society to its own detriment. That is seen in Eastern Europe as weakness.”

Radev has always existed in both worlds — Russia’s and the West’s — and his Bulgaria will doubtlessly exist in both too. Stoyan, the activist, suggests that Radev’s days as a Russian lackey are over, if nothing else because Kremlin cash has stopped flowing his way. Whatever the truth, his government, if he is able to form one, will likely try to recast the EU and Nato in its own image, much like other European populists. Learning the lesson of Orbán’s defeat, though, he’s also likely to be more subtle in his methods, adding amendments to EU proposals instead of rejecting them outright.

Despite hosting more corruption and Russian influence networks than perhaps even Hungary, Bulgaria has largely escaped the EU’s attention so far. If, however, the twin problems of graft and Kremlin influence are to be tackled, that’ll have to change, regardless of who rules in Sofia. Bulgaria’s integration into the eurozone and other European structures will surely help here, but for such a push to truly succeed, it’ll have to be led first and foremost by Bulgaria’s own civic society. Citizens have shown themselves disgusted by their rapacious establishment — and if figures like Radev have the capacity to challenge long-running political dynasties, other, less Kremlin-aligned leaders may one day do so too.

Yet even if the tide continues to turn, and future generations of Bulgarians find themselves increasingly alienated from Russia, the question remains whether they will actually be able to sever centuries of dysfunctional co-dependence without shocking Bulgarian political life to its core — even with the EU’s help. Much will, of course, depend on what happens in Bulgaria’s immediate neighborhood; on the outcome of the war in Ukraine; and on how well the country weathers the energy shocks that lie on Europe’s horizon. Yet it will also depend on what alternative vision the West is able to offer. Bulgaria has already shown that it doesn’t need to stay stuck in the past — even if its future direction remains in the balance.

The likely victor is the center-right Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), comfortably polling north of 50% and now led by Tarique Rahman, the sleek-haired heir and near-stranger to his homeland after 17 years of English exile. His admirers both at home and abroad cast him as a chastened liberal: a steady pair of hands, sobered by history and burnished by absence. His voters, who will back him faute de mieux, remember rather more. During the BNP’s spells in office in the Nineties and 2000s, power rested with his mother, Khaleda Zia — the formidable widow of the soldier-president Ziaur Rahman, assassinated in a failed putsch in 1981. She broke the glass ceiling as Bangladesh’s first female prime minister and broke records soon after, presiding over a country that managed the rare feat of being ranked the world’s most corrupt for four consecutive years by Transparency International. Rahman himself was later described in leaked diplomatic cables as a walking emblem of kleptocracy. Memory, however, is a luxury in Bangladeshi politics.

The principal alternative is the Jamaat-e-Islami, the once-banned Islamist party now enjoying a brisk revival under the leadership of Shafiqur Rahman, a solemn scold, skull-capped and maned. Buoyed by a disciplined grassroots machine and an electorate weary of secular strongmen, it polls at 30%. After 15 years of Sheikh Hasina — daughter of the nation’s founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and long the imperious matriarch of Bangladeshi politics, presiding over electoral farce, colossal corruption, and systematic repression — a turn towards piety has an obvious appeal. The Jamaat insists it has reformed — no theocracy, no Taliban theatrics — yet urban liberals rightly remain unconvinced. It is surely no coincidence that the party of the mullahs has not fielded a single female candidate, while also flirting with limiting women’s working hours. Then there is the amateurism: hardly surprising for a party that has never run anything larger than a student union. Still, in rural Bangladesh, where the state has faded into a footnote, the Jamaat’s draw is less ideological than practical. To the local peasantry and déclassé salariat alike, Islamism carries the warm glow of welfarism. 

Hovering uneasily on the margins is the National Citizen Party (NCP), the political afterlife of the Monsoon Revolution that toppled Hasina in July 2024. The NCP casts itself as the custodian of revolutionary virtue, staunchly anti-corruption and stoutly pro-free speech. Its ebullient leader, Nahid Islam, is conspicuously young — 27 — an age that can read as either bracingly fresh or mildly terrifying, depending on one’s appetite. Bangladesh, it turns out, has little of the Gallic taste for jeunisme. Popular approval has followed a familiar roller-coaster: at the height of the student protests in September 2024, the party’s predecessor briefly polled an eye-watering 35%, only to slump to barely 2% a year later. 

Uprisings, as ever, do not translate neatly into votes. Chronically underfunded and organizationally thin, the NCP has compounded its troubles by entering an electoral mésalliance with the Jamaat — a union that has already alienated many supporters, particularly those for whom the Jamaat’s opposition to Bangladesh’s independence in 1971 remains scarcely forgivable. Senior figures have defected in protest, muttering that an anti-corruption movement has yoked itself to an Islamist machine it neither commands nor quite trusts. The alliance has secured the NCP a meager 30 seats, a thumping return to earth for a party born of street-level heroics.

Presiding over this fragile interlude is the caretaker prime minister, Muhammad Yunus, Nobelist and neoliberal. Installed as a compromise by hot-headed students and cautious generals after Sheikh Hasina’s violent fall, the octogenarian microfinancier cuts an almost comic figure amid the mêlée, a technocrat without a popular mandate who has clung on for 18 months, preaching reform to a political class that has elevated evasion into a civic art. His proposed constitutional changes — term limits; an upper house; new anti-corruption machinery — are logical enough, and will almost certainly be endorsed in the accompanying referendum. Whether they will survive first contact with lived reality is another matter. Bangladesh has never lacked for handsome constitutions; it has merely struggled to obey them.

The economic backdrop is bleak. Food inflation has hovered near 13% under Yunus; flooding has battered rice production; and the Adani Group, which supplies roughly a tenth of Bangladesh’s electricity, has begun curbing power exports from India over unpaid bills. Communal tensions have sharpened, too, with attacks on Hindus — some 8% of the population and disproportionately associated with Hasina’s discredited Awami League — puncturing the interim government’s claim to calm stewardship. Yunus’s preferred party trick has been to rattle the begging bowl abroad rather than tackle the altogether trickier proposition of taxing his own citizens. Dhaka is already propped up by a $1.2 billion American aid package and a $4.7 billion IMF bailout, with Washington assisting efforts to recover an estimated $17 billion siphoned abroad under Hasina’s rapacious rule. It will almost certainly need more. Should Western lenders or India lose patience, China stands ready, dangling a further $5 billion.

Yunus himself remains a curiously divisive figure. A darling of Western chancelleries and long the object of Hasina’s personal vendetta — she believes the Nobel Prize ought properly to have been hers, for having eventually called time on the massacre of tribal groups in the Chittagong Hill Tracts — he was welcomed at home precisely because he belonged to neither of the rancorous political dynasties. His Cabinet leaves little doubt as to his instincts: clanking heavily with military brass and technocrats inclined towards privatization, though leavened with an ecumenical clutch of box-ticking human rights lawyers and environmentalists. 

Hasina’s Awami League, the agent of Bangladesh’s liberation from Pakistani overlordship, has now been banned outright. Her collapse, when it came, appeared abrupt only to those not paying attention. The fuse had been smoldering for years; July 2024 merely supplied the spark in the form of the resurrected Quota Reform movement. The civil service reservation system, devised after independence in 1971 to reward liberation fighters, had long since curdled into a system of hereditary entitlement. Over the decades it came to swallow ever larger portions of public employment (at one point, only 20% of jobs were “merit based”), even as graduate unemployment ballooned. Hasina’s inspired decision to extend these privileges to the grandchildren of freedom fighters proved a bridge too far. The resulting protests were beaten down with the usual admixture of police batons and Awami bruisers, only to resurface with tedious regularity.

