It is in this context that Burnham’s latest Brexit “bombshell” should be read. Speaking to Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart on The Rest Is Politics, Burnham claimed to have “clear” evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 referendum — implying that Moscow had successfully tilted the vote towards Leave — while offering no details, let alone evidence. The goal, though, seems clear enough: to delegitimize the referendum result once and for all, and so pave the way for its reversal. And what better pretext than the Russian bogeyman?

This fits a wider pattern. Since the 2016 Russiagate fiasco, it has become standard practice among Western elites, especially in Europe, to blame every unwelcome election result — and above all every “populist” rebuke to their rule — on Russian “disinformation” and “interference”. The campaign has escalated dramatically since 2022. We are told that Russia has for years been running a vast influence operation aimed at manipulating helpless voters. Yet the evidence that this operation has reached, let alone swayed, any meaningful number of them is scant to say the least.

The consequences, however, are not. Across Europe, the specter of “Russian disinformation” has been used to push through sweeping censorship regimes — chiefly via the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) — and “election-management” tools like the European Democracy Shield. The most extreme case came in Romania in December 2024, when the Constitutional Court annulled the first round of the presidential election — won by Călin Georgescu, an independent euroskeptic and Nato critic — on the grounds of alleged Russian interference. The court cited a TikTok campaign in Georgescu’s favor, but no proof was ever offered that it was funded by Russia. Indeed, internal documents later obtained by the US House Judiciary Committee showed that TikTok had explicitly informed the Commission that it hadn’t found “any evidence” of a coordinated inauthentic network.

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Yet EU elites plainly regard the episode as a blueprint. As former commissioner Thierry Breton put it, with disarming candor: “We did it in Romania and we will obviously have to do it in Germany, if necessary.” Right-populist parties, such as the AfD and the National Rally, are routinely branded “Russian stooges”, with the usual experts already warning of Russian interference in forthcoming elections in France and elsewhere — preparing the ground to legitimize heavy-handed interventions in the electoral process. The same script was run during this year’s Hungarian election, with the mainstream media making evidence-free claims of Russian interference on Viktor Orbán’s behalf. Meanwhile, journalists and analysts have been sanctioned by the EU for “spreading Russian propaganda”, which in practice means dissenting from the EU-Nato line on Ukraine, as evident in the case of former Swiss army colonel Jacques Baud, among others.

The EU, in other words, is at the forefront of an authoritarian trend: invoking a permanent Russian threat to justify a rolling assault on democratic norms, from online censorship to the repression of dissent. It is hardly surprising, then, that Burnham, the Europhile that he is, should borrow a page — or rather a chapter — from the Brussels playbook. As is customary with sweeping claims against Russia, he offered no evidence for his Brexit claims. His statement was nonetheless amplified across the mainstream media. Indeed, pro-EU groups have duly called for Britain to rejoin in light of the Prime Minister’s “revelation”. “We have suspected for years that the 2016 referendum could have been subjected to interference because of how its result helped destabilize a united Europe,” said Richard Kilpatrick of European Movement UK. “Disinformation played a role at the time and it is important to have this public confirmation of those suspicions.”

Public confirmation, or rather evidence, would indeed be welcome — especially since the question has been investigated several times, and nothing has turned up. In 2020, Parliament’s intelligence and security committee published its Russia report. It reached no finding of interference in the referendum, though it blamed the Government for never commissioning an intelligence assessment of the question. Whitehall’s response was that it had seen no evidence of successful interference and therefore saw no need for one.

That same year, Elizabeth Denham, then information commissioner, concluded a three-year investigation into the use of personal data in political campaigning, including during the Brexit referendum, centered on Cambridge Analytica and its parent, SCL Group. Having examined more than 300,000 documents and some 700 terabytes of seized material, she reported that she had “found no further evidence to change [her] earlier view that SCL/CA were not involved in the EU referendum campaign in the UK”, and that her office had found “no additional evidence of Russian involvement” in the material recovered from the companies’ servers.

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Another study by the Oxford Internet Institute examined thousands of tweets before the Brexit referendum and also found “little evidence” of Russian interference — though, to be fair, Twitter later revealed that the Russian broadcast RT had spent a total of £767 on adverts during the referendum. Facebook further reported that it had found no evidence of significant Russian advertising on its platform around Brexit, though accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency, a Russian “troll farm”, had spent 97 cents on three adverts shown to UK users (about immigration, not Brexit as such) and together generating around 200 impressions.

Funnily enough, this careful approach was backed by none other than Burnham’s own Foreign Office minister, Stephen Doughty, who, asked by Sky News about Burnham’s claims, said: “Well, the security minister has spoken about this before, and he’s been very clear that they’ve attempted to [but] they haven’t succeeded.” That is a very different statement from Burnham’s; the Prime Minister’s words were carefully chosen to imply, without quite saying it, that Russia had indeed swung the vote. If not, why raise it in a conversation about rejoining the EU?

Compare all this with the establishment-led Remain campaign, which enlisted most of the mainstream media and the Government itself — which spent more than £9 million of public money on a Remain leaflet delivered to every household. Add to that the EU, which funds many of the universities, research bodies and NGOs that lined up behind Remain, and private actors such as George Soros, who later bankrolled the anti-Brexit campaign to the tune of at least £400,000. In short, the Remainers campaigned openly, lavishly and with the full weight of the state behind them. Which is probably why they have never gotten over the fact that they lost.

It is, of course, possible that Burnham has been shown damning evidence buried for a decade. But how likely is that? The fact that he chose to make his claim to Alastair Campbell, of all people, is ironic indeed, given the latter’s role in the Iraq war debacle. Burnham, it is worth recalling, voted for the war — a war built on claims that could easily have been disproved at the time, and indeed were by many — yet defended his vote for years afterward. Given his record, some skepticism is in order, especially since his latest suggestion is, so far, equally unsupported. And the stakes may be as high as they were a quarter of a century ago — perhaps higher. Then, it was about justifying an invasion to bolster a US-led unipolar order at the height of its power. Now, it is about propping up a liberal establishment facing its deepest crisis since the Second World War.

Little wonder Burnham is so adamant about rejoining: Brussels is the most powerful tool available to discredited national establishments, providing supranational instruments that can be deployed against democratic upheavals, and buttressing transnational financial interests, above all in the City of London, which fought Brexit a decade ago. It is also no coincidence that, on the podcast, Burnham singled out France and Germany as fellow victims of “Russian propaganda” — two countries whose leaders are at historic lows in the polls and who are likewise invoking the Russian threat to shore up their position against populist challengers.

Russia-blaming pays a further dividend too: it cements the rearmament drive. A Russia capable of swinging a British referendum is a Russia against which no expenditure is too great and no sacrifice too onerous. This narrative recasts any critic of Europe’s own choices — the “coalition of the willing”, the pledge to spend 5% of GDP on defense, the ReArm Europe borrowing schemes — as a Kremlin asset.

Indeed, one might argue that this is the real threat to democracy — not a few hundred dollars of Russian adverts, but a political class that would rather write off millions of voters as dupes of foreign propaganda. The 17.4 million who voted Leave in 2016 had profound and legitimate frustrations with the economy, with immigration and with the EU itself, and had voiced them for years without being heard. To recast them, a decade on, as the unwitting instruments of a Kremlin operation for which there is next to no evidence is not a defense of democracy but its negation. It also tells us something about Burnham himself. A prime minister who inherited a country in deep economic and social crisis might have been expected to confront its causes. Instead, his first instinct has been to relitigate 2016 and double down on the path — ever closer alignment with a sclerotic and increasingly authoritarian Brussels — that helped produce the crisis in the first place. That does not augur well for Burnham’s ability, or his willingness, to provide the answers Britain needs.

Now that the noise has receded, it is a good time to listen. I am not hearing of a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive. What I am hearing instead is the thud of Russian jackboots marching deeper into the parts of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine that Vladimir Putin does not yet control.   

Meanwhile, in the southwest of the Arabian Peninsula, the Houthis have taken control of the strategic port city of Mokha. The city lies just to the north of the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. So far, the Houthis have not been able to interdict shipping through the Strait, as Iran did in the Strait of Hormuz. But since capturing Mokha they have also seized Perim Island, in the middle of Bab el-Mandeb, putting them in a far stronger position to threaten passing ships. If they succeed in closing the Strait, Iran and its allies would control the main maritime bottlenecks of the Middle East. 

That spells economic peril for the West. Before the war, the vast majority of oil produced in the Arabian Peninsula traveled through the straits of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb. Right now, about 400,000 barrels of Saudi Arabian oil flow through Bab el-Mandeb per day, only a small fraction of production. And after the Houthis captured Mokha, the price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, is back to around $100 per barrel. This is not the short, sharp oil-price shock that the markets had anticipated when the Iran war started. Leon Panetta, who was director of the CIA under President Obama, now warns of a “forever war”, with no signs of it being resolved one way or the other.  

Economists and central bankers have neatly divided the economic consequences of the war into three scenarios: baseline, adverse and severe. I would describe the situation we are in today as adverse, heading towards severe.  

A crude oil price of $100 translates into higher prices for petrol, diesel, heating oil, kerosene and other downstream products. A severe winter could lead to heating gas shortages in Germany, for the country’s storage tanks are already at record-low levels. A $100 oil price is not one at which our Western economies function smoothly.  

It is a price, however, at which the Russian economy functions very well. And oil, ominously, is what links the two wars. The longer the war in Iran lasts, the greater the financial boost for Russia, whose main exports are oil and gas. As a result, an unwelcome scenario presents itself: the US loses its war against Iran, and Ukraine loses to Russia. 

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Most wars do not end in outright victories or defeats. My central expectation for both is a messy draw: some dirty deal that would leave Iran charging money for passage through the Strait, with Trump and his business associates getting a cut. For Ukraine, I would define a draw as Russia keeping its presently occupied territories and obtaining assurances that Ukraine will stay outside Nato. But the odds of a bad outcome, from a Western perspective, are shortening.  

For one, there is clearly a risk that other European countries might be drawn into the war — just as there is an escalation risk in the Middle East. The two wars could also fuse into a broader Eurasian conflict that acts as a proxy war between the US and China. 

And I doubt that the aging societies of Western Europe have the stomach for a sustained fight. These countries are having to borrow money to meet their defense spending targets. Nor do they have an excess of young men eager to fight the Russians in a war that could later involve the use of nuclear and chemical weapons. In the event of war, our massive wealth and income redistribution systems would have to be painfully cut back, with millions thrown into immediate poverty. 

It is easier, then, to send money to Ukraine without committing troops. Ukraine has received hundreds of billions of pounds in military and financial support from the West, but Russia has still managed to outspend it. Russia hit a short recession earlier this year but is now recovering, in part due to the rise in the oil price. 

At the same time, the US, and by extension Ukraine, is suffering from a shortage of interceptor missiles used to take down incoming missiles and drones. Despite its formidable military capabilities, the US is not geared up for a long war. Its weak link is the supply chain. The same is happening in Europe, where decades of running down defense spending have taken their toll.  

Britain has an army of 75,000 troops, a force so depleted that it could only “seize a small market town on a good day”. These are the immortal words of General Sir Richard Barrons, a former military commander and co-author of the UK’s recent defense review.  

So what makes us so certain we can stop Russia winning in Ukraine? The Russians, too, are brimming with confidence. They are so confident of victory right now that they are no longer even interested in peace talks. 

When Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s special envoy for peace missions, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, visited Vladimir Putin last week, it turned into a toe-curling embarrassment. Putin was happy to receive them and hear their sycophantic praise. But he did not appear in a hurry to cut a peace deal, and the commentary in the Russian media about the visit was caustic. Dmitry Drize, a political commentator at Kommersant FM, wrote: “The visit followed the standard formula — arrival, restaurant, reception in the Kremlin… One would really like to see something more.” 

We have clearly moved beyond the period of US-Russian rapprochement marked by the Anchorage summit between Trump and Putin in August last year. At the time, Russian elites fell over themselves in their praise for Trump. No longer. Putin has the look of a man who thinks he can win.  

He has miscalculated before and may do so again. His invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a shambles. But the Russian army regrouped, and Russia is today in a stronger position than its opponent.  

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For many in the West, though, the idea of a Russian victory is still too painful to contemplate. If we treat something as unthinkable, we do not think about it. But underestimating your enemy is exactly how you lose wars. Even after four and a half years, I do not understand the strategic objective of Western support for Ukraine. I am not questioning the principle, but I fail to see what exactly the intended purpose is in concrete strategic terms. 

One of the few in Europe who pretends to have a strategy is Radosław Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister. His words do not reassure me. He once defined the strategy as one of exhausting the enemy, much as the Allied Powers defeated Germany in World War I. But the situation today is not comparable. Russia has not hit critical energy shortages as Germany did back then. The idea that we would win an endurance contest against Putin when oil prices are high seems over-optimistic. 

Last week, Sikorski claimed in a separate interview that the EU economy is nine to 10 times larger than that of Russia. This is not merely a false statistic; it is a Napoleonic-scale misjudgment of the size of Russia. Measured in dollars, the EU is indeed much bigger. But because Russia has been cut out of the dollar markets, that’s not a smart way to look at relative size. The best way to compare ourselves with a country like Russia, China or Iran, especially for military purposes, is purchasing power — literal bang for the buck. On that metric, the EU is three times as large as Russia. And even that does not tell us what we need to know, because the EU is spending only a tiny proportion of its economic output on helping Ukraine, whereas Putin is spending a lot more.  

The military metrics tell no more flattering a story. The EU has 1.3 million active military personnel, approximately the same as Russia. But in terms of military production, Russia beats the EU hands down. For example, Russia produces 3.4 million large howitzer shells per year, substantially more than the EU’s projected annual capacity of two million. This is true for many other weapons categories as well.

Back in March, Trump said the White House expected the war to last for four or five weeks. But historians have seen that kind of delusion before. When Germany started World War I in August 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm confidently told his troops: “You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.” Today’s equivalent is the assertion that Russia and Iran are easy to defeat because we are so much richer than them.

The bottom line is that Trump has no strategy for the Middle East, just as Europeans have no strategy for Ukraine. We are rich and creditworthy enough to keep supporting Ukraine and battle Iran a little longer. But in either case I struggle to see a path to victory, for we are not willing to put our money, and our troops, where our mouth is. 

Another would-be migrant claimed Moroccan police encouraged him, crying “come to Spain!”

It sounds like a tourist board slogan, and it turned out to be misleading. By Friday afternoon, these men, along with most of the illegal arrivals, were already trudging home, baffled by Ceuta’s lack of suitable accommodation, food or drink. Europe’s famed hospitality had let them down.

The stories of illegal migrants who made the journey there and back again contrast markedly with official Moroccan reports. Moroccan rights groups claim police used water cannons and fired warning shots to prevent crossings (clearly with little success). Morocco’s ambassador to Spain said events unfolded against Morocco’s wishes and that “we have always prioritized legal, orderly and safe migration for all” — a Freudian slip for the ages.

The days since have seen a rash of speculation over Morocco’s motivations for encouraging — or at least facilitating — the crisis. Commentators and experts point out Spanish ties to Western Sahara separatists and the reopening of lucrative economic ties with Morocco’s regional rivals Algeria, as well as Moroccan resentment over the perceived colonial nature of Spanish rule in Ceuta. Other analysts argue that a nexus of Moroccan, Israeli and American interests has combined in order to undermine the Spanish government led by socialist Pedro Sánchez, whom Donald Trump appears to see as the embodiment of Europe’s ills.

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Did Morocco facilitate the crisis? Were the young men’s claims of police encouragement true? This would help explain the scale of the migrant surge, but it cuts against Sánchez’s public response. Rather than rebuking Morocco for its egregious lapse in border enforcement, the Spanish leader thanked Rabat for its “cooperation” in defusing the situation.

Sánchez saved his ire, instead, for the 22 EU leaders who signed an open letter criticizing his pro-migration policies, in particular Spain’s recent mass regularization of illegal immigrants. Sánchez condemned the “selfish, polarizing and unlawful reaction” of his EU peers, saying countries that backed Spain’s temporary suspension from the Schengen Zone were “driven by prejudice, fake news, ignorance, or political interest.”

In short, Sánchez appeared happier with Morocco — the state accused by many of facilitating the crisis — than with fellow Europeans seeking to enforce stronger migration controls.

Granted, Sánchez is typically a defender of migration. But his refusal to cast blame on Morocco illuminates a shift in relations between the EU and north Africa, driven by migration dynamics. This shift puts European leaders of all stripes in the same boat.