In 2018, Hasina attempted a tactical retreat, abolishing the quotas altogether in the hope that the movement would obligingly pack up and go home. For a time, it did. Then, in a final act of institutional self-harm, the Supreme Court reinstated the system in July 2024, siding with aggrieved nepo bureaucrats. Hasina responded with characteristic grace, branding the protesters Razakars — the name reserved for those who collaborated with Pakistan’s genocidaires in 1971. The slur landed like a lit match in a petrol station. Protests swelled; curfews were imposed; the internet went dark. Party cadres and security forces fanned out, shooting indiscriminately. 

By this point, repression was less a tactic than a reflex. Hasina’s government had perfected a system of secret prisons like the notorious “House of Mirrors”, where dissidents were tortured, bitten by insects, and prepared nightly for execution, before being dumped in fields at dawn. At least 1,400 people were killed in the final crackdown; dozens more vanished into the state’s oubliettes. Even when the Supreme Court hurriedly revised the quotas once more, restoring merit as the dominant criterion, the concession came far too late. Bangladesh was already ablaze. Hours before fleeing to India, Hasina pressed the army to fire again on the crowds. This time, the generals declined. The tinderbox finally went up — and the regime with it.

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Last year, a special tribunal sentenced Hasina to death in absentia for crimes connected to the crackdown. Dhaka requested her extradition and Delhi, pointedly, declined. She is, after all, India’s creature. Geography ensures that Bangladesh must always reckon with its Himalayan neighbor; under Hasina, reckoning slid into outright deference. Her government signed spectacularly lopsided energy deals with Indian firms, including an agreement with Adani Power that obliges Bangladesh to pay for electricity it may not even use, and cheerfully backed a coal plant beside the fragile Sundarbans mangroves. In June 2024, she granted India tariff-free access to Bangladeshi railways, allowing Indian trains to trundle across the country — the final straw that helped ignite the Boycott India movement and confirmed, for many, that sovereignty had been quietly mislaid.

The stench of Hasina’s regime drifted as far as Hampstead. Last year, a Bangladeshi court sentenced her niece and Labour MP Tulip Siddiq to two years’ imprisonment for corruption linked to a land allocation scheme allegedly facilitated by her aunt. The verdict, delivered in absentia and unlikely ever to trouble her liberty, was airily dismissed by Labour as politically motivated. Siddiq resigned her ministerial post under pressure but remained defiant, thanking “distinguished lawyers” — among them that legal maven Cherie Blair, no less — for highlighting the deficiencies of Bangladesh’s justice system. Starmer, perhaps sensing a diplomatic tarpit, declined to meet the country’s interim leader during a London visit aimed at clawing back the billions siphoned off under Hasina’s venal rule.

Between a tainted dynast and an amateur Islamist, a youth movement belatedly discovering the price of compromise and a banned incumbent, Bangladesh’s electorate is offered not so much a choice as a sorting exercise. The real contest — over the political economy of plunder — has been deferred once again. For years now, Bangladesh has been evangelically sold in the NGO archipelago as a neoliberal miracle: 7% growth, humming garment lines, microfinance lifting the benighted by their bootstraps. The balance sheet now tells a less flattering story. State revenues languish at around 7% of GDP (the British figure is 39%), derisory even by Asian standards, leaving the government dependent on regressive taxes and foreign handouts. A recent Bangladeshi white paper concluded that the growth figures were massaged perhaps too enthusiastically by Hasina’s economists, and that between 2009 and 2023 some $230 billion was spirited out of the country through illicit channels: a steady annual hemorrhage of roughly 3 to 4% of GDP. 

This was crony capitalism with gusto. Banks were treated as private larders; infrastructure projects became toll booths for ministers and their cronies. The garment sector — the backbone of exports — relied on wages so low that tea plantation laborers, earning barely two dollars a day, could feel positively cosseted. Trade unions were strangled. After Rana Plaza, an eight-story factory building, collapsed in 2013, killing more than 1,000 workers, the response was not reform but rubber bullets, arrests, and the discreet disappearance of labor organizers. Bangladesh now routinely features on lists of the world’s worst countries for workers. The indifference extends abroad. Migrant labor is one of Bangladesh’s most lucrative exports, its workers lionized as “remittance warriors” while being quietly abandoned to Saudi serfdom. When the bodies of abused domestic workers are repatriated from the Gulf, ministers shrug; deaths, it is suggested in Dhaka circles, are an acceptable overhead. In 2022 alone, nearly 4,000 Bangladeshi migrant workers returned home in coffins.

This election will alter nothing of consequence. The BNP may win, the Jamaat may surge, and a few students may scrape into parliament. Power will change hands, perhaps even politely. But the bargain — cheap labor, hollow institutions, money siphoned abroad, dissent managed — will endure. None of this diminishes the courage of Bangladeshi voters, who have braved bullets before and may yet do so again. Elections matter enormously, which is precisely why they are so carefully stage-managed in Bangladesh. The banners will come down; speeches about renewal will be made. And as Tomasi di Lampedusa had it, everything must change so that everything can stay the same.

And yet 2025 was an annus horribilis for Number 10. Entering 2026, Reform now boasts the largest membership of any party in Britain, taking that mantle from Labour last December. All available polling indicates a drubbing for the Government at the next election, with some forecasts even placing them in fifth. One poll by Ipsos declared Starmer the most unpopular PM on record since 1977 — and that includes Liz Truss. In October, another poll, this time by YouGov, suggested Prince Andrew was more popular than the Government.

Why are things so bad for the PM, particularly given the avoidance of a fiscal crisis, and successive interest rate cuts? The first is Zack Polanski, with the Green’s attention-grabbing leader disrupting Labour’s political calculus. The idea of an anti-Reform coalition, pledging to “stop Farage”, only works for the Government if they are the ones to lead it. The second is that first impressions count. Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, he quickly came to be associated with cuts to the winter fuel allowance, gratis Taylor Swift tickets and a party benefactor buying dresses for his wife.

Whatever the explanation for Starmer’s poor performance, it must be tempting for his retinue to surmise they’ve hit rock bottom. That’s the bet of Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s chief of staff, who claims that 2026 will be the “year of proof”. Yet if there’s an iron law of politics, it is that a sequence of bad events creates its own inexorable pull. Just ask Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May. Some other fiasco will likely befall the PM in the months ahead: and it could well involve local government reorganization in England. It has, so far, remained beneath the national radar. That will soon change, as the implications of the shift becomes clear — and more elections are likely postponed.

It is hard to believe that a single report, compiled five years ago by a consultancy, provides the blueprint for the largest reorganization of local government in decades. And yet that is precisely what is happening with the English Devolution White Paper. Published little more than a year ago, it draws extensively from a PWC report of 2020, whose conclusions can be summed up by the phrase “bigger is better”. This is specifically true regarding savings. If all 21 of England’s “two-tier” authorities were successfully merged into larger “strategic authorities”, PWC claims, the taxpayer would save more than £700 million a year.

Insisting on economies of scale is hardly unusual — and the number of two-tier authorities, where some services are administered by a district or borough council, and others by the county council — needs fixing. It’s also clear that larger authorities are better placed to plan ahead and recruit the right people, and if England is to have more metro mayors — which have generally worked — the combined authorities they oversee would need more streamlined, uniform parts.

Even so, the logic’s seemingly brutal application to one of Europe’s oldest nations, and some of its most venerable towns and cities, is striking. Places like Southampton and Portsmouth are set to have a single mayor for instance, despite being two rival cities both dating back almost a millennium. At one point, even distant Bournemouth, whose needs are entirely different, was touted as being in the same mayoral authority. Among the political class, though, the past is often seen as trivial, with place and experience a distant second to the spreadsheet. For them, England’s great towns and cities are as fungible as an NFL franchise.

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Alongside that heavy-handedness, a political crisis is also brewing. “Strategic authorities” and “accountability frameworks” may be abstruse terms, part of a purposefully inscrutable lexicon. Suspending elections, however, is an extraordinary step — underscoring that something strange, and perhaps even sinister, is afoot.

Last year, ministers delayed four mayoral elections set for this May. As a result, Greater Essex; Hampshire and the Solent; Sussex and Brighton; and Norfolk and Suffolk must all wait until 2028 to elect their inaugural metro mayors. Reform was competitive in each of those races, and its supporters allege a fix. But despite their protests, the postponement is the result of ineptitude rather than conspiracy. The relevant local authorities had not been given the time, resources or bandwidth to prepare.

Yet if suspending these four elections is bad, the Government has a defense of sorts: these metro mayors are entirely new. The same can’t be said for what is set to happen next. In all, 204 councils, across 21 so-called  “areas”, are subject to re-organization. Sixty-three of those councils are set for elections in May: and which Labour now hopes to postpone.

Rather than simply postponing these contests, however, as the Government did for the four mayoralties, it has “invited” local authorities to request delays, which ministers will review from January. In other words, after widespread criticism the first time round, Number 10 is eager to spread the blame in the months ahead.

Unfortunately for Labour, council leaders have so far rejected the prospect of suspending democracy. One example is Hertfordshire, where a cluster of six district and borough councils have stressed they harbor no appetite for postponement. Or there’s Hampshire. Last week, Steve Pitt, Portsmouth City Council’s leader, told The News that there would be no request to delay, saying that “…democracy cannot be interrupted because of the Labour government’s chaotic handling of both devolution and local government reorganization”.

Pitt reflects a consensus among Hampshire’s senior local politicians. That includes Labour-controlled Southampton whose leader, Alex Winning, was eager to highlight how any decision to postpone rested “entirely with the Government”. Labour councils have been left high and dry by the national leadership, with Number 10 trying to deflect some of the blame on them. But on the doorstep, those same councillors will be telling voters the truth: this is Westminster’s mess.

And here, again, it’s hard not to return to history. To the north of Hampshire lies the ancient Saxon capital of Winchester. “Winchester City Council has only ever suspended elections in the event of war or pandemic,” declared its leader, the Liberal Democrat Martin Tod. The city’s modern electoral history began in the 1830s, but it has had a mayor since the 1190s, meaning a continuous process of political representation stretching back almost a millennium. That could be halted this year.

Precisely why Labour would do all this depends on your perspective. While it’s true the party is set to fare terribly this May, most authorities facing the prospect of no elections are not administered by them. At the same time, though, these are generally places where Reform was looking to build on last year’s successes. Then there’s the fact that many of the councillors returned would have to step down before their term ended — because their authorities would no longer have existed. Either way, it’s increasingly clear that merging authorities, and introducing a plethora of new metro mayors, was always going to be hard over a two-year turnaround.

Besides, it’s also uncertain whether the much-vaunted re-organization will even reduce costs in the end. Last year, then-Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner declared that “a significant amount of money” could be saved, citing that 2020 PWC report which projected £2.9 billion of savings over five years. And yet the same organization that commissioned the 2020 report, the County Councillor Network, wrote in March how newly enlarged authorities below 500,000 residents would see no financial benefit.

This is important because some authorities — like Brighton — will likely be permitted to remain at around 300,000 residents. By PWC’s own accounting, that will mean no benefits. In which case: what’s the point? And if Brighton were an exceptional case that would be one thing, but it turns out around half the new authorities will be below the 500,000 mark.

Just as remarkable is that the Government hasn’t conducted a cost review of its own, so even the forecast savings remain uncertain. This merits repeating. The financial forecasts behind local government re-organization, something so important that hundreds of millions will be spent up front with elections likely postponed — they simply weren’t made, or indeed scrutinized, by the very Government proposing them.

So who did commission that 2020 PWC report? The County Council Network, which is itself a part of the Local Government Association (LGA), the national body representing councils in England. The CCN’s partner organizations include, you guessed it, PWC.

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Indeed, that the Government hasn’t conducted its own review is especially concerning given PWC arguably stands to benefit from the radical streamlining of local authorities. Merging areas like payroll, human resources and IT departments are any consultancy’s bread and butter. The same applies to the inevitable redesign of management structures, rationalization of assets and integrating council services.

At the same time, one might even argue that consultancies such as PWC stand to gain from making any new bodies as complex, and the process as disruptive, as possible. After all, maximal opacity means a greater dependence on outside help — and more billable hours. The consultancy-industrial complex, alongside outsourcing, has, to borrow a phrase, enshittified local government. But the political class has so far failed to catch up.

“Trust in politics is falling,” declares the 2024 White Paper. That is certainly true. But surely not even Keir Starmer thinks the design of English local government should be based on a paper commissioned by a consultancy which stands to benefit from as much disruption as possible?

Beyond the possibility of suspending democratic elections, and there being scant evidence for tangible savings, there is a final, terrifying point to consider. Authorities which run surpluses are expected to merge with authorities running deficits — with little to no financial assistance available from Westminster. Surpluses and reserves will be pooled, as will liabilities.

In other words, some authorities, which have been managed comparatively well, will have a form of austerity imposed on them to provide a soft bail out for those which have not. When ministers talk about “financial scale” and “resilience” what they essentially mean is merging stable, solvent councils with struggling neighbors. Things could go very badly wrong: imagine the political equivalent of RBS swallowing up ABN Amro before the last financial crisis, or Lloyds acquiring HBOS straight after. In some places, anyway, residents and local leaders are concerned that the net result will be higher council tax and poorer services.

Local government reorganization could come to define English politics this year — and ease Starmer’s exit from the top job. But beyond its short-term consequences, not least suspended elections, it also distills so much about our political class: identify a genuine, existing problem; adopt a technocratic blueprint devised by consultants; implement the whole thing with maximum incompetence. We’ve seen it before with the “NHS Programme for IT” and HS2, and will likely do so again with ID cards.

In his masterful Ruling the Void, political scientist Peter Mair claims political elites have retreated into institutional “safe havens”, focusing on governance procedures rather than representation, with this only disconnecting them further from the electorate. But even Mair would struggle to believe that a PWC report could lead to the suspension of elections — all in the name of saving money, even if nobody really knows how much.

 It was always hard to tell how serious Musk was about this venture. Once a Democratic-friendly billionaire, he fell into Donald Trump’s orbit after buying Twitter (renamed X) and became, by 2024, a prolific donor to the GOP and the Trump campaign. As a reward, Trump put him in charge of the ludicrously named DOGE on a Musk pledge to cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget, or about a third of annual outlays. DOGE made a mess of the federal bureaucracy (while only delivering a relative pittance in cuts) and proved unpopular. 

The relationship between Musk and Trump, with their titanic egos, was never built to last — the budget cuts were never all that compelling to Trump — and they broke up when it became clear that the Tesla boss was a political drag on the administration. For all the chatter about how they clashed over tax credits, the death blow for Musk was probably a hotly contested election for a state Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin. Musk spent heavily to boost the Republican nominee and even campaigned for him personally; the Democratic nominee handily won anyway. For Trump, this was an embarrassment.

 The third-party bid, then, was probably Musk’s lame attempt to console himself. Yet the brief life of the America Party — notwithstanding its founder’s willingness to invest huge sums in the project — sheds light on why third-party politics are such a challenge in the United States. 

The Democrats and Republicans maintain the longest-lasting party duopoly in the world. Of the two, the Democrats are the older party, founded in the 1820s by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren to represent Southern and Western farmers, the emerging proletariat in the North, and grasping entrepreneurs everywhere who felt shut out by the Eastern establishment. The Republicans, meanwhile, were founded in the 1850s as a vehicle for Northern Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats and Free Soilers, and everyone else opposed to slavery. Since then, no sustainable third party has taken root. Many tried, to be sure, but they either dissipated or were absorbed into one of the two major parties.