The EU has made the externalization of migration controls a crucial factor in relations with countries around its external borders. A cornerstone of the bloc’s rightward shift on migration — often labeled “Fortress Europe” — is a focus on bilateral agreements with third countries, particularly in north Africa, which act as gateway states for those seeking to attempt the perilous voyage across the Mediterranean.

These agreements tie EU financial aid to efforts from countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt to contain illegal migration flows. European nations equip and train local maritime police while disbursing hefty financial aid to sweeten the deal. The EU’s controversial 2023 deal with Tunisia on migration proposed over €1 billion in aid, while Morocco, another key gateway state, has received hundreds of millions of euros, most of it earmarked for “integrated border management and the fight against smuggling and trafficking in human beings.”

EU leaders thought that by externalizing migration controls — and washing their hands of the dirty work involved — they had found the perfect solution. Stopping illegal migrants from ever reaching EU soil would, it was reasoned, save the bloc from ever having to confront the thorniest problem relating to illegal migration: the knot of human rights legislation that protects migrants once they arrive. For that reason, leaders hoped that partnership agreements would neutralize public concerns over illegal immigration.

But the Ceuta crisis suggests that “Fortress Europe” is a castle built on sand, one that is perennially vulnerable to the caprice of Europe’s partners. Incentivizing non-EU states to manage migration flows creates a mutual dependency: the gatekeeper states depend on EU financial aid, while the EU depends on their efforts to keep migrants off European soil. The seismic implication of Ceuta is that, amid growing Western panic over migration levels, that mutual dependency is no longer balanced — and the West’s partners are learning the art of blackmail.

Are Sànchez’s words, then, those of an out-of-touch, anti-European traitor, as many onlookers caricature him? Or are they, instead, the supplication of a man with a figurative gun to his head? It should, again, be emphasized that there is no hard evidence to prove that Moroccan authorities were complicit in the Ceuta crisis. But the EU’s externalized migration controls have handed its leaders significant power to disrupt Spain and the bloc as a whole, whether they choose to use it or not.

In that sense, the Ceuta incident shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The EU doesn’t have to look far for a precedent when it comes to hostile weaponization of illegal migration flows. For years, Poland has accused Belarus of sponsoring illegal migration, luring migrants from across the Middle East and Africa on tourist visas with the promise of an easy jaunt into the Schengen area. Successive Polish governments have undertaken heavy militarization of the country’s eastern border, and the route has become deadly. 

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk justified this uncompromising response by saying: “We are not dealing with just any asylum seekers, we are dealing with a coordinated, very efficient operation to break the Polish border and attempts to destabilize the country.”

The Polish response has been harshly condemned by human rights groups, which, given the severity of Warsaw’s measures, is unsurprising. Measures at the border with Belarus include a 5.5-meter-high steel fence with electronic monitoring systems to detect attempted crossings. Poland has also loosened rules around the use of firearms — introduced after a soldier was murdered at the border — that NGOs say give officers a “license to kill”. And since 2025, Poland has suspended the right of all arrivals from Belarus to claim asylum. The latter move was lambasted by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, as well as Poland’s commissioner for human rights, an internal ombudsman, as a violation of European law.

From the perspective of stopping illegal migration at the Belarusian border, though, Warsaw’s harsh measures have been a resounding success. While 40,000 attempted crossings were reported in 2021, and 15,500 in the first half of 2025, the official figure for the first half of 2026 was just 235. Belarus’s focus for illegal migration flows has now shifted to the Baltic states, forcing Latvia to seal its southeastern border at the end of July.

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Given openly hostile relations between Belarus and the EU, Minsk’s actions are understood as a form of hybrid warfare and punished as such through sanctions. The EU has no similarly clear-cut way of understanding the new power wielded by its partner states in north Africa. European leaders must, in this context, ask themselves two questions: how can they be sure that gatekeeper states are on their side, and, if there are concerns over these partners’ good intentions, what options does that leave?

One potential path is appeasement. Sánchez’s thanks for Morocco’s cooperation — in defusing a crisis which it stands accused of having created — can be understood in this light. The more money Europe pumps into external migration partnerships, the more dependent it becomes on those partner states, and the greater their strength — and Europe’s concurrent temptation towards appeasement — becomes.

A second option, in which Europe accepts that externalization agreements pose risks, would be to take back responsibility by significantly strengthening EU states’ own illegal migration controls and enforcement capabilities. This won’t happen, though, until leaders tackle the legal protections that migrants gain once they reach EU soil. There is a tight connection between changes in international human rights law and resultant migration: hence the apparent link between the Ceuta crisis and a Spanish Supreme Court ruling blocking deportations without due process for sea arrivals. It is the opposite effect to the plummeting rate of arrivals to Poland from Belarus since all asylum applications from that country were banned.

Thirdly, Europe could consider applying the playbook which it already uses against Belarus and Russia to any state which it suspects of weaponizing migration with hostile intent — even gatekeeper countries. Hostile exploitation of migration by Russia and Belarus is met with punishment in the form of sanctions and the severing of diplomatic relations. These tools, or at least the threat of them, could be applied more broadly. Facilitating mass illegal migration is not, after all, the act of a friendly nation.

The EU is the largest trading partner for all the key migrant gatekeeper nations in north Africa. It has the economic clout to deter potential hostile exploitation of migration by those states, and while not every lapse in migration controls is an act of hybrid warfare, a carrot-and-stick approach — the “stick” being the credible threat of sanctions — may restore balance to the increasingly lopsided nature of these relationships.

It is disturbing to think that exploitative illegal migration flows may be motivated by geopolitical power games. But Europe should be more disturbed by its powerlessness in the Ceuta affair; a powerlessness created by counterproductive elements of human rights legislation, formalized in externalization agreements with third countries, and exemplified by Sánchez’s thanks to a state which dramatically failed to uphold its end of the bargain in protecting Europe from illegal immigration. 

The EU must also face up to the fact that in the event of instability elsewhere in the region — renewed conflict in major migrant transit nation Libya, for example, or a breakdown in the EU’s fraught relationship with Tunisia — potentially hostile regimes may similarly wield migration as a weapon. This risk is only heightened by the ongoing surge of refugees north from war-torn African states; an estimated two million Sudanese refugees have fled to key EU partners Egypt and Libya alone since the nation’s civil war began in April 2023. 

One thing has become alarmingly clear: the ability of non-European states, who may not have our best interests at heart, to dictate migration flows, in so doing undermining societies and sowing panic. Europe gifted them this ability. Whatever conclusions it draws from the Ceuta crisis, it must now learn to stand up for itself.

The EU — the European Economic Community, as it was — is one of those institutions. In the years before the referendum, I made several arguments in favor of leaving. I said, if you look around, what do you see? You see a mix of stagnation, anti-technology, anti-growth, anti-future, bureaucracy — bureaucracy dedicated to Leninist bureaucratic centralism in Brussels, where everything will improve if everything is uniformly controlled by the Commission. But they’ve got low growth, high debt, nightmare pension systems, nightmare demographics, and immigration that is out of control and fueling the rise of extremist parties.

If you look at what’s happening technologically, increasingly it’s China and California which are dominating, and Europe is not in the game. Again, that was regarded as a very eccentric argument to make 10 years ago, but now it’s an obvious, very mainstream thing. 

I also argued that the regime in Britain is knackered and is failing, and the institutions are knackered, and they’re not going to be able to cope with the world that’s coming. That was an extremely niche view in 2015, regarded, generally speaking, as crazy. Now, of course, you can go on Twitter today, and you can see the vast majority of Westminster is now having to face up to the reality that the old parties are knackered, old Whitehall is knackered, the old media ecosystem is knackered, the universities have lost huge credibility, etc. etc. 

Also obvious is that Britain now has huge problems. In all sorts of ways we have not done what the Vote Leave plan was — and what we started doing in 2019 and 2020 — because the Tories stopped it all. But is the answer to that to say, “Oh yeah, we need the bureaucratic centralism of the European Commission, we need more EU AI acts, we need more of that kind of regulation, that’s the future”? Does anyone in their right mind really think that? 

So how does Westminster respond to this now? Westminster doesn’t want to face all the technology issues, never has done. Our political elites and Whitehall elites, for complicated reasons from the Sixties and Seventies, very deliberately and explicitly stepped back from thinking about frontier technology. 

So now people don’t want to look at those questions. Their response now is: instead of looking at all the very, very obvious big things like our totally farcical procurement system, totally farcical planning system, totally farcical energy, totally farcical housing, totally farcical MoD, totally farcical welfare, a Westminster and Whitehall that is pathological about on technology and doesn’t want to take it seriously — the answer to those problems is to rejoin the EU. 

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Why? Because the old people from the old system are determined not to face reality, determined not to face the future. They just want to retreat to their comfort zone, which is having more stupid culture wars about Brexit, because that’s where they’re happy. They’re pretending that rejoining the single market is somehow a great thing, when you can barely even see the single market in the data. If you look at the Draghi report, which of course also is basically ignored in London because it’s super bad for the EU, you have a perfect example of the actual EU technocracy itself recently writing about how basically a lot of Europe is deluded on the single market. Westminster doesn’t want to face any of those problems either.

Go back to the Eighties and look at the newspapers at the time and the news at the time. There’s obviously a lot of bitter arguments, but the political class is actually engaged with the real issues of the British economy. That is actually what dominates the news, and you have a whole set of people reading things and arguing about them and making complicated arguments in public about what we have to do on privatization, you name it. 

You look at the 10 years since Brexit and it’s basically characterized by Westminster being absolutely pathologically determined not to face any of these core problems in any kind of coherent way. It’s a constant soap opera, and both sides — both sides in the sense of the kind of inside-Westminster Left and Right — have been much happier arguing about all the trans madness in 2020. The Guardian, the Telegraph, Labour and the Tories were happier arguing about that and arguing about Brexit than they were about dealing with any of these other actual core problems.

And Whitehall doesn’t care about these problems. Whitehall cares about preserving existing power and existing institutions and existing budgets, and it cares, most importantly, about itself retaining control over its own personnel caste system. That is its actual priority, and everything will always be sacrificed to that, as you saw in Covid, as you could see in Ukraine, as you can see on everything.

So now you’ve got stagnant growth, you’ve got completely pathological institutions that actually need real-terms increases in money just to stand still, and you’ve got political parties and senior civil servants completely dedicated to not changing how anything works. 

If you put those three things together, you’ve got what we can see all around us, which is every part of the system now failing, and those failings interacting with each other in various ways. So you’ve got a shitshow in that you can’t deport people, and you’re scraping crazy Afghans off the street and putting them in prison, but then that means you’ve got to let all these people out, and then that means you’ve got X, and then that means you’ve got Y, and then that means the budgets for these things are all knackered as well. So all these things are now starting to ping into each other. You haven’t just got one defunct bureaucracy, with internal silos going haywire, you’ve also got, horizontally, them all smashing into each other and breaking — and no one has authority to deal with the interactions between all these different parts of the system.

But in all sorts of ways, Britain is actually the best-placed country in the West. In practical terms, it is much easier to do real regime change in Britain than it is in America or anywhere in Europe, because of our unwritten constitution and the weird way in which the powers of the Prime Minister actually work. So, unlike Trump, the Prime Minister can go in today and say, “Fired, fired, fired, fired, fired. This government department is closed, and I’m creating a new one.” The civil service has to do it, and the courts can’t stop it, or even judicially review these things. In no other Western country is that possible. 

That is why you see two things happening on the Left now: one, the plan to change the electoral system to PR (proportional representation), and then, secondly, discussions about how you encode protections for the civil service to make it extremely difficult to actually do what I’m talking about. What they’re thinking is — and it’s actually logical from their point of view — that if you pass certain kinds of legislation defending the current Whitehall system, and then you do PR, you make it extremely hard for anybody coming in to actually change anything. You completely embed the current catastrophic situation, which is what they want to do.

What they’re terrified of is Nigel Farage doing some kind of Doge-type thing and saying, “Right, I’m going to bring in 20 hotshots, fire all the permanent secretaries, put them in charge of this, use the actual powers of the PM, close departments, open them, fire people, and then pass a whole series of primary legislation, repeal the Human Rights Act, repeal the Equality Act, reform how judicial review works, bin the Climate Change Act.” You go through 15 things, you whack them all in year one with primary legislation.

If you have an actual serious list of these things, the right way to do it would be that you draft all this legislation in opposition, you make the case in the election, in the manifesto, you win on the Thursday, and on Monday morning, these bills start hammering through into parliament. And you also make clear to the House of Lords that if anyone thinks that they can fuck around, we’re going straight at the King, we’ll appoint 600 new peers, and it’ll be blitzkrieg on you guys.

You smash that through in primary legislation, so you have that combination of primary legislation changing fundamentals, and you actually use the constitutional powers of the PM, as I’ve discussed, and the whole thing starts to shift. That’s what they are terrified of — correctly from their point of view — in Whitehall, in Labour, in the Inner Temple, etc. etc. And that’s why you start to see this mix of “Rejoin the EU”, PR, censorship, and embedding legislation to protect the civil service. They’re thinking that if they can bring off some combination of those things, then they can get to the state they want to, which is that they don’t have to worry about elections anymore. And they’ve convinced themselves that everyone who doesn’t agree with them now is fascist. Go back to pre-referendum: mainstream people in the system in Westminster hated me, thought I was crazy, stupid, wrong, but they didn’t say I was actually a fascist who should be in jail. Now, their argument about people like me is that we’re actually fascists who should be in jail and shouldn’t be allowed to actually participate in democratic politics.

So almost all the positive things that we could have changed after Brexit, Westminster, the Tories and Labour have been adamant in refusing to do. But just because of inertia, we haven’t adopted various of the EU regulations, and therefore we haven’t shot ourselves in both feet the way that Brussels has. As the old system fails, something new is being born — but for the moment, it is unclear exactly what.

***

This essay was adapted from Dominic Cummings’ interview on the Anglofuturism podcast.

Over the past decade, the EU’s institutional balance has already tilted heavily toward the Commission, which has extended its reach into areas once considered the preserve of national governments — from fiscal policy and public health to foreign affairs and defense. The mechanism has been consistent: each crisis — the sovereign debt crisis, Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ukraine war — has served as a pretext for the Commission to assume more authority, make “emergency” decisions and lock in permanent changes to the exercise of EU power. None of this has required formal treaty changes. It has occurred surreptitiously, outside the arena of democratic debate, through what scholars have called “integration by stealth”. The result has been a creeping “Commissionization” and supranationalization of European decision-making, with a corresponding erosion of national sovereignty and democratic accountability. 

Now the Commission is using negotiations over the EU’s next seven-year budget — the aforementioned Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) for 2028-2034 — to push this process further still. And precisely for this reason it is keen to wrap up a deal by the end of the year. Brussels insiders are acutely aware that the French presidential election of April 2027 could produce a government led by Jordan Bardella of the National Rally — a party hostile to the integrationist agenda underpinning the new MFF. Since the framework requires unanimous approval in the Council, a Eurosceptic France could strangle the budget at birth. The unstated but operative goal is to seal the deal before that risk appears. That this is never said openly only underscores the contempt for democratic deliberation that now pervades the process. 

What, then, is the package that the Commission is so keen to sign into law? It is a framework totaling almost €2 trillion, equivalent to around 1.26% of EU gross national income (GNI) over the seven-year period. The European Parliament, never shy about spending other people’s money, wants to push that to 1.38% of GNI. But neither institution really admits the structural tensions buried in the figures. The EU must service roughly €750 billion in bloc pandemic debt, the repayment of which is now being permanently integrated into the regular EU budget. The Commission’s own proposal earmarks €149.3 billion for repaying the so-called “NextGenerationEU Recovery” and “Resilience Facility” funds — a sum that amounts to nearly 10% of total MFF commitments.

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This matters because of what it reveals about the true nature of NextGenerationEU (NGEU). What was sold to European publics as an exceptional, one-off response to the Covid crisis is now the fiscal template for the Union’s future. The pandemic fund set the precedent: the EU can borrow on capital markets, distribute grants to member states, and then embed the repayment into the general budget for decades to come — all without anything resembling a proper democratic mandate. This is arguably what the “unprecedented” EU fiscal response to the pandemic was always about: normalizing common debt as a mechanism for tilting the institutional balance of power decisively in favor of the Commission, downgrading member states and locking in a structural shift in European integration. Indeed, the EU has since repeated the trick with a €90 billion package for Ukraine, again funded through joint debt backed by the common budget. The “historical exception” has quietly become the norm. 

To repay its vast debts, the Commission has proposed a package of five “new own resources”: a corporate levy on companies with annual turnover above €100 million; taxes on tobacco and electronic waste; and adjustments to revenues from the EU Emissions Trading System and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. Together, these are projected to generate roughly €60 billion a year. This projection, however, should be treated with skepticism: for many of the proposals, revenue estimates are rough at best, and the actual yield will depend heavily on (unresolved) questions of implementation. More fundamentally, adopting “new own” resources requires unanimous agreement among member states and ratification through national constitutions, a high bar that previous Commission attempts at revenue reform consistently failed to clear. 