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By Ross Barkan

Much of this is structural. In a first-past-the-post presidential system that rewards, in every way, zero-sum politics, there will always be two dominant factions. The Electoral College renders third-party efforts mostly futile. In the 1992 presidential election, billionaire Ross Perot garnered nearly 20% of the national vote, a significant sum, against Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. In a proportional parliamentary system, he’d have been entitled to that share of the vote in parliament; instead, he won zilch, because he couldn’t carry a single state and was therefore awarded no electoral votes.

Due to ballot-access laws that vary from state to state, it can be very hard for third parties to maintain a long-term presence in either local or national elections. Take the Green Party, a small Leftist party best remembered as a vehicle for Ralph Nader’s presidential runs (and blamed for spoiling Al Gore’s chances in the 2000 election). In New York today, the Green Party no longer has a ballot line. Indeed, in 2024, no third-party candidates for president appeared on the ballot in New York — a first in the modern era. Voters could only choose between Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

 The two major parties in America are remarkably malleable and adaptable, able to survive even when they serve, within their own ranks, diametrically opposed regional and class interests. In Britain, the Conservative Party — the world’s oldest, if not the oldest continuous, party — is now threatened with extinction by Nigel Farage’s Reform movement, which is cutting deeply into the Tories’ base. 

If Britain’s intra-Right contest took place under US rules and conditions, the Tories would almost certainly swallow or co-opt Reform. That’s in essence what happened with Trump: he ran a populist, outsider campaign against the GOP establishment in 2016 and, instead of destroying the party, he simply remade it in his own image. The keepers of the older GOP consensus — foreign-policy hawkism, pro-business austerity — simply learned to push their agenda using Trumpian rhetoric (and often succeeded because Trump’s populism was skin-deep).

On the Left, a similar dynamic played out with Bernie Sanders, except Sanders could never beat the Democratic establishment in the same fashion. Rather than campaign as a Green or a socialist, Sanders — who doesn’t identify as a Democrat but caucuses with the party in the Senate — ran in the 2016 Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton. He won many states and millions of votes, and was able to emerge as a significant political leader after the election. 

In the wake of this, the Democratic Socialists of America saw a huge boost in membership and became a budding political force in American politics. Unlike the Socialist Party of the 20th century, DSA doesn’t field candidates on its own ballot line. Instead, the DSA simply endorses Democrats who call themselves socialists and are willing to fight for their policies. In New York, this is how Zohran Mamdani won. He ran as a Democrat and beat back the Democratic establishment. Like Trump, perhaps, he’ll be able to reshape the party — at the local level, at least (full disclosure: Mamdani managed my own unsuccessful bid for the New York state Senate in 2018).

 What Musk, as deranged as he often is, did get right is that Americans are hungry for other options. Both parties are resented (centrist Democrats especially), and the nation isn’t so much polarized as negatively polarized, with voters defining themselves as much by the party they revile as the one they support. It’s rarer and rarer to hear an American declare they’re proudly a Democrat or Republican. The old political machines have withered. Americans have a weaker relationship with the Democratic and GOP apparatuses than they ever did before.

 To build a viable alternative, millions of dollars would be needed to secure ballot access and advertise the virtues of the new party to voters who are still used to only voting Republican or Democratic. And the party, in some sense, would have to be distinct enough to avoid charges that it’s simply siphoning ballots from the Democrats or the GOP in America’s zero-sum system. This was Musk’s fear — that he would end up a spoiler, abetting Democrats.

What Musk would probably have never gotten right is the policy platform of the America Party. Musk doesn’t understand the American electorate very well. DOGE, his great obsession, backfired, as even rank-and-file Republican voters rebelled against the idea of government programs they rely on facing devastating cuts. At heart, he is a globalist capitalist, and even his nativism is limited by his desire for high-skilled foreign workers to join his companies.

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By David Auerbach

A viable third-party movement in America would have to unite voters who feel underserved by the Democrats and Republicans. What kind of voter isn’t truly seen or served by either party? The answer is a socially moderate or conservative economic populist, a voter with a Bernie Sanders view of the economy who is more traditionalist on cultural issues and skeptical of immigration.

Trump’s GOP, on immigration, has plainly overreached. Americans wanted him to get control of the border, and on that count, he succeeded. But terrorizing ordinary migrants, dispatching hairdressers to a Salvadoran gulag for life, and removing student green cards over pro-Palestine op-eds was heinous. Trump’s approval rating is falling, including on immigration, and Americans now take a warmer view of immigration.

A third party, in this scenario, would advocate for a stricter border but a reasonable path to legal status for law-abiding migrants — the compromise once supported by Republicans like Marco Rubio. The dynamism of the United States derives from its inherent multiculturalism, its ability, again and again, to assimilate newcomers. If there’s a single politician who might embody what this theoretical third party movement would look like, it’s Dan Osborn, the former labor organizer running for the Senate again in Nebraska. Osborn is campaigning as an independent against the Republican incumbent, shunning both parties. He’s deeply critical of corporate power, like Sanders, and sympathetic to rural gun owners, like a Republican. He advocates for a “secure” border. And he’s got a shot at winning.

Osborn, though, isn’t helming any political party. There might be a universe in which a saner version of Musk attempts to use his cash to seed more Osborn-like candidates across America, building a movement around the America Party. That universe, though, hasn’t yet arrived, and maybe never will. Team Red and Team Blue are here to stay.

Well, that was then. Today — after the Dobbs decision in late June, a better-than-expected inflation report in July, recent Democratic victories in Congress, and a Republican primary season that has seen Trump-backed candidates edging out their more conventional rivals — the terrain is looking a lot more favourable for the Democrats. While the GOP is still expected to take the House in November, the Senate has become a gigantic question mark. As RealClearPolitics election analyst Sean Trende put it in June, what we are looking at now is “a classic battle between an irresistible force and an immovable object”. The irresistible force is Biden’s unpopularity; the immovable object is the fact that GOP primary voters have reliably opted for weak, unproven, and at times cartoonishly bad Senate candidates to run against Democrats. Faced with one of the most favourable electoral environments in decades, Republicans are finding a way to blow it.

Take Georgia, which, on paper, should be as reliably Republican as they come. Although immigration to the metro Atlanta area is steadily shifting the partisan balance in the state, Georgia went for Donald Trump by 5 points in 2016, and, until 2020, it had not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 2000. In the last election, however, college-educated suburban whites moved heavily into the Democratic column, granting a narrow victory to Biden and to two Democratic Senate candidates, Jon Ossof and Raphael Warnock. Still, most observers at the time attributed the blue wave to Trump’s personal unpopularity and predicted that Warnock would be one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the Senate in 2022.

Georgia Republicans, however, selected as their challenger to Warnock the Trump-endorsed Herschel Walker. Walker is not a politician — he is a former college football star at the University of Georgia who played professionally for the New Jersey Generals, a Trump-owned team in a failed competitor league to the NFL. There was, to be fair, a certain logic behind the choice. College football is what white Southerners have today instead of a religious or regional identity. I come from a multigenerational Georgia family: I, my mother, my father, my brother, my grandfather, and the majority of my aunts, uncles, and cousins have all received degrees from the University of Georgia. Walker was a god in our household, and in many households across the state, for his leading role in winning the 1980 college football national championship, much in the way that Diego Maradona is still revered in Argentina for the 1986 World Cup. I can’t count on both hands the number of dogs named “Herschel” I have met in my life.

And yet, with all due respect to Walker, who has received countless blows to the head over his years as a football player and mixed-martial artist, he is likely among the dumbest men ever to run for Senate. Even to those jaded from watching Biden press conferences, his interviews are remarkable for their incoherence. When asked in March about gun violence, he answered: “Well, Cain killed Abel, you know, and that’s a problem that we have… You talked about doing a disinformation, what about getting a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women that’s looking at their social media?” He has cautioned against green energy investments on the theory that “when China gets our good air, their bad air gotta move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then, now, we’ve got to clean that back up.” Amazingly, these quotes sound even worse when you listen to them.