If the new taxes fall short, the fallback is a compulsory levy on member states. The existing “Own Resources Decision” — another wonderful piece of EU lexicon — already empowers the Commission to call on national governments for additional GNI-based contributions to cover NGEU repayments, on top of regular program spending. In other words, if the new revenue streams underperform, the bill lands automatically on national treasuries, decided not by sovereign parliaments, but by the remorseless logic of the EU’s debt repayment. At any rate, EU debt now functions as a de facto tax on member states, bypassing the normal channels of democratic budgetary control. The tension between net contributors and debtors is already producing open fractures: Sweden’s European Affairs minister has flatly stated that the budget’s size “must come down significantly” and that there is “no such thing as free money”, even as several southern and eastern member states — including Italy, Spain and Poland — have suggested postponing part of the debt repayment plan. 

The structural changes to the budget architecture compound this problem. The Commission hopes to reduce the budget’s headings from seven to four, collapsing 52 separate programs into just 16. This is presented as “simplification”. Politically, though, it’s something else entirely: centralizing fiscal control and stripping away the granular program categories whose very specificity constrained the Commission’s ability to reallocate funds on a whim. The old system’s structure, dense and bureaucratic as it was, functioned as a form of democratic constraint: money earmarked for a specific purpose is harder to redirect than money pooled under a broad heading. 

Fewer programs and broader headings mean more executive flexibility and less parliamentary oversight. Nowhere is this power shift more visible than in the proposed National and Regional Partnership Plans (NRPPs). Under this model, cohesion policy, agriculture, fisheries, migration and border management would all be merged into single bilateral frameworks negotiated directly between the Commission and each member states, as opposed to the current system of separate programs, each with its own rules and oversight structures. Regional and local authorities — who currently have a formal role in overseeing the existing programs — would invariably be marginalized. The Parliament would be sidelined. The Commission, meanwhile, would gain a uniquely powerful position, exercising conditionality over each national plan through the so-called rule-of-law mechanism, set to become a structural feature of the bloc’s budget. If the Commission deems a government non-compliant with the rule of law — as understood, of course, by Brussels — funds cannot simply be frozen; they can be redirected to civil-society organizations and “European values” programs approved by the Commission itself. This amounts to the creation of a system of permanent EU-managed political pressure. 

Then there is the question of where the EU budget money actually flows. The new AgoraEU program — a merger of the Creative Europe and CERV (Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values) programs — is allocated €8.6 billion: more than double the combined budgets of its predecessors. The CERV strand alone, now rebranded CERV+, sees its budget grow from €1.55 billion to €3.6 billion, even as it remains under direct Commission management. This is the funding stream from which hundreds of NGOs, operating in the fields of “democratic values”, civil society advocacy and media support, draw their operating grants. It goes without saying that these organizations are, by design, institutionally dependent on Brussels and reliably aligned with its agenda. In a recent book, I show how European programs and funds have been progressively oriented towards the diffusion of so-called “European values” — and very often towards the promotion of the EU and the integrationist project as such — through the direct funding of NGOs, think tanks, academic institutions, media outlets and educational projects, to the tune of hundreds of millions each year, with the effect of blurring the boundary between support for civil society, institutional communication and outright political propaganda. And now this EU-funded propaganda complex is poised to grow even more powerful. 

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The two areas where European citizens most directly feel the EU’s presence — the common agricultural policy and cohesion funds for structurally weak regions — are the budget’s biggest losers. This has received surprisingly little public attention, with the debate still largely confined to the technocratic language of net contributions and distribution keys. That framing obscures what is really going on: the construction of a European fiscal executive. For decades, the German-led integration model held that political deepening should proceed without genuine fiscal union. The Maastricht criteria, the Stability and Growth Pact and the no-bailout clause were expressions of this philosophy: prompting integration through common rules, not through common debt or centralized budget policy. That order, however, is now being dismantled, one “exceptional” instrument at a time. The reality is that the Commission no longer treats the budget as a limited distribution instrument but as a strategic policy-making tool for expanding its control over key policy areas — and, increasingly, for imposing its will on recalcitrant member states. 

The stakes become clearer when you consider what the Commission has actually done with the powers it has already accumulated. During the pandemic, it ran a €71 billion vaccine procurement program behind closed doors, signed contracts that handed pharmaceutical companies full intellectual property rights and blanket indemnity against legal claims, likely overpaid by tens of billions of euros, and then stonewalled every attempt by MEPs, auditors and the European Ombudsman to scrutinize the contracts — while the EU’s own Public Prosecutor opened a corruption investigation that remains ongoing. In the ongoing Ukraine war, it has devised and imposed sweeping sanctions packages with minimal consultation of member states and committed the EU to an open-ended maximalist war strategy — including the provision of lethal weapons through a repurposed “peace facility” — that no European parliament ever voted on. It threatened incoming elected governments it disliked with financial consequences. It used “disinformation” as a pretext to build a censorship architecture — the Digital Services Act — that gives Brussels effective leverage over what European citizens can read and say online. And it has consistently used financial conditionality to penalize governments whose domestic politics it disapproves of, redirecting funds away from citizens and toward Brussels-approved “civil society” organizations when it judges a government non-compliant. The new MFF doesn’t just continue this pattern, it institutionalizes and permanently funds it.

All this is especially frustrating given Europe’s weak geopolitical position. It is technically true, after all, that a geopolitically capable, strategically autonomous Europe requires a centralized fiscal capacity. But the EU is not a democratic federation capable of exercising such capacity accountably. It is a structure in which an unelected Commission holds agenda-setting power; the Council operates behind closed doors; and the Parliament has no power to initiate legislation. Handing this structure even greater fiscal autonomy doesn’t solve the EU’s democratic deficit: it deepens it. It is time to acknowledge that the EU’s failures are inherent to the supranational model itself. Attempts to address these shortcomings within the current framework, typically by pursuing “more Europe”, will only make things worse — with grim consequences for European governments and their citizens.

It was none other than Karl Marx himself who made the sharpest observation of how history repeats itself. In his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, he writes: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Marx was comparing the French emperor who had been dethroned after his defeat at Waterloo with his nephew, Napoleon III, a calamitous figure, who was King of France from 1852 until 1870.

Blair’s attempt at a comeback has a Napoleonic quality. Most commentary on his long essay focused on the man — his record in office and, especially, Iraq — and not on the arguments of the essay. A lot of people, especially on the Left, really hate him. But I think there is a bigger story here that is not about Blair himself, but about radical centrism itself.

He is right to say that “there are two epochal changes happening in the world today — one geopolitical, the other technological — and Britain is not prepared for either.” But he does not reflect on why this happened, and on his own role in that story.

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Blair was the most successful Labour prime minister in history, if you measure success in terms of the number of times he managed to get elected. But his big idea failed. He bequeathed a legacy of economic decline that his successors were not able to address with the classic tools of radical centrist policies — inward investment, trade agreements, privatization, deregulation and financialization.

The election of Emmanuel Macron in 2017 should serve as a more recent cautionary tale of what happens when countries naively try to revive radical centrism. In 2016, Macron suddenly appeared on the French political scene with his own version of radical centrism. He was elected president in 2017, and his new party gained a majority in the French parliament shortly afterwards. His government passed big reforms — the liberalization of labor markets; cuts in capital gains and corporation taxes; reforms in social security contribution systems; apprenticeship and vocational-training reform; railway reform, and so many others. It was one of the busiest legislative agendas that Europe’s ever seen, similar to what happened in the UK during Margaret Thatcher’s first term.

But then it stopped. Macron was re-elected in 2022, yet his party failed to win a majority in the following parliamentary elections. In 2024, he made a bad call to dissolve the parliament, as a result of which his party was almost eliminated.

There is a pattern here. In both France and the UK, radical centrism initially seemed to work and then at some point turned into a car crash. Radical centrism fails not because it’s wrong in theory, but because it’s wrong in practice. It simply cannot be delivered in a small European country, because it requires a diversified economy. That’s why the US could deliver it better than others. Radical centrism means that, if you live in an industrial town and your employer goes out of business, you can move to another part of the country and find another job. Or, if you train as an electrician, you may end up running an electricity company. Or, if Elon Musk fires you from your cosy government job, you can get yourself a food truck and retrain as a chef. Social and regional mobility plays a big part in this. This stuff does not happen in the UK or elsewhere in Europe, at least not on the scale that would be needed for radical centrism to work.

What killed radical centrism in the UK was financial globalization. The UK never recovered from the global financial crisis, because its economy remained dependent on the City of London. Because radical centrism requires a diversified economy, it is not a feasible political ideology for a mid-sized European country.

One could have imagined the EU developing in such a way to make radical centrism feasible. There was a time, in the early Nineties, when people thought of the EU and its single market as the future. I was among them. But reality intruded. My family and I moved around four European countries. So did many families — but most of them stayed where they were.

The barriers were not cultural, as euroskeptics lazily claim, but legal and institutional. Europeans have a long history of migration. The very rich and the very poor have always moved around. But what stopped middle-class employees moving around the EU were practical issues like incompatible pension systems. If you took up a new job abroad, you could lose insurance claims that you’d built up over many years. Another problem, one that affected families with children, was that of incompatible school curriculums. Europe’s private schools are ultra-compatible; if you are rich, Europe is a dream. But if you’re middle-class ,and you try to put your 10-year-old through a French or Belgian state school, you will have second thoughts. Language will be the least of your child’s problems.

The idea of the EU as a framework of radical centrism failed because it would have required a degree of political integration that EU leaders were simply not ready for. One of them was Blair himself. Blair is pro-European in terms of his stated preferences. He was anti-Brexit, even in favor of a second referendum. But his revealed preferences tell a different story. Memories are still fresh in the EU of how Blair divided the bloc over Iraq. He nurtured a narrative about a clash between the old Europe and the new Europe, of which he was the natural leader.

But for me, the decisive moment came much earlier. The most consequential stated preference by Blair was his decision during his premiership not to enter the euro. Initially, he had wanted to join it. I remember the moment when Blair briefly toyed with it but decided to fall into line with the position of Gordon Brown and Ed Balls, who strongly opposed euro membership on macroeconomic grounds. The macroeconomic arguments were indeed weighty. But to reduce the question to macroeconomics alone was to confuse the short-term and the long-term. This was a strategic mistake for Blair. Had he joined the Eurozone, then he might have been able to deliver radical centrism back in the UK.

The reason the euro decision was so important is that it killed the idea of an integrated European capital market. The EU still does not have one today. The lack of a big capital market is the reason why Europe does not have a large tech industry, whereas the US and China do. European banks are not big enough to fund companies the size of Google, Apple, Meta or Nvidia.

Back in the late Nineties, the UK was in a unique position to change that. It had the know-how. It had the financial center. It could have driven the financialization of the EU. But to build a capital market of the scale and importance of the US would have required a single currency and a single government bond market.

History took a different turn — and it won’t turn back. Today the EU has eight currencies, one of which is the euro. On top of this, we have the British pound, the Swiss Franc, and the Norwegian krone. Every country has its own sovereign bond markets, its own banks, and its own capital markets.

All the big European countries today suffer from similar problems to the UK — a fall in productivity growth from which they never recovered. All of them failed to connect with 21st-century technologies. They have bloated welfare states. They have not spent enough money on their security. Their most talented people emigrate. As Marx correctly predicted in his Eighteenth Brumaire, the political leaders in Europe are squarely in the category of what he called “grotesque mediocrity”.

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Blair himself is of a different caliber. What I found refreshing about his essay is that at least somebody in the UK is talking about political ideas. The debate inside the Labour Party is reduced to personalities and popularity. Neither Keir Starmer, nor his presumptive challengers, have the slightest idea of what they want. At least Blair has a plan.

Sadly, it is just not a good plan. I concluded a long time ago that Britain’s problems are not solvable at a national level. I clung on to the hope — the delusion, you might call it — that the EU could develop into a political union capable of addressing this problem. That did not happen and now it will never happen. There are no obvious solutions to the problem.

It is difficult to imagine whether Marx, had he lived today, would still be a Marxist. It is not nearly so hard to imagine what he would have made of Blair and the radical centrists of our generation — tragic figures who turned into farcical ones in their own lifetimes.

And yet, despite the EU’s best efforts, Trump still derides them, insults them, and threatens them. Most recently, he threatened to raise the tariff on European cars, from 15% to 25%. Most of them are German cars. He is disappointed with Keir Starmer and Giorgia Meloni. But he really hates the Germans. It seems personal.

I am not quite sure why this is the case. Maybe he hasn’t forgiven Angela Merkel for attempting to stand up to him during his first term. Maybe he’s trying to distance himself from his German ancestry. Or maybe it’s just Friedrich Merz. Merz is the Wormtongue of European politics. I wouldn’t trust him either.

After a year of Merz acting as the Trump appeaser-in-chief, the German chancellor suddenly turned on him last week. He said that Iran had humiliated the US, and that the US had entered the war without a strategy. On the substance, Merz was right, of course. I am always saying the same thing myself — along with virtually every other commentator. But Merz is also the head of government of western Europe’s largest country. He speaks for a large part of the EU and Nato too.

It’s hard to work out why he intervened as he did. My hunch is that Merz simply misjudged the situation, not for the first time. He made his comments during a visit to a class of school children in his idyllic Westphalian constituency, far away from the real world — somewhere he felt safe.

Unfortunately for Merz, though, Trump was listening and hit back immediately. It’s not Trump’s tweets I worry about. I have long ago stopped reading them. But what I do take seriously are Trump’s actions. The US Department of War, as it is now called, announced a reduction of troops in Germany by 5,000 — with Trump threatening still more.

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What I also take seriously is his threat to impose a 25% tariff on European cars. The US Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs lacked a sound legal basis. But this has been widely and foolishly misinterpreted in the EU: it does not mean he cannot impose the tariffs; he just has to find a different legal basis. And for the cars, he has one. Cars, as well as steel and aluminum, fall under Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act — a provision of national security. If the US-EU trade deal breaks down, the 25% on cars will come into force automatically. In fact, for cars, the actual tariff would actually be 27.5% because of an extant and perfectly legal tariff. And given how badly the German car industry is doing right now — with Porsche’s profits already collapsing by 98% — a 27.5% car tariff would be a major disaster.

Merz was the political driving force behind that Turnberry trade deal last August: the one in which Ursula von der Leyen agreed that the EU would drop all its tariffs against the US, even as America promised a 15% on all goods from the EU – including cars. For the EU as a whole, this was a terrible deal. But it was the best deal the German car industry could have hoped for.

Trump has defended his latest tariff increase on the grounds that the EU did not stick to its side of the bargain. This is not quite true, but the European Parliament did score an own goal when it delayed the ratification of the Turnberry deal after the US Supreme Court ruling. That delay has given Trump the excuse he needed to claim that the EU failed to honor its promises. Similarly, when European leaders declared that Iran “is not our war”, Trump could claim “Nato wasn’t there for us”. Merz’s comment about Trump’s humiliation is even more stupid. Trump hit back that Merz should “spend more time ending the war in Russia/Ukraine”, and that he should focus his attention on his “broken country”. Trump is objectively right on all of these points. The Germans are not involved in any Russia/Ukraine peace-making efforts. And most Germans would agree that their country is broken. It is also an objective fact that Nato clearly wasn’t for Trump when he asked. This is after all “not our war”.

Here, then, is the folly of what we are supposed to call European diplomacy in all its absurdity. Europe keeps provoking the President — and yet still depends on his country. Europeans, despite the nonsense they talk about strategic autonomy, have persistently failed to take the steps needed for Europe to be safe without the help of the US. The most important stumbling block being the lack of agreement between France and Germany on the future of the European defense. France sees itself as the senior partner; the Germans don’t. Nor is there any leadership from Italy, Spain or Poland. Domestic policies are all they care about. And when something happens that exposes their lack of preparedness and fragility, they resort to blame-gaming. They blame Vladimir Putin. They blame Viktor Orbán. Now they blame Trump.

If Europe really was serious about decoupling from the US, it would leave the eurosceptics like Orbán on the sidelines, muster a coalition of the willing, and draw up a multi-annual plan as it did for the euro in the Nineties. In stage zero, you would map out the road ahead. In stage one, you would pool your military procurement. In stage two, you adopt majority voting in the foreign affairs council. And in stage three, you begin to merge your militaries and elect or appoint a European commander-in-chief. As things stand, Europe can’t even manage to limp to stage zero. Contrast this inept alliance with what is happening in America. While I agree that Trump went into Iran without a strategy, he does not suffer from a collection action problem. He can rely on a formidable military apparatus. The Europeans don’t have a joint strategy, nor do they have the capabilities.

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There is absolutely no reason why Trump should care about European economic interests either. Economically, the European have the capacity to look after themselves. But they chose not to. And the war is going to hit Europe hard — the UK and Germany will suffer the worst effects with several decimal points knocked off economic growth. The car tariffs will be an additional hit on the German economy, costing it an estimated 0.3 points of growth. And neither the UK nor Germany is willing to undertake structural reforms to mitigate their disastrous economic situation.

The Europeans are in dangerous denial: struggling to admit their own powerlessness. And yet not so long ago, Europe was the center of the world’s political universe, the cradle of democracy and western culture. Today, though, the EU is the embarrassing uncle of western alliance, always there, drinking too much, talking too much, telling everybody what to do, and never, ever, buying a round.

Now Trump has called their bluff. No wonder they hate him.

Chat Control, formally known as the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, was first proposed by the European Commission in 2022. The original plan would have made it mandatory for email and messenger providers to scan private, even encrypted, communications — with the purported aim of detecting child sexual abuse material. 

The tool was sold as a noble crusade against some of the world’s most horrific crimes. But critics argued that the tool risked becoming a blueprint for generalized surveillance, by essentially giving states and EU institutions the ability to scan every private message. Indeed, a public consultation preceding the proposal revealed that a majority of respondents opposed such obligations, with over 80% of explicitly rejecting its application to end-to-end encrypted communications.

Yet despite repeated blockages, and widespread criticism for violating privacy and fundamental rights, the text was never abandoned. Instead, it was repackaged, and continually pushed forward from one Council presidency to the next. Each time democratic resistance stopped the original plan, it kept returning in new forms, under new labels, each time dressed up as a “necessary” and “urgent” tool to protect children online, yet always preserving its core logic: normalizing government-mandated monitoring of private communications on an unprecedented scale. 

In May, the European Commission once again presented its proposal. Yet several states objected. That included Germany, but also Poland, Austria and the Netherlands. As a result, Denmark, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Council, immediately began drafting a new version, known as “Chat Control 2.0” and unveiled earlier this month, which removed the requirement for general monitoring of private chats; the searches would now remain formally voluntary for providers. All this happened under the auspices of Coreper, the Committee of Permanent Representatives — one of the most powerful, but least visible, institutions in the EU decision-making process. It is where most EU legislation is actually negotiated; if Coreper agrees on a legislative file, member states almost always rubber-stamp it. 

The gamble worked. Yesterday, this revised version was quietly greenlit by Coreper, essentially paving the way for the text’s adoption by the Council, possibly as early as December. As digital rights campaigner and former MEP Patrick Breyer put it, this maneuver amounts to “a deceptive sleight of hand” aimed at bypassing meaningful democratic debate and oversight. 

While the removal of mandatory on-device detection is an improvement on the first draft, the new text still contains two extremely problematic features. First, it encourages “voluntary” mass scanning by online platforms — a practice already allowed in “temporary” form, which would now become a lasting feature of EU law. Second, it effectively outlaws anonymous communication by introducing mandatory age-verification systems. 

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An open letter signed by 18 of Europe’s leading cybersecurity and privacy academics warned that the latest proposal poses “high risks to society without clear benefits for children”. The first, in their view, is the expansion of “voluntary” scanning, including automated text analysis using AI to identify ambiguous “grooming” behaviors. This approach, they argue, is deeply flawed. Current AI systems are incapable of properly distinguishing between innocent conversation and abusive behavior. As the experts explain, AI-driven grooming detection risks sweeping vast numbers of normal, private conversations into a dragnet, overwhelming investigators with false positives and exposing intimate communications to third parties. 

Breyer further emphasized this danger by noting that no AI can reliably distinguish between innocent flirtation, humorous sarcasm — and criminal grooming. He warned that this amounts to a form of digital witch-hunt, whereby the mere appearance of words like “love” or “meet” in a conversation between family members, partners or friends could trigger intrusive scrutiny. This is not child protection, Breyer has argued, but mass suspicion directed at the entire population. Even under the existing voluntary regime, German federal police warn that roughly half of all reports received are criminally irrelevant, representing tens of thousands of leaked legal chats annually. According the Swiss Federal Police, meanwhile, 80% of machine-reported content is not illegal. It might, for example, encompass harmless holiday photos showing nude children playing at a beach. The new text would expand these risks dramatically. 

Further concerns arise from Article 4 of the new compromise proposal, which requires providers to implement “all appropriate risk mitigation measures”. This clause could allow authorities to pressure encrypted messaging services to enable scanning, even if this undermines their core security model. In practice, this could mean requiring providers such as WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram to scan messages on users’ devices before encryption is applied. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has noted that this approach risks creating a permanent security infrastructure, one which could gradually become universal. Meta, Google and Microsoft already scan unencrypted content voluntarily; extending this practice to encrypted content would merely require technical changes. Moreover, what begins as a voluntary option can easily become compulsory in practice, as platforms face reputational, legal and market pressure to “cooperate” with the authorities. Furthermore, this doesn’t affect just people in the EU, but everyone around the world, including the United States. If platforms decide to stay in the EU, they would be forced to scan the conversations of everyone in the bloc. If you’re not in the EU, but you chat with someone who is, then your privacy is compromised too. 

Another major danger is the introduction of mandatory age-verification systems for app stores and private messaging services. Though the Council claims these systems can be designed to “preserve privacy”, critics insist that the very concept is technologically unworkable. Age assessments inevitably rely on biometric and behavioral data, both of which require invasive data collection. Far from protecting children, these systems would increase the volume of sensitive personal information being stored and potentially exploited. 

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Requiring official identity documents for online verification would exclude millions of people who lack easy access to digital IDs or who won’t provide such sensitive documentation merely to use a messaging service. In practice, this would spell the end of anonymous communication online, forcing users to present ID or face scans simply to open an email or messaging account. Breyer has warned that such measures would be particularly disastrous for whistleblowers, journalists, political activists and others reliant on online anonymity. It would also push under-16s towards less safe, poorly regulated alternatives that lack encryption or basic safety protections. 

Ultimately, critics argue that mass surveillance is simply the wrong approach to combating child sexual exploitation. Scanning private messages does not stop the circulation of child abuse material. Platforms such as Facebook have used scanning technologies for years, yet the number of automated reports continues to rise. Moreover, mandatory scanning would still fail to detect perpetrators who distribute material through decentralized secret forums or via encrypted archives shared using only links and passwords — methods that scanning algorithms cannot successfully penetrate. The most effective strategy would be to delete known abuse material from online hosts, something Europol has repeatedly failed to do. 

Chat Control, in short, would do little to actually help victims of child sexual exploitation while harming everyone else. Every message would become subject to surveillance, without any judicial oversight, contrary to long-standing guarantees of private correspondence. There’s a legal question here too. The EU Court of Justice has previously ruled that general and automatic analysis of private communications violates fundamental rights, yet the EU is now poised to adopt legislation that contravenes this precedent. Once adopted, it could take years for a new judicial challenge to overturn it. 

The confidentiality of electronic communication — essential for personal privacy, business secrecy and democratic participation — would be sacrificed. Sensitive conversations could be read, analyzed, wrongly flagged or even misused, as past scandals involving intelligence officials and tech employees have shown. One of the most notorious cases of intelligence abuse came from the US National Security Agency, in which multiple NSA employees were caught using the agency’s powerful surveillance tools to spy on romantic partners and ex-lovers. Leaked documents have also shown that the UK intelligence agency GCHQ captured and stored images from Yahoo webcam chats, including millions of sexually explicit images of completely innocent users. There have also been several cases of Big Tech employees — from Google to Facebook — using internal tools to spy on unsuspecting users. 

Furthermore, secure encryption, a foundation of cybersecurity, would be compromised by introducing backdoors or client-side scanning tools that foreign intelligence services or criminal actors could exploit. At the same time, the responsibility for criminal investigations would shift from democratically accountable authorities to opaque corporate algorithms, with minimal transparency or oversight. 

Opponents therefore argue that the EU should instead adopt a fundamentally different approach: one that protects children without undermining fundamental rights. They propose ending the current voluntary scanning of private messages by US internet companies — restoring the principle that targeted surveillance requires a judicial warrant and must be limited to individuals reasonably suspected of wrongdoing — and maintain that secure end-to-end encryption, and the right to anonymous communication, must be preserved. 

Particularly worrying is the issue of function creep, the process by which a technology introduced for a narrowly defined purpose gradually expands to serve broader, and sometimes entirely different, purposes over time. The UK’s Online Safety Act, passed in October 2023, obliges firms to develop child sexual abuse detection systems, even though the British government itself admits that such infrastructure is not yet technically available, creating legal authority awaiting technical capability. In the United States, “temporary” surveillance measures introduced under the post-9/11 Patriot Act became permanent, and indeed expanded in scope. Once a technological infrastructure for comprehensive online surveillance exists, it can easily be repurposed and is hard to dismantle. Technologies designed to detect harmful content can quickly be extended to political repression; examples from authoritarian states demonstrate how similar systems are used to identify and target dissidents. 

Breyer summarized this pattern starkly: “They are selling us security but delivering a total surveillance machine. They promise child protection but punish our children and criminalize privacy.” The implications are ominous. Europe effectively stands on the threshold of building a machine that can see everything. Once constructed, it will serve not only the current political authorities — the idea of Ursula von der Leyen spying on everyone’s messages is disturbing enough — but whoever wields power next. With yet another vote approaching, the window to stop Chat Control is narrowing. 

In recent years, the Court has increasingly come into conflict with elected governments — most notably over questions of migration and deportation. Its critics, particularly in Britain, argue that the Convention has expanded far beyond its original remit, interfering in areas that go to the heart of democratic sovereignty: border control, national security and the prerogative of parliaments to set the law. When nine European leaders signed a joint letter in May this year, questioning whether the ECtHR had overstepped its mandate on migration, the Council of Europe’s Secretary General, Alain Berset, dismissed their concerns outright. “No judicial body should be subject to political pressure,” he declared. The implication was clear: the ECtHR sits above democratic scrutiny; its authority, derived from moral principle rather than electoral consent, is to be accepted without debate.

A key turning point came in 2023, when the ECtHR intervened, via Rule 39, to block the UK’s so-called “Rwanda plan”, which would send certain asylum seekers and illegal migrants to Africa for processing. Just hours before the first flight was due to depart, a single judge in Strasbourg issued an emergency injunction that grounded it. Whatever one’s opinion of the policy, the episode raised a profound constitutional question: should an unelected foreign judge have the power to overturn a decision approved by a sovereign parliament?

The debate has only intensified since. Both the Conservatives and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK have pledged to withdraw from the Convention. Even Keir Starmer, while rejecting outright withdrawal, has suggested the Government will review how international human rights law, including the ECHR, is interpreted by British courts — particularly to stop unsuccessful asylum seekers from blocking deportation.

Leaving the Convention would not, by itself, solve the complex problem of illegal migration. But across Europe, elected governments — in Poland, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands and elsewhere — have often found themselves constrained when trying to respond to growing public concern over the phenomenon which has become one of the defining political issues of our time. What we are witnessing is not simply a technical legal dispute, but a clash between democracy and a transnational judiciary that increasingly sees itself as a moral authority above politics.

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The European Court of Human Rights has, over the past two decades, engineered what can be described as a “quiet power grab”. Through a series of legal innovations and doctrinal reinterpretations, the Court has progressively widened its jurisdiction, often beyond what member states ever agreed to.

One of the Court’s controversial doctrines is that of extraterritorial jurisdiction — the idea that the ECHR applies even outside a state’s borders. This instrument has allowed the Court to extend its reach into foreign territory and even international waters. In the case of Hirsi Jamaa and Others v. Italy, for instance, the Court ruled in 2012 that Italy could not intercept migrants in the Mediterranean and return them to Libya, despite the operation taking place outside Italian territory. The result was a de facto outlawing of “pushbacks”, which is a core component of border enforcement. In practice, the judgment meant that states could no longer prevent illegal entrants from reaching their shores to lodge asylum claims, no matter the operational or humanitarian cost.

Another key development concerns the doctrine of non-refoulement — the prohibition on returning individuals to countries where they may face serious harm. Though not explicitly mentioned in the Convention, the ECtHR has expanded this principle far beyond its original postwar intent. In several cases, the Court has ruled that even transfers to other EU countries may be unlawful if conditions there are deemed inadequate. It has also insisted that each deportation must be subject to an “individualized assessment” of risk — an administrative nightmare that renders mass removals practically impossible. National security considerations are given almost no weight: even individuals deemed dangerous cannot be expelled if they might face mistreatment abroad.

Finally, there is Article 8 of the Convention — the “right to respect for private and family life”. Once a narrowly defined protection of home and correspondence, it has become a catch-all provision invoked to prevent deportations of convicted criminals and illegal immigrants. The Court has repeatedly ruled that deportations must be halted if an offender has established a family life in the host country, however tenuous. This has led to an avalanche of cases in which serious offenders — from violent criminals to drug traffickers — have successfully appealed against removal on Article 8 grounds. British tabloids have gleefully reported cases where criminals were able to avoid deportation because their child liked chicken nuggets or questioned their gender. But behind the tabloid absurdity lies a serious constitutional reality: an international court has assumed the authority to decide who may remain within a nation’s borders.

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The Court’s defenders insist that it merely applies the principles that states themselves agreed to uphold. Yet this is no longer credible. The ECtHR has, by its own admission, embraced the doctrine of the Convention as a “living instrument” — meaning that its provisions must be interpreted in light of “present-day conditions”. In practice, this gives judges carte blanche to reinterpret and expand the meaning of rights according to contemporary political sensibilities. What began as a limited postwar charter has become an evolving moral code enforced by an unelected elite with a de facto veto power over national law.

The ECHR, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. The Court operates within a wider ecosystem of judicial and technocratic power that extends far beyond Strasbourg. Its rulings are cited by the European Court of Justice, domestic supreme courts and international bodies, and often transcribed into national law. National judges, NGOs and human-rights lobbies use its jurisprudence to influence policymaking. An entire regime of judicialized governance has emerged — what legal scholar Ran Hirschl has called juristocracy: rule by judges.

Over the past half-century, vast areas of public life once decided through political debate — from migration and security to macroeconomic policy — have been transferred from parliaments to courts, tribunals and independent authorities. This process of depoliticization was a deliberate response by political elites to the growing assertiveness of mass democracy. As voting rights expanded in the late 19th and 20th centuries, Europe’s ruling classes feared that popular majorities might use their new power to challenge the economic and social order. The solution was to create institutional checks — constitutional courts, independent central banks, and supranational treaties and institutions — that insulated key areas of governance from democratic contestation.

In the postwar decades, this model spread rapidly. Germany, Italy, France and Austria all established constitutional courts with the power to strike down legislation. Internationally, new bodies such as the ECtHR and the European Court of Justice emerged as guardians of a liberal order that placed “rights” and markets above popular sovereignty. Even Westminster-style systems like Britain eventually succumbed. In the Seventies and Eighties, political elites across the Anglosphere embraced judicialization as a means of enforcing policies that might otherwise have faced public resistance.

Examples include the creation of independent monetary and pricing bodies, and the extensive use of quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations (quangos) to implement policy at arm’s length from parliamentary control. The 1998 Human Rights Act, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, epitomizes the judicialization trend. As Hirschl observed, “deference to the judiciary” served elite interests well: for example, it allowed governments to pursue controversial neoliberal economic and labor reforms while blaming unelected judges or independent bodies for their consequences.

The result is the system we inhabit today: a “constrained democracy” in which the forms of representation remain, but the substance of political choice has been hollowed out. Immigration policy, once the preserve of parliaments, has become the domain of judges interpreting “rights”. Economic and social policies are now dictated by international treaties and constitutional doctrines.

To criticize the ECtHR is not to oppose human rights, but to ask who defines them and by what authority. When “rights” are expanded indefinitely without democratic consent, they cease to be instruments of liberty and become tools of control. Governments, meanwhile, though nominally constrained by such courts, often welcome their interference, which allows them to outsource politically costly decisions to unelected judges — to pursue or preserve policies they privately support but dare not defend — or simply to evade responsibility for problems they are incapable of solving. This is why politicians’ condemnations of the ECHR, especially coming from the Conservative camp that so spectacularly betrayed the Brexit mandate while in power, ring so hollow.