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But even if Walker did not sound like President Camacho minus the showmanship, he would still be plagued by a string of scandals. He has admitted to struggling with dissociative identity disorder and of having up to 12 different personalities, or “alters”, including one that prompted him to play Russian roulette with a loaded pistol and another that nearly led him to murder a man for failing to deliver a car on time. His ex-wife has accused him of threatening her with knives and of holding a gun to her head, meaning that whoever wins the Georgia Senate seat will have faced domestic violence allegations from their former spouse. Indeed, it’s a testament to the strength of Republican feeling in Georgia that Walker is running only two points behind Warnock. It’s also telling that he’s polling a full five points behind Brian Kemp, the GOP candidate for Georgia governor.

Walker is the most colourful Republican seeking election to the Senate, but he’s not the only one with problems. Pennsylvania, for instance, should have been a decent opportunity for the GOP. The Democratic nominee, John Fetterman, is another one of those American politicians who can barely talk — he suffered a stroke in May and has rarely appeared in public since. For that and other reasons, he would appear to be a soft target. A radical from the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, Fetterman attempts to project blue-collar authenticity (largely by wearing hoodies) but is in reality something more like a middle-class slummer. He received an MBA from the University of Connecticut and a Master’s in public policy from Harvard, and he subsisted into his 40s on the largesse of his parents, from whom he purchased an “industrial-style loft” for $1. He’s also got what, if he were a Republican, the media might call a “racially tinged” past. In 2013, Fetterman used a shotgun to detain an unarmed black jogger whom he (wrongly) suspected of criminal activity in his neighbourhood — behaviour that in other cases has been charged as the federal crime of kidnapping.

Fetterman’s Republican opponent, however, is Mehmet Oz, another Trump-backed political novice best known as the celebrity doctor from The Oprah Winfrey Show. While Oz, like all Republicans, has to deal with a hostile media, his big problem is that he’s been unable to shake the impression that he’s a wealthy carpetbagger with little organic connection to Pennsylvania. In a much-mocked video highlighted by the Fetterman campaign, Oz, who lived in New Jersey until recently, mispronounces the name of a Pennsylvania grocery chain before complaining that skyrocketing food prices are driving up the price of his wife’s “crudités”. And a recent attempt to attack Fetterman for sponging off of his parents ended up spiralling into a discussion about whether Oz owned ten homes or only two. (He clarified: two homes, ten properties.) With barely 12 weeks to go until the election, Fetterman has opened up a towering 11.5-point lead over his rival.

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By Park MacDougald

But the Senate map looks bad for the GOP across the board. In Arizona, Democrat Mark Kelly has opened up a double-digit lead on the Trump-and-Peter Thiel-backed Blake Masters, who has been hammered for past comments calling abortion “demonic”. That might’ve been Republican boilerplate a year ago — meaningless red meat for Evangelicals and Catholics — but in a post-Roe world, voters are jumpy about what GOP politicians might do to abortion access once in power. And the other Trump-and-Thiel candidate, Hillbilly Elegy author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance, is struggling in Ohio. The state went decisively for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, which should be great news for Vance. But polling in that race, while sparse, has tended to show Vance narrowly behind in a close race, and his campaign has struggled to raise money. A Yale-educated populist whose real constituency is among D.C. intellectuals, Vance has had trouble connecting with Ohio voters. He still has a decent shot to pull it out, but Ohio shouldn’t even be close.

A friend who’s reported on American politics for decades once told me that parties take a few electoral cycles to get the message the electorate is trying to send them. Democrats weren’t convinced to abandon McGovern-style, tax-and-spend liberalism until after getting thumped in 1980, 1984, and 1988. Republicans held onto the Bush-era synthesis of religious family values and neoconservative foreign policy through the defeats of 2008 and 2012, abandoning it only after their base decisively rejected it in the 2016 primary.

A few months ago, it looked as if the Democrats might be the ones about to receive the message that their current flavour of elite-driven progressivism was out of step with the country. That outcome is still possible: Biden is only marginally less unpopular than he was earlier in the summer, and reports of his revival carry more than a whiff of wishful thinking. And the Senate map favours the GOP, even if the candidates are weak. Today, however, it’s starting to look as if the American electorate could be gearing up to deliver a very different sort of message. Trump was defeated in 2020. It seems increasingly likely that his hand-picked candidates could cost Republicans a Senate majority in 2022. And with each new report coming out of Mar-a-Lago, he inches closer to declaring his candidacy for 2024.

In a perfect world, it wouldn’t take yet another Trump defeat to convince the GOP to move past the man. But we’re not living in that world, so something tells me that it will.

That was the atmosphere on the streets of Paris on the night of the first round. The Trocadéro, overlooking the Eiffel Tower, was occupied not by enthusiastic political activists but by tired partygoers who left the building littered with broken glass. The only detritus of the election were a huge “Zemmort 2022” tag (a contraction of Zemmour and the French word for death) and the occasional trampled campaign flier.

Even the presence of Le Pen in the run-off for a second time did not worry the locals, a stark contrast with 2002, when Marine’s father, Jean-Marie, made the second round and jolted the French youth into organising mass demonstrations against the threat of a far-Right presidency. This is the real story of the 2022 election so far. We are witnessing a phantom campaign.

Another striking example of the exceptional disinterest in this year’s campaign: TF1, France’s oldest and most popular TV channel, decided to broadcast the hilarious medieval time-travel movie Les Visiteurs at 10 pm, only two hours after the announcement of the official results. It was the earliest that the channel had ever cut away from its election debrief.

The impression of apathy is backed empirically. Of registered citizens, 26% abstained, the highest number since 2002. 68% found the election “uninteresting”, according to the pollster Ipsos. A month before the first round, “tiredness” was the strongest emotion associated with the election.

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Macron rules over a political desert

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

Away from the verbal provocations of Zemmour, the electoral platforms this year were uniformly bland. Even the relatively lacklustre 2017 campaign entertained radical ideas like universal income, enormous public-sector spending cuts, and a potential French exit from the EU. Large-scale rallies, normally essential rites of passage for presidential candidates, were virtually absent from the last few weeks.

The election also suffered dearly from the absence of its main candidate, President Macron. The incumbent announced his campaign a mere four weeks before the vote and held one major rally before the run-off. He declined to show up for any of the debates with the other candidates, largely because he did not want to be reduced to their level at a time when the war in Ukraine imbued him with international stature. His platform was purposefully modest. It focused on Macron’s strongest attribute: his experience.

This lack of public interest in the election — and with it, the lack of any serious debate about the country’s future — will weigh heavily on the French Republic’s health. More than in any other European country, the French President commands immense executive power. He can fire his Prime Minister at will and call early parliamentary elections with virtually no restrictions. And unlike his American counterpart, he cannot be impeached.

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The French psyche is perhaps even more important than France’s institutional landscape. For all the mythology around France decapitating her king, the French have never broken completely from their long monarchic past. De Gaulle, when he founded the Fifth Republic, made it explicitly clear that he was building a “synthesis” between France’s monarchic and republican traditions — one that would give the president considerable power.

Macron has often used the symbolism of the monarchy for political purposes. In 2017, weeks after his election, he hosted Vladimir Putin at the Palace of Versailles, and twice during his term he used his constitutional right to give a speech in Versailles to the Congress in an apparent attempt to develop a French version of the United States’ ‘State of the Union’ address. Before he became President, he said of French politics that “we are missing a king”.

The French presidential election has replaced the coronation ceremony as the symbolic centre of French politics. This means, however, that the présidentielles must be a moment of democratic catharsis. Here is the occasion for France’s electorate to wrestle with all of its frustrations and desires. Debate and political conflict reach new heights, families and friends weigh on the various campaign pledges, and tempers sometimes get out of hand. All topics must be on the table because once the presidential ship has sailed, the opposition parties have few institutional means to steer public policy.