The British public appears to sense this contradiction. While many citizens would probably agree that the ECHR’s authority has gone too far, polls suggest that a majority do not favor outright withdrawal from the Convention. Perhaps they intuitively understand that leaving the ECHR would make sense only as part of a broader project of political renewal — a re-democratization of governance that restores the primacy of parliament and popular sovereignty. But such a project would require a political class that actually believes in democracy — something in short supply, in Britain and across Europe.

The British-German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, one of the smartest people I have ever met, famously talked about the 20th century as “the Social Democratic century”. The term stands for all the parties of the center-Left: Social Democrats, Democratic Socialists, or Labour. Dahrendorf’s characterization was about the institutions and practices the center-left managed to create: collective bargaining, the welfare state, pensions, universal healthcare, unemployment protection, and free education. The parties of the center-left prided themselves on taming capitalism. They managed to turn the EU’s single market, which started off as a force for market liberalization, into a regulatory behemoth. The Social Democrats in Germany, the French socialists, and Britain’s Labour Party did not win most elections in the 20th century. Until recently, the Conservatives were the natural party of government in the UK, as were the Gaullists in France and the Christian Democrats in Germany. But it is the parties of the center-left that won the battle of ideas. Their main political opponents, the center-right, were simply alternative managers of the system the center-left created.

Today, the Left is in synchronized decline everywhere. Industrial workforces, the backbone of the center-left’s electorate in previous decades, have disappeared. The Left has split into various parties – Greens, hard-Left, center-left. In Germany, the SPD ended up at 16% at the February election, its worst result ever. The French Socialists are nowadays a junior partner in a political group whose only visible figure is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the hard-left. François Hollande was the last French Socialist president. He was very keen to get to the top, but when he arrived there, he forgot what he wanted to do.

Keir Starmer is Britain’s version of Hollande. Like Hollande, he was flushed to the top by a backlash against an unpopular previous incumbent, but has been clueless since he became Prime Minister. With the help of the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system, he managed to get two-thirds of the seats with one-third of the vote. But he does not know what to do with it.

Today Labour is polling in the same ballpark as the German Social Democrats or the French Socialists. The long-run trend is brutal. In the short-run, voting systems matter, but they cannot arrest secular decline.

The decline had already started to kick in during the 1970s and 1980s, but the collapse of the Soviet Union gave the Left a new lease of life, allowing them to reinvent themselves as globalists. The Socialist François Mitterrand was president in France at the time. Bill Clinton was soon to gain power in the US. The age of Tony Blair would follow in the UK. At that point it appeared that we were able to create a new Social Democratic age — the centrist, globalist version. It lasted for thirty years. I always thought of the World Economic Forum as the quintessential quango of that period — where Left-wing intellectuals met with the world of finance and business. From the heights of the mountains in Davos, the globalists did not see what was going on beneath them.

The age of the Left-wing globalist is gone — but vestiges remain. Starmer’s appointment of Minouche Shafik as his chief economic adviser is a throwback to that age. Shafik spent most of her career as a diplomat in international financial institutions, with a mixed record during her stint on the monetary policy committee at the Bank of England.  If you are desperate and in search of a new economic strategy, as Starmer surely must be, this appears to be an odd appointment. He needed an original thinker, but he got himself a salesperson.

The most visible outward sign of socialism’s failure in the 21st century is its alienation from digital technologies. Dahrendorf’s Social Democrats were creatures of the analog age. Modern socialists are digital Luddites. When confronted with data, their instinct is to regulate. Data protection is a big deal in Europe and in the UK. In Brussels, people still celebrate the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — the set of legislation that brought us the irritating cookie popups online. What the bureaucrats don’t know, and don’t care about, is that GDPR has become a nightmare for small companies in particular, and a big cost factor for everyone. It purports to protect consumers against data abuse, but it kills fledging data-based business. With GDPR and the AI directive, which subjects companies offering AI services to regulations on data protection, Europe made sure that it will not participate in the single most important industry of the 21st century. Nor will it reap the spoils of this industry as a user of AI services. AI is a technology that could deliver the much needed improvements in productivity. Unlike the Europeans, Starmer regularly pays lip service to AI and quantum computing — but his policies are the same as those of the Europeans.

His government’s mindless pursuit of the net zero target is wrecking UK energy policy. His big idea is to realign regulation with the EU. This will guarantee that the UK will remain stuck in the worst of both worlds. It does not enjoy the benefits that come with EU membership, yet it is hamstrung by its regulation.

The tech industry is the driver of economic growth in China and the US. The only socialists anywhere in the world who understood this are the Chinese. Despite this, I still get people quoting at me the old quip that the “US innovates, China imitates, and the EU regulates”. The joke is spot-on for the EU. Whether it is true for the US is a more complicated story that deserves a column on its own. But the joke gets modern China completely wrong. China has out-innovated Europe. They are the world leaders in many important pockets of high-tech engineering, leaving Europe with no chance to catch up.

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If you traveled back in time and told this story to intellectuals of the 20th century, this is the part that would probably surprise them the most. The big delusion of the center-left has been that they won the battle against the Communists. In fact, because hard-Left parties are on the rise, the post-social democratic age is looking increasingly like the pre-social democratic one. Once again, the social democrats find themselves outflanked by communists on the left and by nationalists on the right.

The West deluded itself for a long time that China was becoming Westernized. Few predicted the rise of the Right. Donald Trump has now dominated the Republican Party for a decade. Nigel Farage has a real shot at winning the next General Election. So does Marine Le Pen in France. The Alternative for Germany outpolls the venerable CDU. The German SPD’s brilliant new idea is that they want to ban the AfD. They have run out of ideas.

I see the right resurgence everywhere in Europe, including the UK, as a natural backlash to the Social Democratic age and its now dysfunctional institutions. I don’t think that the Left will reverse the trend. But they could do better by following a few simple policy rules. First, allow your economy to participate in the technologies of the 21st century. But don’t try to pick winners. We should let the private sector do it and give it the room it needs through light-touch regulation and moderate levels of taxation.

Second, when productivity growth is low, the only source of available money for redistribution should be structural reforms like changes to welfare and healthcare systems. Another option is the privatization of dysfunctional state-owned entities. Don’t do what Rachel Reeves is about to do: plug your fiscal holes through higher taxes, which ends up depressing productivity growth. In Germany, Lars Klingbeil, finance minister and SPD chief, is about to do the same as Reeves is.

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And finally: change the story on immigration. Make it your priority that businesses can get the labor supply they need. Crack down on crime committed by immigrants. You are not going to beat Farage by doing what he does. Healthy economies not fret about immigration nearly as much as unhealthy ones.

The center-left will absolutely not follow this advice. What was once said about the Bourbons applies to them too. They learnt nothing. And they have forgotten nothing. Starmer has no tech policy, no policies for structural reform, he will raise taxes, and he will follow Farage on immigration.

The Left is still overrepresented in the media, in academia, and in the legal system, but that only amplifies the delusion. Therein lies the real tragedy. The Left blames its misfortunes on Right-wing conspiracies or on social media. In their worldview, there can be no other explanation. They live in a bubble where the like-minded reinforce each others’ views — a cocooned version of Dahrendorf’s 20th century.

That is why I think Labour is finished as a force of politics. Angela Rayner would be gone either way.

Draghi is often praised for his rare bluntness in assessing Europe’s condition, a quality that has earned him a reputation as one of the continent’s most insightful thinkers. And, certainly, he is right in arguing that the neoliberal architecture of the EU — grounded in “a conscious reduction of the power of states” in favor of rules-based market mechanisms — has left Europe woefully unequipped to navigate a world where military and economic power are increasingly deployed to protect national interests.

The problem is, Draghi’s so-called analyses usually amount to little more than stating the obvious — facts that are evident to anyone not blinded by ideology or vested interests. The acclaim, in short, says less about Draghi’s brilliance than about the poverty of European public debate. But even more importantly, while Draghi may correctly grasp the surface symptoms of Europe’s malaise, he consistently fails — deliberately so — in properly diagnosing their underlying causes.

For if he is right to say that the EU’s neoliberal framework — based upon state retrenchment, fiscal austerity, wage compression and an obsession with boosting exports — has weakened Europe, it’s a policy cocktail that he himself helped blend. He was an architect and enforcer of that model. Already in the early Nineties, when he was director general of the Italian finance ministry, he emerged as a leading advocate of the concept of vincolo esterno (“external constraint”) — the idea that only by “tying the hands” of national governments via a political-economic straitjacket could neoliberal reforms, which lacked popular support, be forced through. That external constraint was, of course, the European Union, and above all the single currency, whose roadmap was laid out in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. In that position, Draghi was also instrumental in driving forward the large-scale privatization of Italy’s state-owned enterprises.

Over the next three decades, moving between the private sector (notably Goldman Sachs) and senior public posts, Draghi established himself as one of the foremost champions of neoliberal orthodoxy. This role reached its fullest expression during his tenure as president of the ECB from 2011 to 2019, and the act that symbolically marked the beginning of his tenure couldn’t be more paradigmatic.

In August 2011, at the height of the so-called “euro crisis”, Draghi and his outgoing predecessor Jean-Claude Trichet sent a letter to the Italian government. Intended to remain secret, it was subsequently leaked. The letter claimed that Italy’s post-crisis deficit-cutting plan was “not sufficient”, and set out detailed demands, including “the full liberalization of local public services”, “large scale privatizations”, wage reductions and even “constitutional reform tightening fiscal rules”. Giulio Tremonti, Italy’s then-minister of economy and finance, later privately told a group of European finance ministers that his government had received two threatening letters that year: one from a terrorist group, the other from the ECB. “The one from the ECB was worse”, he quipped.

Draghi must have concluded that the conditions set out in the letter had not been met, because a few months later he “forced” (to quote the solidly neoliberal Financial Times) Silvio Berlusconi to leave office in favor of the unelected Mario Monti. Draghi achieved this by discontinuing the central bank’s Italian bond purchases — thus deliberately causing interest rates to rise above safety levels — and by making Berlusconi’s ouster the precondition for further ECB support of Italian bonds. This was belatedly admitted by none other than Monti himself, who claimed in a 2017 interview that, in late 2011, Draghi “decided to stop the purchases of Italian government bonds, which had kept the Berlusconi government afloat in the summer and autumn of 2011”.

It is hard to imagine a more disturbing scenario than a supposedly “independent” and “apolitical” central bank using monetary blackmail to oust an elected government from office and impose its own political agenda. Yet all evidence suggests that this — a monetary coup d’état — is exactly what happened in Italy in 2011. Just a few years later, Draghi deployed the same tools against Greece, effectively shutting down the country’s banking system to force the government to comply with EU-demanded austerity policies, which Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s then-finance minister, likened to a form of “economic waterboarding”.

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Even in his brief role as Italian premier, between 2021 and 2022, Draghi continued these policies. The few “structural” measures enacted by his government were all aimed at promoting privatization, liberalization, deregulation and fiscal consolidation — while he imposed on his country some of the most draconian Covid policies in the world.

Overall, then, few figures over the past decades have been more unwavering in their commitment to advancing undemocratic neoliberalism than Mario Draghi. But his responsibility for Europe’s downward spiral extends well beyond his role as neoliberal enforcer-in-chief. In his speech last week, he effectively conceded that the EU had been vassalized by the United States. Yet, once again, Draghi omitted any mention of his own role in bringing about this sorry state of affairs: he has always been a staunch Atlanticist, and as such has played a key role in ensuring the EU’s structural subordination to Washington.

The EU’s response to the Russia-Ukraine crisis is a good case in point. In his much-discussed report on European competitiveness, published a year ago this week, Draghi highlighted high energy costs as one of the main reasons for the EU’s loss of competitiveness. The report emphasized that European companies face significantly steeper prices compared to their US counterparts, seriously hindering industrial growth and investment.

Fair enough — yet this was hardly an act of God. Rather, it was a direct consequence of the EU’s decision to decouple from Russian gas, which before the war accounted for almost half of the bloc’s supply, in favor of much more expensive American liquefied natural gas (LNG). More to the point, this policy was vehemently supported by Draghi. Shortly after Russia’s invasion, he defended as prime minister the EU’s decision to impose a gas embargo on Russia, from which Italy imported around 40% of its gas. “Do you want air conditioning or peace?”, he asked, the logic stark in its dubiousness. Draghi was likely suggesting that sanctions would soon cripple the Russian economy and force an end to the war — a scenario that anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of economic and geopolitical realities could have dismissed from the outset.

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A few months later, in a speech at the UN that in retrospect appears almost comically misguided, Draghi doubled down, claiming that the sanctions had imposed “extremely harsh costs on Russia” and had “a disruptive effect on the Russian war machine and on its economy”, making it “harder for Russia to respond to the defeats piling up on the battlefield”. As we know, none of this came to pass — the Russian economy proved resilient, the war machine kept churning, and the defeats mounted not in Moscow but in Draghi’s delusional forecasts. All of this was easily predictable, and indeed was predicted by many of us.

All this raises an obvious question: how is it that Draghi continues to be an enlightened statesman for denouncing the consequences of flawed policies he himself promoted? In a normal world, he would be laughed off the stage — or pelted with rotten eggs. That he so easily evades accountability is the clearest expression of the kakistocratic nature of EU politics, where failure is not punished but rewarded, and where incompetent leaders routinely fail upwards.

But if Draghi’s refusal to acknowledge responsibility for the EU’s problems is bad enough, his proposed solutions are worse still. For Draghi, the cure for the EU’s dysfunction is — to give the EU even more power. “The European Union will have to move towards new forms of integration”, he declared in his latest speech. Translation: yet more political, fiscal, military and technological centralization. In other words, then, Europe’s problems, in Draghi’s view, can only be solved by transferring still more authority to Brussels and further sidelining national governments and parliaments.

But the last thing Europe needs is to give even more power to people like Draghi. On the contrary, if the continent is to have any chance of reversing its decline, it must reject the delusional dogma of “more Europe” and finally hold to account the very technocrats who built the crisis-ridden order they now pretend to diagnose.

What did it take to get here? While a ceasefire will not be a pre-condition, the Europeans have been granted some of the assurances they wanted on security guarantees. Whether these can be enforced is, of course, an entirely different matter — but America’s agreement, in principle, to help the Europeans meet their obligations does mark an important shift in this seemingly endless war.

Since it is now unlikely that Trump will change his mind and revert to the Biden-era policy of unconditional, if hesitant, support for Ukraine, we are now left with two possible scenarios for how the war plays out.

In the first, Ukraine and Russia will agree to a peace deal, and the US and Europe will try their best to make the post-war security arrangement work. It is our baseline scenario, but it will be hard to pull off since the question of land is a particularly difficult one. The starting point of the talks would have to be the existing military situation — not Russia’s or Ukraine’s maximal demands — and would then need to be followed by detailed negotiations.

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In the second scenario, the peace talks will go ahead but fail. Trump will then blame Zelensky and actively disengage from supporting Ukraine. Beware of extrapolating yesterday’s show of support: the smiles are deceptive. Trump wants to get out. Like the real estate developer he once was, who has first put a deposit down, Trump has invested political capital into a peace process and he is not going to back down. This scenario would be very bad for Ukraine and for Europe. America would withdraw — for real this time. The Europeans would be left having to support Ukraine and build a new security infrastructure without US support.

This is not really a viable financial or military option for European leaders. After all, their engagement would have to be major. The Ukraine-Russia frontline is, at the moment, about 1,200 kilometers — around the length of the Cold War-era inner German border. Nor does this include the rest of Ukraine’s de jure border to the north and east with Russia, and with Belarus. There have been some comparisons with the situation in Korea — but the demilitarized zone there is barely 250 kilometers in length.

Adequately securing such a large border on the Ukrainian side would take a huge amount of troops — one estimate suggests as many as 150,000 European soldiers. This is a far larger deployment than anyone else has envisaged; Emmanuel Macron mentioned troop numbers in the thousands earlier in the year similar to the so-called tripwire troop deployments in the Baltic States.

And even if they wanted to, European leaders don’t have the troops needed to provide genuine assurances to Kyiv. Johann Wadephul, the German foreign minister, recently admitted that Germany probably wouldn’t have the capacity to send troops to Ukraine. And while the UK might be keen to voice its political commitment to the country, it’s doubtful that it can meaningfully back this up. A RUSI piece last year indicated that Britain does not have enough equipment to sustain a proper three-brigade armored division. Even deploying a single brigade would use up 70-80% of the British Army’s total combat engineering capabilities.

There are other challenges too. At this stage, the easiest way to blow a deal, by either side, would be to refuse concessions on land. The Russian claim for the entirety of the Donbas region, including the parts they don’t occupy, is a maximalist one, from which Russia would have to retreat if the negotiations were to succeed. There are some commercial assets in the region of interest to Moscow — mines and industrial companies based in the Russian-occupied parts — but it has military significance for Ukraine. In any case, there is a long history of European regions being split. Karelia split into Finnish and Russian parts after the Winter War of 1939-40, and parts of the old Prussia are now in Lithuania, Russia, Poland and Germany. Negotiations, though, will be fraught.

But the big difficulty European leaders will face is how to deal with their war-crazed supporters back home. There has been a great deal of cheerleading and regime-change fanaticism in the European political and media space, with many recent headlines insisting that Russia must not be rewarded for its aggression. None of these authors, of course, has a military strategy for victory, because strategic thinking is not what educated Europeans do. They use the passive tense when they speak or write: something must be done, they intone. Rarely, if ever, do they say: “we will do this and are ready to make sacrifices to do so.”

But we do know the rest of the world does not look at Russia the way Europe does. This Eurocentric perspective no longer dominates global discourse — except, of course, in Europe. It is clear that we are living in one of those dangerous moments in history where fate could flip either way. Yet for all his arrogance, at least Trump has a strategy, whereas the Europeans do not.

The timing of the summit was as important as its outcome. In recent days, Russian forces have advanced near Pokrovsk, forcing Ukrainian defenders from several fortified positions and threatening key industrial and logistical sites. While far from a decisive breakthrough, these gains have given Moscow a measure of battlefield momentum and reinforced the perception that time, for now, is on the Kremlin’s side. Against that backdrop, any willingness to discuss a settlement is notable. Putin was unlikely to agree to any form of ceasefire without reciprocal concessions from Zelensky. This will, as Trump noted, require more coordination between both Russia and Ukraine to ensure that any ceasefire is mutually agreeable and, therefore, sustainable.

Trump has taken a central role in the peace process, meeting with Zelensky in late February and now meeting with Putin for the first time in Trump’s second term. While consistently eager to draw down US commitments abroad, Trump’s attitude toward the Russia-Ukraine conflict has seemingly pivoted, with the American president cracking down on states avoiding the sanctions regime against Moscow and dispatching nuclear submarines to the “appropriate regions” in response to a trollish tweet from former Russian President and notable poaster Dmitry Medvedev. That said, Trump’s legacy as a peacemaker is clearly important to him, and he has consistently advocated for an end to the bloodshed in Ukraine.

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With Ukraine, Trump’s most potent tool is the ability to curtail or cut off American aid. While his recent approach has involved compelling European governments shoulder the cost of purchasing US-made weapons for Ukraine, the underlying reality is that Washington remains the indispensable supplier of advanced arms, intelligence, and logistical support. A complete withdrawal of American assistance, whether immediate or phased, would place enormous strain on Ukraine’s military capacity, especially given Europe’s limited ability to fill the gap.

With Russia, Trump’s leverage is different. He can offer to ease or lift US sanctions in return for concrete steps toward a settlement. For Moscow, even partial relief from restrictions on finance, technology, and energy exports could provide meaningful economic breathing room. Conversely, Trump could boost aid to Ukraine if Russia resists, turning additional Western support into a penalty for obstruction. This dual ability to reward compliance or punish defiance gives him a flexible negotiating position, though one that must be calibrated carefully to avoid alienating either party.

What, then, is on the table for negotiation? It is likely that at the top of Russia’s list of demands is assurance that Ukraine will not join Nato. Since the Soviet collapse, the Western Alliance’s expansion into former Soviet republics has fueled Moscow’s suspicion that Nato’s purpose extends beyond the defense of its members. Putin has repeatedly described Ukrainian accession as a red line, viewing it as a direct threat to Russian security. Trump appears to recognize the delicacy of this issue, saying before the summit that a US security guarantee for Ukraine might be possible “but not in the form of NATO.”

Meanwhile, Zelensky’s best chance at salvaging a diplomatic win may lie in securing Ukraine’s path to EU membership. Closer integration with Western Europe has long been at the heart of Ukraine’s foreign-policy ambitions. While Russian accounts of the conflict often trace its origins to Mikhail Gorbachev’s mishandling of the Soviet collapse or to Lenin’s creation of Ukraine’s borders after the October Revolution and collapse of the Russian Empire, Ukrainians point instead to the Kremlin’s reaction to the 2014 Euromaidan uprising as the true starting point. In Kiev’s view, Russia’s aggression in 2014 was a direct attempt to block Ukraine’s turn toward Europe. If Moscow accepts the EU expansion that Kiev sought more than a decade ago, it would mark a genuine Ukrainian achievement — one rooted in the very struggle that, in both Ukrainian and Western narratives, set this war in motion.

A settlement would give Ukraine the breathing room to focus on the internal reforms required to meet the European Union’s standards of democracy, corruption, and minority rights that all aspiring members must satisfy. Ukraine holds official “candidate” status, but former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has warned that the country’s notorious graft problem will require “massive internal reform processes” before meeting Kiev can meet codified EU requirements. Recent protests over Zelensky’s suspension of certain anti-corruption measures have compounded these concerns.

If EU accession is indeed central to Ukraine’s future, ending the war through a negotiated settlement would allow Kiev to restore the democratic and anti-corruption institutions that were suspended as a wartime necessity and to concentrate fully on meeting the requirements for EU membership.

That said, more work must be done to provide a sufficient security guarantee to Ukraine to assuage concerns that Russia will invade again in the near future. Putin seems to agree, stating that the “security of Ukraine should be ensured as well.” The Kiev government often evokes the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which Ukraine agreed to give up its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal in return for Russian, American, and British promises to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.” As Russia’s actions in the past decade have demonstrated, that agreement had little binding power. While NATO accession likely remains a red line for Putin, a more limited European or American guarantee of Ukrainian security may be necessary to get the Ukrainians on board.

Territorial transfers are also likely up for negotiation. Despite concerns that Trump and Putin had plans to carve up Ukrainian territory without Zelensky at the table, Trump has repeatedly stated that he has no such intentions. “I’m not here to negotiate for Ukraine,” the president stated aboard Air Force One while traveling to Alaska, adding “I’ve got to let Ukraine make that decision.” No territorial concessions were mentioned by the leaders following their discussion, but a redrawing of national borders seems inevitable, given the state of the conflict.

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While Zelensky has repeatedly stated that Ukrainian territory is not on the negotiating table, such statements are likely posturing as to drive a better bargain for his country. Russia has held Crimea since 2014, and is steadily consolidating control in significant portions of southeastern Ukraine. Although Putin is likely to make significant territorial demands, Zelensky may be able to meet him halfway by accepting new effective boundaries without formally recognizing Russian sovereignty over those Ukrainian regions.

Should the Ukrainians agree to ceding Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia to Russian control, Moscow should likewise agree to withdrawing its forces from Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Sumy oblasts in central and northern Ukraine. While this is not the most desirable outcome for Zelensky, it does offer a way for him to stop the slaughter of the Ukrainian people outside of those territories which Ukraine is unlikely to reclaim by force. When all is said and done, this is a World War II-style industrial war that Ukraine is structurally incapable of winning.

As Trump continues to coordinate Ukraine and Western governments, the first step toward a settlement must be a ceasefire. As the president stated to the press, his main priority is to “stop thousands of people a week from being killed.” Given the high spirits of both leaders following their conversation, this step seems to be on the horizon, if Trump is able to convince the Ukrainians to give negotiations a chance. Had Trump found Putin’s demands to be unreasonable, it seems unlikely that the two men would be in such good humor shortly after speaking.

This bilateral US-Russia exchange, then, marks a step toward a broader negotiation. Whether it leads to a sustainable peace will depend on the willingness of all parties to turn Alaska’s cautious opening into a lasting settlement.

The Fifth Republic is far from alone here. For Western democracy is under threat — not from “foreign adversaries”, or “far-Right populists”, but from its own elites. Whether in Britain, Germany or Ireland, censorship has become routine across Europe and beyond, even as dissent is increasingly criminalized and legal systems are weaponized to suppress opposition. In recent months, these trends have escalated into direct assaults on the basic institutions of democratic governance. In Romania, to give one example, an entire election was annulled because it delivered the wrong outcome, while other countries contemplate similar measures too.

In theory, all this is being carried out in the name of defending democracy. In truth, the purpose is clear: to help ruling elites maintain their grip on power in the face of a historic collapse of legitimacy. Whether they will succeed in doing so remains to be seen. What is clear, though, is that the stakes are enormous. If elites manage to entrench their control through increasingly authoritarian means, the West will enter a new era of managed democracy — or democracy in name only. If they fail, and in the absence of a coherent alternative, the resulting vacuum may give way to deepening instability, social unrest and systemic crisis. Either way, the outlook for the future of Western democracy is grim.

Critics have been raising alarms about this elite-driven democratic backsliding for years. As far back as 2000, political scientist Colin Crouch coined the term “post-democracy” to describe the fact that, even though Western societies boasted the trappings of freedom, they had increasingly become a meaningless facade. Elections, Crouch argued, had become tightly managed spectacles, orchestrated by professional persuaders who operated within a shared neoliberal consensus — pro-market, pro-business, pro-globalization — and offered voters little choice on fundamental political or economic questions. Citizens, for their part, played a passive role, helpless in the face of political and corporate power. Politics, Crouch said, was “slipping back into the control of privileged elites in the manner characteristic of pre-democratic times”.

Crouch was writing at the peak of what Francis Fukuyama famously called the end of history. In the political scientist’s telling, the Cold War’s end, and the global triumph of Western liberal democracy, marked the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”. Subsequent upheavals — especially following the 2007-8 financial crisis — shattered any illusion of history’s halt. Yet Fukuyama’s core argument wasn’t so much that the clock of history had stopped spinning, but that, from then on, there would be no essential challenge to liberal democracy and market capitalism, deemed the pinnacle of social evolution.

For a while, Fukuyama’s prediction proved correct. The historical defeat of socialism shrank the ideological space in the West, foreclosing any fundamental challenge to capitalism and enabling the emergence of a technocratic, depoliticized governance model underpinned by the “TINA” (There Is No Alternative) consensus around neoliberalism — centered on individual responsibility, market hegemony and globalization. Left-wing protests, whether against globalization or the Iraq War, failed to transition into formal politics. On the contrary, much of the post-Cold War Left, having abandoned class conflict for liberal-cosmopolitan identity politics, became a legitimizing force for an aggressive “progressive neoliberalism” — a fusion of pseudo-progressivism and neoliberal economic policies.

Geopolitically, meanwhile, US “hyperpower” status allowed it to aggressively assert global hegemony, creating a unipolar “new world order”. This was underpinned by structural economic shifts within the West: the decline of traditional manufacturing, and the Fordist-Keynesian social contract, replaced by services, labor dispersion, precarity and fragmentation. Most Western countries saw manufacturing employment decline by a third-to-half in absolute numbers. This pulverized the working class as a unified political subject — along the way wrecking trade unions and other material symbols of postwar mass politics.

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This historical trend was exacerbated by policies deliberately aimed at reducing labor’s bargaining power (anti-union laws, labor market flexibilization), and promoting privatized consumerism and apathy. Meanwhile, decision-making processes were increasingly insulated from democratic pressures, chiefly through the surrendering of national prerogatives to supranational institutions and super-state bureaucracies such as the European Union. This strategy of depoliticizing democracy birthed what some have called “post-politics”: a regime where political spectacle thrives, but where systemic alternatives to the neoliberal status quo are not just repressed but foreclosed. The American journalist Thomas Friedman aptly described the post-political neoliberal regime as one where “policy choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke” — minor variations within an unchallenged framework.

The concept of post-politics inevitably intersects with that of democracy. A minimalist view of democracy, focused only on rules and elections, suggests it survived the “end of history”, as formal institutions persisted and in some cases expanded (such as in former communist states). Yet substantive democracy — meaning citizens’ ability to actively shape government policy and the political agenda — has eroded dramatically. With no systemic alternative, politics and substantive democracy withered, resulting in declining voter turnout. One might say that the defining characteristic of post-democracy is that, despite the existence of elections, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. Instead, power and influence are concentrated in the hands of a small subset of society.

Of course, since authors like Crouch first diagnosed this hollowing out of democracy from within, things have become exponentially worse, especially in the wake of the financial crisis. The post-democratic politics of the neoliberal era were actually intensified during the 2010s, becoming increasingly repressive and authoritarian. In the EU, under the pretext of responding to the financial and euro crises, the bloc’s supranational institutions (notably the ECB and European Commission) dramatically expanded their powers, imposing budgetary rules and structural reforms on member states without democratic oversight.

Beyond these institutional shifts, meanwhile, unelected elites increasingly interfered in the democratic processes of member states. The ECB’s “monetary coup” against Berlusconi in 2011, where the central bank effectively forced the prime minister to leave office by making his ouster the precondition for further support for Italian bonds and banks, is one good example here. The financial blackmail of Greece’s Tsipras government is another. Taken together, anyway, these events led some observers to suggest that the EU was becoming a “post-democratic prototype” — one fiercely opposed to national sovereignty and democracy both.

The scorched earth left behind by the financial crisis, and the elite-imposed austerity that followed, fueled in the mid-2010s our century’s first major anti-establishment uprisings: Brexit, Trump, the Yellow Vests and growing anti-EU sentiment across Europe. This mass awakening seemingly marked the “end of the end of history”, a widespread rejection of the post-Cold War neoliberal order. Even so, these challenges ultimately failed — absorbed or neutralized by the establishment through repression and ideological counter-offensives.

In this sense, the pandemic, beyond its epidemiological nature, can be interpreted as a “deep structural event” that accelerated this authoritarian centralization of power. Governments inflated the danger of the virus to sweep aside democratic procedures, militarize societies, crack down on liberties and implement unprecedented measures of social control — in the process “freezing” democratic politics and sapping whatever energy was left from the populist movements of the late 2010s.

Similar authoritarian dynamics resurged with the Russia-Ukraine conflict, with the media-political establishment smearing, censoring and even punishing voices critical to Western hawkishness. Just over a month ago, the EU, in a shocking and utterly unprecedented decision, sanctioned three EU citizens — banning them from traveling through the EU and freezing their bank accounts — for allegedly engaging in “pro-Russian propaganda”.

At the same time, new populist threats to the established order have emerged, predominantly from the Right. But so far, these too have failed to disrupt the status quo, partly because the West’s increasingly unpopular and delegitimized elites have turned to ever more brazen forms of repression to influence electoral outcomes and suppress these challenges. The Romanian case marked a fateful escalation: elites, backed by NATO and the EU, overturned a presidential election result, barring the populist candidate via unsubstantiated claims of Russian interference.

These events signal a disturbing trend: elites no longer limit themselves to “managing” electoral outcomes through “soft” or covert means — media manipulation, censorship, lawfare, economic pressure and intelligence operations. Rather, they are increasingly willing to discard the formal structures of democracy altogether. In retrospect, the “post-democratic” era of technocratic managerialism described by Crouch appears positively benign by comparison. All this repression is carried out in the name of defending democracy from so-called internal threats (populists) and external ones (foreign adversaries). Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that its true aim is shoring up elite power.

Most anti-establishment analyses of the current “crisis of democracy”, however, rest on flawed assumptions: that the current phase deviates from a historical norm; that postwar social-democratic capitalism was truly democratic; and that a return to it is possible. These assumptions crumble under scrutiny.

Western liberal democracy, even minimally defined as representative government based on universal suffrage, is a very recent phenomenon. Full male suffrage emerged in a limited number of countries only between the middle of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Women’s suffrage generally came after the Second World War. Effective voting rights for racial minorities, such as African Americans, arrived decades later. In short, democracy as universal adult suffrage, regardless of wealth, property, race or class, has existed for mere decades. Previously, it was the exclusive domain of propertied elites, or else based on sex or skin color.

Besides, as noted above, democracy is about something far more substantial than the mere act of voting. If it means anything, it must surely allow citizens to influence the state’s direction and shape the political agenda on fundamental issues — whether immigration, foreign policy, or the overall trajectory of social and economic policy. It’s hard to claim Western democracy is thriving on those terms. Yet that still leaves one more question: if “real democracy” is now dead, was it ever alive at all?

For a relatively short period — roughly between the Forties and the Seventies — we did witness a form of democracy that was decidedly more substantive than what exists today. Over these decades, often described as the “golden age” of capitalism, the working classes were integrated into the West’s political systems for the first time in history. This allowed them to gain a significant influence over the political agenda, leading to a substantial expansion of social, economic and political rights, in a context of growing politicization of the masses. The contrast to the post-political period is very stark indeed.