None of that is happening in 2022. And the lack of this ritual catharsis will have profound ripple effects. The next president will lack a strong mandate to implement his (or her) vision. Macron announced mezza voce that he would increase the legal retirement age from 62 to 65, but he has done little legwork in his campaign to get the French on board with this policy. Given France’s long tradition of strikes and Macron’s incapacity to pass a milder pension reform in his first term, this reform could well be political dynamite.

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The 2017 campaign was also underwhelming, albeit to a lesser extent. In its late stages, it was largely highjacked by the centre-Right candidate François Fillon’s financial scandals, which sidelined substantive debate over other issues. Strikingly, in a country that had been recently rocked by a series of high-profile jihadist attacks, the issues of political Islam and what would later be coined “separatism” were largely secondary, as was the question of climate change.

As a result, France wound up electing a president, Macron, that it did not really know. This came back to haunt Macron, who soon discovered that he lacked a mandate for much of his governing agenda. On questions of Islam and identity, for instance, Macron ran a campaign in 2017 that embraced the traditional multiculturalism of the centre-Left. He praised German Chancellor Angela Merkel for welcoming over one million refugees in 2015 and provoked many conservatives by stating that there was “no such thing as French culture, there is a culture in France and it is diverse”. In the aftermath of Brexit and Trump, he was heralded by the liberal international media as the new internationalist champion to slay populist dragons.

This very New Labour stance on identity did not hold. In a blend of tactical triangulation and real concern about France’s unity, Macron, once in office, steered sharply to the Right on immigration and identity. He gave a 12-page interview to the staunchly Right-wing magazine Valeurs Actuelles in which he echoed many of its concerns on immigration, and his minister of the interior, Gérald Darmanin, a former Nicolas Sarkozy ally, even called Le Pen “soft” when she argued that jihadism had nothing to do with Islam. Many of his Left-wing supporters in Parliament abandoned him in response to this about-face.

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But it was the issue of environmentalism that led to Macron’s first real setback in November 2018. Increasingly resentful rural French, who felt condescended to by a president who was accumulating a series of insensitive gaffes (including telling someone to “cross the road to find a job”), finally revolted when Macron went along with a scheduled green tax on diesel. Thousands of Gilets Jaunes rose up across the country, occupied roundabouts, and headed to Paris to manifest their profound discontent.

Macron undeniably paid for 40 years of governmental disinterest for what Christophe Guilluy has called “peripheral France”, but he also suffered from the lack of cathartic debate over his policies, including his green pledges. Although the French state was eventually able to repress the riots and protests, the Gilets Jaunes represented an outburst of revolutionary anger against the system. Denied a proper debate over the direction of their country, many ordinary people felt that taking to the streets was their only option.

So while over the next few days all eyes will be on the genuine, albeit still somewhat hypothetical, risks of a Le Pen presidency, the real poison for French democracy might already be in its veins. In 2017, the pollster Brice Teinturier published the prophetic “Plus Rien à faire, Plus rien à foutre” (don’t care, don’t give a damn), in which he demonstrated that 40% of French citizens were disappointed with French politics, 13% angry, 20% disgusted, 9% indifferent. Only 18% expressed positive emotions. Teinturier even hinted that anger might be preferable to apathy, because angry citizens still want to believe in a cause. Apathetic citizens have given up.

Assuming that Macron is indeed re-elected, France’s monarchical republic will give him all of the power he needs to muscle his agenda through the country’s institutions. But, after the experience of his first term, we should all be concerned that the French Republic will pay dearly for this year’s phantom campaign.

With lockdown sceptism having proven itself not very popular with populist voters, another cause presents itself in the form of “devoscepticism”.

Next year marks the 25th anniversary of the referendums that began devolution in Scotland and Wales. The first, and most radical, of the big New Labour reforms has long outlasted New Labour itself, and a quarter of a century on, what have we got to show for it? The devosceptic answer is this: SNP rule in Scotland; and not much of anything in Wales. Devolution has been a disappointment, and a failure.

Just as unionists warned, home rule has empowered nationalists and marginalised unionist parties, leading to one-party state in Edinburgh with all the corruption and incompetence that goes with it.

In those areas where power is devolved, such as education and health, the SNP has performed poorly. Evidence of a Scottish or Welsh culture renaissance is thin on the ground, and the main growth industry associated with the devolved administrations is the growth of government itself. Just as the Eurosceptics of old longed to be rid of the Eurocrats, the devosceptic bugbear is the “devocrat”.

Is it any wonder, then, that a small, but growing, band of devosceptics scent an opportunity here? Yes, they may be few in number — but 20 years ago the same could be said about the early Brexiteers. So could the anti-devolution movement become a serious force?

Politicians aren’t popular, especially those deemed surplus to requirements. Reversing devolution in Scotland and Wales would mean getting rid of 189 MSPs and AMs — plus all the hangers-on, of which there are many.  And public hostility to paying for the apparatus of politics is a potent force. It proved decisive in the 2004 referendum on the creation of a North East regional assembly and the 2011 referendum on electoral reform. Those two paved the way for the biggie: the Brexit referendum.

Already, the devosceptics have a voice in the media: try Googling “devocrat” — a word which no one uses with admiration, but which is already gaining traction just as so much of the language of Euroscepticism helped sow the seed of Brexit.

In May’s elections the anti-devolutionists are also set to establish a political bridgehead. Polls show that the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party (whose purpose you can probably guess) will win its first seats in the Senedd. “Abolish” is full of former-UKIPers and they’ll be hoping that 2021 is the start of bigger things just as 1999 was for Nigel Farage.

And yet, I fear — or, rather, hope — that the devosceptics are doomed to disappointment. Devoscepticism is not the new Euroscepticism. Look beyond the superficial parallels and it soon becomes apparent that the two causes — and their underlying dynamics — are completely unalike. It also becomes clear that there is no going back on devolution; instead something else needs to be tried to correct the mistakes made by the Blair government.

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Has the EU lost its mind?

By Peter Franklin

Let’s start with a point that ought to be obvious, which is that Scottish (and Welsh) separatism is first and foremost a British failure — specifically that of the British political establishment. With great power comes great responsibility — so when millions of people yearn for something as disruptive and painful as leaving the United Kingdom, the responsibility has to lie primarily with those who had — and still have — most of the power.

The devosceptic agenda, however, puts all the focus on the failings of Edinburgh and Cardiff, therefore avoiding the underlying problem. Devolution in its current form has not — as promised — halted the march of Scottish nationalism, but that doesn’t change the fact that the stresses and strains of the Union precede devolution by decades. Unless the devosceptics have anything to say about that, then they don’t have anything to say at all.

Let’s not forget that prior to 1997, there was an explicitly anti-devolution party — called the Conservative Party. You may recall how that worked out for them. From holding half of all Scottish seats in 1955, they went down to zero by 1997 — and zero in Wales too. Even they got the message after that.

In any case, Eurosceptics, of all people, should understand that voters don’t like being ruled from distant places. Westminster was to pre-devolution Scotland and Wales what Brussels was to pre-Brexit Britain. In many ways, it was worse. At least the UK was never under direct rule by a team of ministers headquartered in the Berlaymont. And only some of our laws were decided in the European Parliament.

Also I don’t remember any occasion when the EU trialled its least popular directives in the UK first — unlike Margaret Thatcher’s government, which introduced the hated Poll Tax to Scotland a year before England and Wales. Whatever you think of Scottish separatism, it is a monster of Westminster’s making.

Of course, the parallels are far from exact but, being Eurosceptics, devosceptics ought to have a sense of what it feels like to have your future decided by institutions in which you’re outnumbered by outsiders. What part of “taking back control” don’t they understand?