All the same, it’d be wrong to idealize the mid-century West. Even then, democracy in its substantive sense remained heavily constrained. Though the ruling classes were forced — under pressure from popular movements, the Cold War, and the threat of social unrest — to extend voting rights and acknowledge a range of political and social rights, they did not do so willingly. On the contrary, they were often driven by the fear that the masses could pose a real threat to the established social order — that workers might use democracy to overturn existing power relations.

As a result, alongside economic concessions, Western elites also constrained democratic participation in various ways. Modern constitutional systems — including nascent supranational ones like the European Court of Justice, established in 1952 — explicitly limited popular sovereignty. Elected governments were prevented from enacting certain economic or social policies, or even challenging existing international alliances. All the while, power shifted. Parliaments got weaker, and technocrats and judges grew more powerful, each in their way proving capable of overriding national laws. This was often justified as a way of protecting democracy from what elites feared could be the irrational or destabilizing demands of the masses — a longstanding argument in liberal political thought that equates too much popular participation with the risk of populism, mob rule or economic irresponsibility.

In some countries, the concept of “militant democracy” became a further means to limit the popular will. In Germany, for example, it legitimized the banning of political parties, most notably the country’s Communist Party. State authorities, supported by media and institutional elites, systematically repressed demands for deeper democratization, whether via police force, media delegitimization or institutional restructuring. Meanwhile, Western “permanent states” — the military, intelligence and security apparatuses — exercised considerable influence behind the scenes, generally under the direction of the US. That infamously included terrorist acts aimed at curbing the power of Left parties and movements, for example through Gladio. In short, from the very beginning of modern liberal democracy, the ruling classes actively worked to contain democracy within the boundaries of what they deemed acceptable politics.

All the same, for a while, the organized power of the masses was indeed able to constrain, to a greater degree than ever before, the power of capital. As noted, however, this brief period of relative substantive democracy depended on a unique confluence of factors. As these conditions crumbled from the mid-Seventies, the marriage between capitalism and democracy dissolved.

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The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the symbolic end of this era. In the decades since, we have witnessed a steady erosion of democratic norms — a process that has accelerated dramatically in recent years. Relevant, here, is Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception”, whereby constitutional safeguards are suspended to impose decisions unachievable via normal democratic channels. Yet as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben emphasized over 20 years ago, the state of exception has now become a permanent condition in Western states.

This, of course, is a paradox: if it is permanent, then, by definition, it is no longer a state of exception. It becomes the rule. But is this permanent state of exception unique to the “post-democratic” era? An analysis of the postwar era suggests not. Rather, it is a fundamental characteristic of the state itself, even in its liberal-democratic guise. This challenges common conceptions of the state: across the Western world, we are accustomed to identifying the state with the executive and with parliament, assuming that these institutions act in accordance with constitutions and the rule of law.

But this is a misunderstanding: the state doesn’t coincide with the institutions of representative democracy. Rather, the two belong to entirely distinct spheres of politics. On the one hand, there is the politics of the state. On the other, there is what we might call popular politics, embodying popular sovereignty and typified by political parties, trade unions, social movements and civil society. The state operates with a significant degree of autonomy from the latter, meaning it is not only largely independent of civil society, but also of parliaments and even governments themselves.

In theory, after all, state bureaucracies act as neutral executors of government policy. In reality, they often act independently of, or even in opposition to, elected parliaments and governments, particularly when it comes to protecting institutional continuity, legal norms or elite interests. Supreme and constitutional courts, for example, frequently rule against government policies — especially when it comes to controversial issues like immigration. The way in which the Bank of England derailed Liz Truss’s infamous mini-budget is another example here. This phenomenon is obviously much more pronounced when national governments are subordinated to supranational institutions, as in the European Union. And then, of course, you have the military and intelligence bureaucracies, which today arguably exercise more influence than ever before (see, for instance, the Russiagate hoax).

The state thus emerges as a social organism endowed with its own internal logic and continuity, capable of pursuing goals and directions often independent of those declared or pursued by the political leadership of the day. This has always been true — even if, depending on the relative balance of class forces within society, the state may at times be forced to make concessions to the forces of popular politics. In other words, then, today’s crisis doesn’t represent democracy’s sudden collapse, but instead the unveiling of how power truly works. The contemporary crisis of Western democracy exposes the limits of formal democratic institutions, bringing the logic of state power into blindingly sharp relief.

The future, unfortunately, seems bleak. The conditions enabling the brief period of substantive democracy are gone, and unlikely to return soon. In a real sense, substantive democracy is dead. Even so, the unraveling geopolitical order underpinning Western dominance — challenged by the emergence of a multipolar order underpinned by the rise of powers like China — marks a profound political and economic shift. The erosion of Western hegemony is weakening its elites, whose dominance has long relied on both internal suppression and power projection abroad. Declining influence overseas exacerbates domestic discontent, especially when fueled by rising and systemic inequality.

This unraveling exposes the structural weaknesses of the Western system. Without the geopolitical stability and economic dominance that once masked its internal contradictions, elites are growing more vulnerable. Crucially, this decline also paves the way for a potential new order — not just a geopolitical reconfiguration, but a potential reimagining of political and economic systems. As Western elites grapple with their waning power, there are vast opportunities for alternative visions of governance and democracy.

What lies ahead is not merely a question of whether democracy can be “restored”, but whether a new political project can emerge to replace the exhausted model of elite-managed liberalism. The old order is collapsing, but the new has yet to be born. In this vacuum, anything can happen.

The most notable shift was from the right-wing ECR group, which includes Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. Previously, these MEPs had supported von der Leyen on several key proposals, but few voted against this motion, with most opting to desert it altogether. Also revealing was the support the motion received beyond its Right-populist sponsors: several MEPs from The Left group as well as non-affiliated Left-populist deputies from Germany and elsewhere, also backed it. Overall, von der Leyen secured the backing of 360 MEPs — 40 fewer than in her 2024 re-election.

A key point of convergence between these otherwise divergent forces is their shared opposition to the Commission’s belligerent stance on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Indeed, the no-confidence motion also referenced the Commission’s proposal of using an emergency clause in the EU treaty to shut MEPs out of approving a €150 billion loan scheme to boost the joint procurement of weapons by EU countries, mainly to increase military support for Ukraine.

It’s important to note that the motion of censure wasn’t just directed at von der Leyen but at her entire Commission — in particular, her second-in-command, Kaja Kallas, Commission Vice-President and High Representative for Foreign Affairs, the closest thing the EU has to a foreign minister.

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Kallas, the former Prime Minister of Estonia — a country of just 1.4 million people, fewer than reside in Paris — was confirmed as the EU’s new High Representative for Foreign Affairs in December of last year. Since then, she has come to personify, more vividly than anyone else, the EU’s toxic blend of incompetence, irrelevance and outright stupidity.

At a time when the war in Ukraine is unquestionably Europe’s foremost foreign policy challenge, it is difficult to imagine anyone less suited to the role than Kallas, whose deep-seated hostility towards Russia borders on obsession. On her very first day in the job, during a trip to Kyiv, she tweeted: “The European Union wants Ukraine to win this war” — a statement that immediately caused unease in Brussels, where officials viewed it as out of step with settled EU language two years into the war. “She is still acting like a prime minister”, one diplomat commented.

Just months before her appointment, she proposed breaking Russia into “small states” and, since then, has repeatedly demanded the full restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders, including Crimea — a position that effectively rules out negotiations. While even Donald Trump has acknowledged that Ukrainian Nato membership is a non-starter, Kallas insists it remain a goal — despite it having been a red line for Russia for nearly two decades. Kallas has even declared that “if we don’t help Ukraine further, we should all start learning Russian”. Never mind that Russia has no strategic, military or economic reason to attack the EU. Earlier this year, she denounced Trump’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war, dismissing them as a “dirty deal”, which explains why US Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly cancelled a scheduled meeting with her in February.

Kallas’s single-minded fixation on Russia has rendered her virtually silent on every other foreign policy issue. As former UK diplomat Ian Proud, who served at the British Embassy in Moscow from 2014 to 2019, observed, she comes across as a “single-issue High Representative” who is “intent only on sustaining the decade-long European policy on non-engagement with Russia, whatever the economic cost”.

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Her aggressive, unilateral rhetoric — often delivered without prior consultation with member states — has alienated not only openly Euro- and Nato-sceptic governments in Hungary and Slovakia, but also countries like Spain and Italy, which, while broadly aligned with Nato’s Ukraine policy, don’t share Kallas’s assessment of Moscow as an imminent threat to the EU. “If you listen to her it seems we are at war with Russia, which is not the EU line”, one EU official complained.

Technically, the High Representative’s role is to reflect the consensus of the member states as an extension of the Council, not to freelance as a supranational policymaker. Yet, Kallas interprets her role otherwise, repeatedly acting as though she speaks on behalf of all Europeans — a top-down, anti-democratic approach that is symptomatic of a broader authoritarian trend supercharged by von der Leyen.

Despite her proclamations about defending democracy, Kallas herself has no democratic mandate. Not only was she never elected to her current office, but her party — the Estonian Reform Party — received fewer than 70,000 votes in the last European Parliament elections, representing less than 0.02% of the European population. Von der Leyen, though, has packed her Commission with these like-minded Baltic officials — hailing from a region of just over six million people — to fill key defense and foreign policy posts. These appointments reflect a strategic alignment between von der Leyen’s centralizing ambitions and the ultra-hawkish worldview of the Baltic political class. Both share an unwavering commitment to the NATO line and a deep hostility to any diplomacy with Moscow.

Kallas’s anti-Russian zeal made her a natural choice for the job. But rarely mentioned is the fact that Kallas’s own family, far from being the victim of Soviet oppression, actually lived a relatively comfortable life as part of the Soviet establishment — or what may very well be considered the Soviet middle class.

In fact, Kaja Kallas was born into one of Estonia’s most powerful political families — a family whose rise was facilitated, in no small part, by the very Soviet system she now demonizes. Her father, Siim Kallas, was an influential member of the Soviet apparatchik and then a key figure in Estonian post-Soviet politics, eventually becoming Prime Minister before serving as a European Commissioner for over a decade. Few will be surprised to learn that immediately after completing her studies, in 2010, Kaja decided to enter politics and joined the Reform Party — her father’s own party — nor that she followed his footsteps in moving to Brussels after serving as Prime Minister from 2021 to 2024. It’s hard to shake the idea that elite continuity and inherited privilege had a helping hand. One is also left wondering, given her upbringing, whether her aggressive anti-Russian posture is a sincerely held conviction, or a cover for personal ambition.

One story sheds particularly interesting light on her geopolitical attitude. In 2023, when Kallas was still Prime Minister, three major Estonian newspapers called for her resignation after it emerged that her husband’s transport company had continued to do business with Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. However, Kallas dismissed the scandal and refused to resign, claiming no wrongdoing, sparking accusations of hypocrisy: demanding the total economic isolation of Russia on one hand, while turning a blind eye to her own family’s business ties with the country.

All things considered, Kallas is dramatically ill-suited for the job — stumbling from one blunder to the next. Only recently, she managed to offend nearly every Irish citizen by suggesting that Ireland’s neutrality stems from not having experienced atrocities such as “mass deportations” or “suppression of culture and language” — a bizarre statement, given Ireland’s long history of British colonial rule and the bloodshed of the Troubles.

Some blunders are far more consequential. In a recent meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Kallas demanded that China condemn Russia’s actions in Ukraine and fall in line with the “rules-based international order”. Yi, usually soft-spoken, responded sharply, noting that China had not supported Russia militarily — but also had no intention of seeing Moscow defeated, since that would simply bring the West’s wrath upon China next. He may have been alluding to Kallas’s earlier remark: “If Europe cannot defeat Russia, how can it take on China?”. That a senior EU official would frame global affairs in such stark, confrontational terms reflects an astonishing lack of diplomatic nuance.

The fact that Kallas felt comfortable lecturing China on international law and the “rules-based order” reveals not only a striking blindness to Europe’s diminished global standing, but also a profound lack of self-awareness about how the EU’s double standards are viewed in Beijing and across the Global South. While loudly condemning Russian attacks on civilians, Kallas has consistently whitewashed — or outright endorsed — Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. A recently leaked EU report confirmed that Brussels acknowledged a long time ago that Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza, including “starvation, torture, indiscriminate attacks and apartheid” — yet Kallas has neither condemned Israel nor questioned EU-Israel ties. Similarly, she said nothing about US threats to annex Greenland and supported the US-Israeli bombing of Iran — a clear violation of international law.

This selective moralism has done lasting damage to the EU’s credibility, particularly in the eyes of the Global South. But to lay the blame solely at Kallas’s feet would be a mistake. In the end, it’s not Kallas who should concern us most, but the system that made her possible — a system that rewards the loudest hawks, holds scant regard for democracy, and replaces statesmanship with social media posturing. If Europe continues on this path, it won’t just lose its place in the world; it will become the most vivid expression of the West’s broader slide into kakistocracy — government by the worst, the least qualified and the most unscrupulous.

I am going to put my head on the block to predict that this crisis could come back sooner than we think. Last time, it was the southern Europeans who triggered it. This time, it is the northern Europeans with their relentless push for an increase in defense spending to 5% of GDP.

In 2010, a Greek deficit, overshot by some $20 billion, triggered the worst financial crisis in Europe since the Great Depression. But this is a tiny amount compared to the extra defense spending European countries are about to commit: $500 billion, by my calculations, every year. The Greek deficit was a finance minister taking his eye off the ball, but our increase in military spending is a life sentence. After 10 years, we will have spent a cool $5 trillion. This is on top of what we are spending already.

People get easily fazed by large numbers. Let’s put this into perspective. When the Labour government in the UK cut off the winter fuel payments to pensioners, that saved them less than $1.8 billion. We all remember the furious political reactions and the botched U-turn. If the UK was really serious about meeting the Nato 5%-of-GDP target, the UK government would have to spend a cool $100 billion each year. That’s 55 times as much as the savings on the fuel subsidies. In fact, it is more than half of the UK’s entire welfare budget, excluding pensions.

It is not just the UK. You are looking at numbers that are off the charts for every Western European country. This week, Nato leaders are about to descend on the Hague to agree the fiscally most impactful decision that politicians have ever committed to in modern history. They do so without an electoral mandate. None of them campaigned for this, including those who came to power in recent elections, like Keir Starmer or Friedrich Merz. None of them received a formal mandate from the parliaments, which are ultimately responsible for fiscal expenditures in Western democracies. They are doing this because Donald Trump just pulled this number out of a hat. It was just a number. He could have said four, or six. Nobody did a study beforehand on what Nato actually needs, and how the needed capabilities are best acquired. We are talking about the biggest fiscal program in human history — because Europeans are dead scared that Trump will feed us to the Russian bear.

This is not how military investments are normally done. The right way to do this is to start identifying the threat, and the options available to counter it. Europe will undoubtedly have to purchase capabilities it does not currently have — especially in areas such as electronic warfare, cybersecurity, satellite-based systems, and drone technology. What stands out about European defense spending is not how little we spend compared to the US, but how inefficiently we spend it. Europe has six times as many weapons systems as the US. Our drones, tanks, missiles and warships are incompatible with each other. Nato-Europe has 178 weapon systems, compared to 30 in the US. European countries have a dozen different types of howitzers, a type of artillery gun designed to fire projectiles on a high-arching trajectory. According to Reuters, the Europeans spend some €6-11 million on each one of them, while the US spends €2 million.

Would a rational security planner not start with that kind of consideration? If you were really serious about raising Europe’s defensive capabilities, you would pool this. Europe does not need a single army, but it does need a single defense procurement agency. It cannot be the EU, if only because the UK and Norway are not members.

You may accuse me of being a bean counter. We live in some of the richest countries in the world, and we are facing an existential threat. So who cares about the cost? I would agree that the threat is for real. Russia is fighting wars in Europe. It is implicated in hostile activities in the Baltic Sea. It interferes in elections and is behind cyberattacks against Western digital infrastructure. Putin has ordered the use of chemical weapons in the UK to hunt down former spies. I also believe it is important that we bolster our defenses to disabuse Russian leaders of any idea that they could test Nato’s security guarantee with impunity. We should not talk ourselves into a war, as some hotheads are doing now. But we should be in a position to fight one.

I doubt that our new NATO target will help us do this. Given the lack of any political willingness to pool our defense purchases, what will Putin make of our newly announced 5% spending target? He is already spending 6-8% of Russia’s economic output on defense, but the impact is much higher than those numbers suggest. He does not have a dozen different howitzer systems. Through presidential diktat, he redirects private-sector industrial production to defense. He pays a fraction of the cost of defense equipment that we do. His technology may not be as advanced as ours. But unlike Western countries, Russia is capable of scaling up production quickly. Putin also gets supplies of weapons and soldiers from North Korea, drones from Iran, and dual-use advanced technology from China. The West, and especially the so-called Russia experts that keep popping up in the media, persistently underestimated the resilience of Russian military supply chains. Putin has been a much more formidable warrior than Western experts believed he would be.