This is also about the principle of power sharing. We’ve already had eleven years of Conservative government. Given the state of the opposition parties in England it’s likely that we’ll have many years more. Indeed, it’s not impossible that we could see a situation like in Japan where one party governs for decades on end. This might work in a consensus-driven society with a highly unified national culture, but Britain is not either of those things. We are a nation of nations — of different sizes and political predispositions. Such a situation would be torment to most Scots.

Devolution therefore provides a vital safety valve, a mechanism by which the Westminster system can persist but without giving the dominant English party exclusive power over the whole of the UK.

That’s why the boo-word “devocrat” is so ill-judged. Devocrats are in fact democrats. As individuals and as governing parties they are voted in directly by the Scottish and Welsh electorates — and they can be voted out again. They couldn’t be less like the Eurocrats we’ve just freed ourselves from. Whether you like Nicola Sturgeon or not — and I’m about as big a fan as Alex Salmond is — she has democratic legitimacy.

But, of course, for devosceptics that’s the problem. If the SNP secures a majority in May, then the pressure on Westminster to concede another referendum on Scottish independence becomes overwhelming.

Well, so be it. It is completely consistent with the principles of British Euroscepticism to give the people — in this case, the Scottish people — the deciding vote on that most fundamental of democratic questions: who governs? Brexit supporters in the Government, and the London media, can hardly complain if Scottish voters demand that its government carries out their wishes.

If such a vote is what Scotland truly wants, it’s not our place to suppress it. After all, isn’t that what the pro-EU establishment did to a number of countries which voted against them, and what EU supporters in Britain tried to do after the 2016 vote?

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How the EU humiliated itself

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There are of course matters to settle about the timing of the referendum, the wording of the question and who can vote. The UK Government should be adamant that the Covid recovery comes first; that the question presents a clear and explicit choice between leaving and staying in the United Kingdom; and that Scots who live outside Scotland should not be disenfranchised. However, the principle of Scottish people deciding Scotland’s future should never be in doubt.

In any case, what’s the alternative? A constitutional ban on independence referendums forever? Lock up the SNP leadership? Force Nicola Sturgeon into exile? This is Britain, not Spain.

We’d do better to follow the Canadian example instead, the only country to democratically neuter a secessionist movement. Back in 1980 the French-speaking province of Quebec held an independence referendum that was defeated. Then a landslide election victory for the Parti Québécois (the equivalent of the SNP) led to second referendum in 1995, but that too was defeated — though more narrowly. At the time, independence for Quebec looked inevitable, the result of unstoppable trends; today, the PQ is in long-term decline, independence is off the political agenda and the province is governed by the centre-right Coalition Avenir Québec.

Perhaps the single worst argument for reversing devolution to Scotland and Wales is that devolution is imperfect and full of contradictions. Well, of course, it is! There’s no such thing as a perfect democracy. The rule of the people, in all their wondrous complexity, will always and everywhere produce messy compromises and inconsistencies.

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Those who think we should give up on devolution because we’ve never really solved the West Lothian question remind me of the anti-Brexiteers who relentlessly focus on all the problems caused by leaving the EU. In both cases, they overlook the much greater problem of their preferred alternative. In the case of the continuity Remainers, it would have meant submitting to a sovereignty-destroying superstate. In the case of the devosceptics, it would mean going back to an outdated, over-centralised model of Britain that the people of Scotland and Wales have clearly rejected.

We don’t have to stick with Tony Blair’s botch job, and there are other ways of decentralising a country. We could learn a thing or too from the Swiss, for instance — who have been at this lark for a lot longer than we have. Without a common language to unite them, they’ve nevertheless held their confederation together for centuries — and they’ve done it through fiercely-defended localism and direct democracy.

A system of cantons with local responsibility for their finances could suit the nations of the UK very well. Each area could come together with other areas as they saw fit — so that our governing institutions could emerge from the bottom-up instead of being determined by Westminster.

But that’s just one option. The key point is that if you believe that our model of devolution doesn’t work, then you need a positive vision to put in its place, not some unloved and long-discarded ancien regime that can never be brought back. Devolution can and should be re-done, but it can never be undone.

Generally, they have succeeded in implementing many aspects of their agenda, pushing the political conversation toward their direction. They also start to become ‘normal’ political parties, subject to the same types of activities and bargaining found in more traditional parties. Their stances are clearly not to everyone’s liking, but their impact and durability can no longer be denied.

Blue-collar populists have had the most success in their signature issue, restricting migration. Norway[2. Norway tightens asylum policy to cut numbers.], Denmark[3. Danish parliament passes contentious ‘ghetto’ plan.], Switzerland[4. Switzerland’s new immigration statute sets high hurdle for citizenship.], and Austria[5. The long honeymoon of Austria’s right-wing alliance.] have all tightened their policies on refugees since populist parties entered into government, and Italy’s government[6. Thousands march for refugee rights in Italy.] is in the process of following suit. America’s populist president, Donald Trump, is yet again embroiled in a dispute with Congress over immigration policy as he attempts to reduce the number of illegal migrants who enter and reside within America. Poland[7. Poland only accepts returning Poles under migration policy.] and Hungary’s[8. Orban digs in against European Commission on migration policy.] populist governments have also rejected pressure from the European Union to accept Syrian and other Middle Eastern refugees as part of the EU’s common policy.

Just the threat that blue-collar populist parties could take power has often been enough to push governments to propose migration restrictions. The Dutch Prime Minister fought off a challenge from conservative populist Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in 2017 when he took a more demanding tone towards migrants, telling them in an open letter “act normal or get out”, and he has played a strong role in reducing African migration into the EU[9. Rutte says EU deal to reduce migration is a big step forward.]. Sweden’s major parties both tacked to the right on immigration in this year’s general election to fend off the Sweden Democrats, as did Norway’s Labour and Centre parties in that country’s 2017 election. Angela Merkel’s government followed suit this year in a bid to help her CDU/CSU alliance win two recent state elections. Even French President Emmanuel Macron recently mentioned immigration as a concern to be dealt within his speech addressing the gilets jaunes protestors.

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Could the gilets jaunes topple Macron?

By John Lichfield

Denmark’s blue-collar populist Danish People’s Party’s (DF) two-decade growth in strength has even forced the long dominant Social Democrats to abandon allies on the left in the run up to next year’s campaign. Breaking a twenty-five-year agreement with the Social Liberal Party, Social Democratic leader Mette Frederiksen has led her party to vote with the bourgeois-populist government on a number of immigration restriction measures in the current parliament, including a ban on wearing burkas in public[10. Danish parliament passes ban on burqa and niqab.] and a controversial effort to combat “ghettos” where many Muslim immigrants live.[11. Danish parliament passes contentious ghetto plan] The populists have been so successful that there is now a new party to its right, the New Right, which argues that the DF is not tough enough on migration. Polls currently show it is likely to surpass the 2% threshold to enter the Folketing.

Even Hillary Clinton has got in on the act, recently saying that Europe needs to “get a handle on immigration” to stop the rise of blue-collar populism. Restricting immigration and reducing the number of Muslim refugees may remain very unwelcome policies among Western elites, but virtually everywhere else it’s a winning issue, forcing any leader who seeks to form a government to shift with the prevailing winds and endorse policies that would have been unacceptable five years ago.

Conservative populists have had an impact in other policy areas too. Norway’s Progress Party started as an anti-tax protest movement and to this day the party insists it’s more of a classical liberal party than a populist one. In government, its leader, Siv Jensen, took the Finance Ministry and has worked with Conservative (Hoyre) Party Prime Minister Erna Solberg to cut income taxes and eliminate the inheritance tax. The centre-Right coalition has also implemented a long-time Progress Party proposal to finance these cuts by taking money directly from Norway’s large sovereign wealth fund to pay for current spending.

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How irresponsible Merkel let populism thrive

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In contrast, the Danish People’s Party consciously places itself between the traditional Left and Right on economic matters. In practice, this means the party approves of tax cuts for lower-income workers but not for higher-income earners. Their opposition to this forced a smaller member of the governing centre-Right coalition, the libertarian Liberal Alliance, to abandon its plans to reduce the top income tax rate in the 2018 budget.

Italy’s conservative populists, the Lega Party, has also used its newfound power to push for radical changes in fiscal policy. It had campaigned for a 15% flat tax to replace the current progressive regime that includes rates up to 43%. It had also called for reductions in the retirement age. Its government partners, the more centrist populist Five Star Movement, had campaigned on a 780 Euro a month universal basic income. While a recent budget agreement with the EU forced both parties to scale back their programme, the new Italian budget will include increased spending and dramatically lower taxation, precisely the opposite of what the prior, more establishment-friendly budget had envisioned.

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Europe's democratic difficulties

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Populist economics has also found a home in the United States. President Trump signed a massive corporate tax cut in late 2017 while also approving dramatic hikes in both domestic and military discretionary spending. The deficit has ballooned as a result, rising to nearly $800 billion (3.9% of GDP) in fiscal year 2018. The deficit is expected to further widen to nearly $1 trillion, or over 4.5% of GDP, in the coming fiscal year. Populist economic policy is spreading and is likely to have as much impact over the long term as its migration programme already has.

For the most part, fears about populism being inimical to democracy have proved ill-founded. Concerns that President Trump would become an autocratic strongman have faded as he acted in accord with his constitutional powers and accepted policy reversals when checked by other branches of government. No populist party in coalition has even tried to move against the press or attempted to criminalise political opposition. While some of these parties did grow out of movements with roots in authoritarianism or fascism, as the parties have grown, those elements have usually been dismissed or checked.

In Eastern Europe, though, the picture is a little less reassuring. Hungary’s Fidesz government has acted in ways reminiscent of authoritarian governments, especially in its use of state resources to mount openly political campaigns. Opposition political activity is not formally restricted, but the difficulty in attracting private advertisement for newspapers critical of the government has drastically reduced the number of openly critical press sources. Polarised between the Fidesz-supporting rural areas and opposition to him in Budapest and with the opposition split, politics is freer than it is in Putin’s Russia, but not as open and fair as elsewhere in the EU. Moreover, the invoking of ethnic nationalist themes in election campaigns is unlikely to be echoed by mainstream Western politicians.

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The far right's plans to capture Europe

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Poland is another worrying case. The governing Law and Justice Party (PiS) attracted worldwide opprobrium when it overturned a law that had allowed the outgoing Civic Platform party (PO) to appoint a significant number of judges to the country’s Constitutional Tribunal. Since then, PiS has continued to pass laws that give its government greater control over the judiciary and public prosecutors. It has also placed the state media directly under government control, leading to what some opponents say is blatantly biased press coverage. The EU has threatened to suspend Poland’s voting rights as a result of these actions.

We must always be prepared to protect democracy, but we also must avoid the temptation to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of votes that don’t go the way we want, and even to change the rules as a result of them. Those opposed to conservative populism have claimed that both the Brexit referendum victory and the election of Donald Trump might have been fraudulently obtained by Russian state propaganda on social media. Law enforcers will duly reach their own conclusions on those issues. But American opponents of Trump have called for Democrats to expand the number of Supreme Court justices and appoint their favoured judges should they obtain control of Congress, exactly the type of allegedly anti-democratic action PiS has engaged in. Democracy is a fragile flower, and its flourishing ultimately rests on the willingness of the losers to accept results they disagree with.

Western countries have now had some form of democratic elections for over a century. In that time, we have grown used to a Left-Right political landscape, one that developed only over time and only in countries where the primary political dispute was over how to handle the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Communism. If one goes back to the mid-19^thCentury, many European countries were divided between Liberals who sought to expand democracy and free markets and combat the power of crowns and clerical gowns and Conservatives who opposed them. The current landscape emerged only when those battles faded in significance and new alliances were drawn to meet new challenges.

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Europe's biggest test yet

By Matthew Goodwin

There were always outliers to this landscape. Irish politics was divided for nearly 80 years along the lines of which side you supported in the Irish Civil War, and Israeli politics was originally divided on the question of how a party related to Zionism. Scandinavian politics has long had room for agrarian parties that did not fit neatly into the Left-Right continuum, as did many Eastern European countries in the interlude between the World Wars. The basic insight is that democratic politics organises around the questions that divide a people at a particular moment in time; parties are not, and should not be, frozen in amber.

Conservative populism represents a growing number of people who want different questions asked and answered. So long as this continues, we should expect these parties and figures to remain strong and active players in their nations’ politics. The evidence so far shows that as unconventional as their policies may seem, they can successfully compete in a free and vibrant democratic playing field and can operate as responsible actors when they obtain government. So long as the problems they address remain unsolved, we should expect to see the issues they champion and many of the solutions they advocate to remain on the Western agenda, and perhaps influence the course of history as decisively as did the rise of social democratic parties in the last century.

Democracy in the developing world is not like democracy at home. It is fought dirtily (even by comparison to the Brexit referendum or the 2016 presidential election). Voters often come in blocs, often organised on linguistic, religious or ethnic grounds. Money and violence are used liberally. Votes are bought and sold and stolen. But these elections are nonetheless real political struggles. They not only matter for the quarter of the world’s population, they are also an indicator of what democracy really means in weak states. Here are a few of the best books I read this year to understand them.

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By Dan Knowles

How to rig an election, by Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas

Nic Cheeseman, co-author of this brilliant book, was one of my regular sources when I covered African politics, in particular during the disputed Kenyan election of 2017. After years of studying politics in Africa’s Anglophone democracies, he knows what he is talking about. The pair explain how although more and more countries are holding elections, not many of them are truly credible.

Election rigging these days rarely involves stuffing ballot boxes and presidents winning improbable 99% victories (though those still happen). Instead, it involves careful manipulation of the voter registration process; the use of illicit money stolen from government coffers to bribe power brokers; intimidation and even the use of disappearing ink in Ukraine’s 2012 elections. Foreign observer missions, they persuasively argue, rarely spot such trickery or prove it. And even when they do, Western governments often endorse the results anyway.

When Crime Pays, by Milan Vaishnav

This was one of the first books I started reading on arriving in India in August – and it is extraordinary. After the last elections in 2014, 34% of MPs in India’s national parliament were facing criminal charges. What Mr Vaishnav explains, with plenty of colour, is why this is. And in the world’s largest democracy, he makes a persuasive case that being a criminal is actually an asset – indeed voters prefer them.

In his account, as India’s democracy became more competitive, and the firm grip of the Congress Party loosened, the need to use violence and bribery to bring out your voters and intimidate your opponents grew. At first, politicians outsourced the violence and money-making to goondas, but pretty quickly the men with guns realised that they could cut out the middlemen and run for office themselves. It is a depressing lesson in how even in relatively free democracies, voting does not necessarily lead to the best people winning, and how in weak states, corruption is not a parasite on the system – it is the system.

How democracies die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

This book is my third pick of the year. It sold brilliantly, probably because it is far from subtle in drawing parallels from developing countries’ democracies to the United States. But it is not necessarily wrong. Its chief argument is that democracy dies not because voters pick demagogues, but because elite power brokers allow demagogues to get onto the ballot.

Democracy is not ensured by well-designed institutions, they say, it relies on social trust and an establishment which obeys unwritten rules. The book relies a little too much on overly famous examples for my liking – I found the rehashing of the rise of Hitler a little tedious. But it did make me aware of Alberto Fujimori, the president of Peru from 1990 to 2000, who launched a military coup in 1992. He also divorced his wife and publicly stripped her of the title of First Lady, giving it to his daughter instead. The lesson, that populism can be, well, popular, is effective.