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So how would a leader, who has been in power for a quarter of a century and who has fought several wars, react to the NATO announcements of an increase in defense spending that avoids any painful decisions? Worse still, many NATO countries like France or Germany will have to fund this through debt because they do not have the political majorities to raise taxes or cut spending. Germany would have to spend $130 billion per year extra on defense. That’s about the size of the federal government’s social budget. They are not going to replace their welfare systems with food stamps, are they? That is the kind of thing Putin might do.

If NATO goes down the road of debt-funded defense spending, chances are that the bond markets will attack us before Putin does. The infamous bond market vigilantes will fight on the side of the Russians. They were the ones that brought the sovereign debt crisis to the eurozone. Their job is to attack countries that aren’t financially sustainable. Low-growth Western European economies are not going to grow out of this debt as they did after the Second World War. A debt-funded increase in defense spending of that magnitude could push some Western countries over the brink. Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, is the only Western leader to come out openly against the NATO defense spending program for exactly this reason. It would destabilize his country, he said. But Spain is not the only country in trouble, or even the main one. Sánchez is the only guy who admits this.

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Putin knows that Western countries do not have political majorities in favor of making sacrifices to support such high levels of defense spending. A debt-funded defense program will reinforce this view.

He raised his own defense spending by seizing foreign assets. He also tapped Russia’s sovereign wealth fund. He increased company taxes, and income taxes for higher earners. And he is about to do something that we Europeans are struggling with: intensify defense cooperation with friendly countries, especially China. One of Russia’s and China’s strategic advantages is their large supplies of important commodities. What has become clear in the US-China trade dispute is that China is willing to use its monopoly of rare earths as a geopolitical weapon. These magnets are a vital component not only for electric car engines but also in military aircraft. Russia will have unlimited access to these magnets.

China will not cut off the West completely, but it will discriminate. The West has already started to lose its technological dominance which it enjoyed since the Seventies — the time when the Soviets started to fall behind. In AI, for example, China has caught up with the West and is the world leader in solar technology. The Chinese have more people. And their purchasing power is getting bigger than ours.

Perhaps the best thing that can happen to the West is that they will cheat themselves out of the new defense spending target — so that the 5% will end up like just another Western phantom spending program. Keir Starmer wants to reclassify £5 billion of investments in rural broadband rollout as a key military priority. I am hearing that the Germans are thinking of counting an electricity-price subsidy as a military investment. The truth is that we do not want to give up our creature comforts, let alone our national sovereignty, for defense procurement.

We are spreadsheet warriors. Putin knows it.

Even before the tariff tiff, Europeans were at risk of a geopolitical squeeze between the US and China. In trade, this is now happening. Despite Trump’s U-turn last week, we are still in a worst-case economic scenario. American tariffs on Chinese imports are now 145% — a level at which nations stop trading, even if Trump has since made an exemption for electronic goods and components. In all this, Europe emerges as the loser: it is far more exposed to trade shocks than America because it relies more on foreign trade.

How, then, can Europeans protect their interests? My advice is first and foremost not to get distracted by military matters. What is the greater threat to Europe — the US abandoning multilateral free trade, or a Russian invasion of Northern Europe in the mid-2030s? In the short term, it’s the former. While Russia has strong defense capabilities, it will not have the resources to fight another big war for at least 10 years. Europe will need to get its military in shape before then, but this is a medium-to-long-term job. By contrast, the split in the transatlantic alliance and the assault on the international trading system is taking place right now. It’s the threat we should be most focused on today.

An adequate response to this threat would require deeper cooperation between the EU and the UK. But this means not getting sidetracked by another Brexit debate. When the European Commission announced it would open talks with the UK on defense cooperation, France immediately suggested that this would be a good moment to re-open the EU-UK talks about fish. Never underestimate the level of pettiness in European politics.

The most immediate joint action I would recommend is a coordinated macroeconomic policy response in the form of a fiscal stimulus for consumption and investment. Perhaps Canada could be roped in, or even China. Now is a great moment to do this because it would protect Europe and the UK from a sharp recession — plus, it wouldn’t cost very much. The infamous bond vigilantes are currently busy fighting Trump — and they can’t fight on two fronts at once. Last week, the US bond market came close to seizing up as people lost confidence in the future role of the dollar as a global reserve currency. If you move your money out of the US, you have to move it somewhere. This is why the euro is rising against the dollar.

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Economic stimulus would not only mitigate the economic downturn in Europe, it would also help to rebalance the global economy. The problem of global imbalances is not really about trade, as Trump erroneously insists. It’s about the US saving too little, and the rest of the world, especially China and the EU, saving too much. The difference between what a country saves and what it invests is approximately the same as the difference between what it exports and what it imports. It is the financial side of this equation that drives the product side, and not the other way round.

If the EU, the UK, Canada, and perhaps even China came together to agree on a joint stimulus, it would be a win-win for everyone. If the Trump administration is genuinely keen to solve the problem of global imbalances, as members of Trump’s team suggest, then they should welcome such an antidote.

My next suggestion will probably go down less well with the Americans. The EU and UK should begin to replace a traditional diplomacy centered around relationships with a diplomacy that prioritizes the national, or European, interest. After all, Trump’s tariffs do not benefit Europe: not a single European country can align with Trump on this issue and emerge victorious.

If the US and China decide to fight it out, Europe would be wise not to take sides. Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, has so far refrained from doing so: “We shouldn’t jump in with both feet to retaliate”, he told the Liaison Committee of the House of Commons. This is exactly the right thing to do. And Europe should follow his lead by staying neutral. After all, Trump is not our friend. He could not care less who wins the Russia-Ukraine war, in which he casts himself as a neutral arbiter. He does not play on our team.

Europe should see the US and China as strategic competitors, not as enemies. For the EU, now would be a prime moment to revisit the EU-China investment agreement. Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron negotiated the deal with President Xi in 2020, but the European Parliament shelved it a year later, after China banned a few MEPs from visiting. The relationship became frosty, though it has been thawing lately. When Rachel Reeves, the UK chancellor, visited China recently, she came out in favor of greater cooperation. It would be easier to cooperate, however, if the EU, the UK, and Canada acted together. If only we weren’t so afraid of provoking Trump’s fury.

Of course, any cooperation with China must respect national security interests. It would be wrong for Europe or the UK to rely on China for critical infrastructure — we should not revert to the bad old days when we did not care about security. But cooperation is not the same as dependency. The goal is to make sure that the global trading system can continue to function, with or without America.

The alternative to this would be dire. The US and China could someday stop trading with one another altogether. In such a scenario, China would start selling its unsold goods to Europe at knock-down prices, driving European competitors out of business. The EU and the UK might then respond by imposing tariffs on China. As we saw last week, China would retaliate immediately. The world trading system would suffer a cardiac arrest.

Yet while greater cooperation makes perfect sense for the EU, the UK might be wary of it. The island nation is still holding out for a trade deal with Trump, and hoping that the President will drop the 10% tariff. If this were to happen, the UK would find itself in a very small group of privileged American trading partners. China will clearly not be part of that group. And I doubt the EU will be either, especially if Trump imposes a 20% tariff on the bloc, and it retaliates. Perhaps South Korea, Vietnam, or Japan will make the cut.

But this would mean the world splitting into competing tariff zones, with the EU and the UK on opposite sides of a new global tariff border. And if Trump and Starmer were to agree to a trade deal, Trump would almost certainly insist that the UK mirror US tariff policy. He could not otherwise impose different tariffs on different countries.

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Would this make sense for the UK? In 2023, the UK imported £115 billion of goods and services from the US and exported £187 billion. That same year, it imported £466 billion from the EU and exported £356 billion. So the UK imports roughly four times as much from the EU as it does from the US. And it exports twice as much to the EU than it does to the US. The trade numbers with China are smaller, but it all adds up. With this in mind, it would not make sense for the UK to break with the EU and Canada to join Team America.

Naturally, trade numbers are not cast in stone. They would change if the UK were to align with the US. In a world where many services are delivered digitally, and where container shipping is cheap, geography matters less than it used to. And there is at least one scenario in which it would benefit the UK to align with America: if the EU were to retaliate against American tariffs, the UK would be foolish to join in. Post-Brexit Britain cannot afford a tariff war.

The UK and the EU have three options now: align with the US, become more independent, or do nothing and let others decide their fate. My own preference would be the second course of independence. My hunch is that the UK will try to stick with its traditional alliance with the US for as long as possible. I see the EU splintering: Italy, under Meloni, will align with the US. So will Hungary. And so may some eastern European countries that prioritize security over trade. Meanwhile, France will seek greater independence, and Spain will favor a closer alliance with China.

What about Germany? Friedrich Merz, the presumptive next German chancellor, would be more inclined than any of his predecessors to seek a closer alliance with the US. He did not agree with the EU’s negotiating position on Brexit. What the Germans and the British have in common is that they are instinctive free traders. If there is any hope for Europe to lead a world of free-trading nations, Germany and Britain would need to be at the forefront.

This is, after all, a time for action. Either we rise to the occasion now, or else we allow the era of global free trade to slip from our fingers — and with it, all our prosperity.

Note well, though: it’s a trade agreement, not a free-trade deal. The difference means a lot to Greer, a lawyer who served as a senior aide to Robert Lighthizer, President Trump’s trade envoy during his first term and a ferocious critic of neoliberal globalization. Having assumed his former boss’s job in the second term, Greer also channels his worldview.

“When people talk about a free-trade deal,” he tells me, “the objective is: ‘Let’s just liberalize as much as we can, as quickly as we can, and we’ll just see where the chips fall economically. And let’s be as expansive as possible in the things that we’re covering.’ And as you know, my view is different.” To Greer, trade is only worthwhile if it’s “reciprocal, fair, balanced, and contributes to the economic security of the United States”.

The new UK-US deal — an “agreement in principle”, he insists, not the final document — reflects this narrower account of trade. “We are being somewhat picky about areas where we want to increase trade or maintain trade.”

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For starters, “we are essentially maintaining our tariffs as a general matter”, says Greer. That is, the Trump administration’s 10% levy will remain in place as a sort of default. However, “there are areas where the United Kingdom [has] had higher tariffs and barriers to our products, where they will bring those down. On our side, we will find appropriate accommodation, consistent with US economic and national security interests, on things like autos and steel, while protecting our own industries.”

But is there any pathway for Britain to escape the 10% tariff altogether? “The main thing for Britain”, he says, “is they have an opportunity to go into the economic-security fold of the United States”, particularly with respect to sectors that Washington otherwise considers security-sensitive, such as automotives, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductors.

“Obviously,” he adds, “the British want to be able to take care of other sectors in their economy, etc. And there is a discussion to be had on that. But the nature of our national emergency” — persistently high, across-the-board trade deficits — “means that we need to be able to keep that 10%, and we expect that average tariff rates will remain high.”

Still, the agreement — the holy grail of UK politics for nearly a decade — was only made possible by Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. “Brexit made it possible for the UK to do this,” Greer tells me. “Especially with respect to tariff levels. The UK now controls its own tariff levels and can make its own decisions about what it wants to protect and what it doesn’t.”

Likewise, on non-tariff barriers such as regulatory hassles, “the UK now has sovereignty over these matters.” Here, one sticking point — the bane of US, UK, and European negotiators for at least the past two decades — has to do with Europe’s more stringent standards on agricultural products, particularly animal protein. Were “chlorinated chickens” a difficulty during Greer’s discussions with his counterparts?

“They certainly came up,” he says, “because that’s where we suffer so many barriers to the UK market”. Avoiding directly answering the poultry question, Greer says Washington anticipates “an expanded quota for American beef”, “a reduced on duty on that quota for beef”, and “a reduced tariff for American ethanol”. As for agricultural sanitary questions, “with any country you have to comply with their import rules, but we’re very happy to have that conversation with them”.

The haggling around these and other issues wasn’t easy. “I work directly with Varun Chandra,” a special adviser to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, “and Johnny Reynolds”, Britain’s secretary of state for business and trade. “These folks were professional, dedicated, and very tough negotiators, but at the same time very committed” to the special alliance.

Negotiations with Brussels are likely to prove even hairier. When I ask Greer which other trade conversations are advancing productively, he mentions India, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, Israel, Jordan, and the Philippines — but not the European Union. “It’s a variety of economies,” he notes. “The UK is the sixth largest economy in the world, India is one of the largest economies in the world; but also some smaller economies where it’s also important to make sure that American influence is felt and present.”

As for Brussels, “they have expressed an interest in negotiating”. The problem is that “they have philosophical, legal, and cultural aversion to what we’re doing. It can be very challenging. But I have a very friendly relationship with my counterpart there. And I believe that they are strongly interested in a deal. And we’re open to a way forward on that, too. But it’s not as advanced as [with] other economies.”

But if the deepest goal of the tariff regime is to contain China’s rise, and decouple the American economy from the Middle Kingdom’s, shouldn’t Washington take it easier on the Europeans, not least so they’re more likely to collaborate with the United States on issues like Taiwan? Greer disagrees.

“I would just frame that differently,” he says. “I know that that’s a very Washington thing to say. I know people say, ‘Oh, we’re just aligning everyone against China’. Fundamentally, this is less about tagging one certain foreign country or another. We have this problem of a giant trade deficit. Which has led … our manufacturing base being diminished, having a lack of working-class jobs, etc.”

Fundamentally, it is the erosion of America’s industrial base and working-class security that are Team Trump’s prime objectives. “Obviously, China is a big aspect of that”, he grants. “But we have other countries that send a lot of stuff, too, where they have a lot of over-capacity. So, when we’re looking at agreements, which are essentially modifications of our regime, we’re asking: Are they helping us address our emergency?”

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The new accord with Britain meets these criteria: “We have this deal with the UK, where they’re clearly giving us more market access, and other national-security-related measures, we can find a good accommodation that will ensure that we have protected supply chains. Those are the kinds of outcomes we’re looking for. We’re not trying to create two blocs.”

As one of the chief architects of the “Liberation Day” tariffs, Greer has maintained a relatively low profile, even in the United States. Yet it isn’t Donald Trump who pores over detailed trade tables and the minutiae of agricultural standards — it is Greer. Has the stock-market reaction to his policy vision made him at least a little queasy?

Not really. “There are a lot of indicators to the economy”, he replies. “So, of course, we watch these indicators to see what effect [our policies are having]. We find that the markets sometimes are good indicators. Sometimes they overreact, sometimes they underreact.”

Short-term alarm or optimism on Wall Street isn’t the best guide, he insists. “Right now, you have all the so-called smart people saying, ‘Well, we’re not seeing the effects of the new trade policies on the numbers yet — but we will!’ But it goes both ways. The first couple of weeks, they went, ‘Oh, well, look at the markets — this means everything’s bad.’ And then we got a really good jobs report. The GDP number was a little funky, but not quite as bad as some people thought it was going to be.”

Bottom line: “We are in the middle of a process, and taking any one data point and projecting a policy over the next months or years, it’s a dangerous thing to do. We watch it, we have to assess the indicators, but they can fluctuate based on imperfect information.” The Trump administration, in other words, believes that the US economy has enough juice to weather the epochal transition they have put in motion. And individual trade deals like the one with Britain can reassure market actors along the way.

No wonder Greer’s having an “up” day.

When Barnier was appointed Prime Minister after the long summer of indecision, Bayrou theorized that it would be better to come after Barnier’s downfall, because surely the parliament would find it harder to censure a government a second time. But this week, as the Assembly musters against him already, he may yet have to eat his words.

Bayrou’s nomination a month ago came as something of a surprise to the public, given how long he has been around without ever securing the top jobs. This time, though, Bayrou had left no one in any doubt that he wanted Prime Minister and President Macron was running out of options. The story his supporters tell is that he was summoned to the Elysée only for Macron to tell him he wanted someone more pliable and likely to take orders than Barnier had been. But after Bayrou threw a furious tantrum, threatening to withdraw his support in the national assembly, Macron backed down.

Just as Bayrou carries the whiff of angry desperation about him, then, so too does his government — some of whom have been hauled out of the political deep freeze. One is the former socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls. After resigning from the Socialist Party, Valls briefly sat as an MP for Macron’s party after the 2017 legislative elections, only to quit in an attempt to become the mayor of Barcelona. Another is Elisabeth Borne, a recent Prime Minister, whose reappearance was an unpleasant surprise for all those who took to the streets to oppose her pension reform bill.

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Most problematic for Bayrou’s government is that it hasn’t got a firm purchase in the National Assembly. This, after all, is what brought Barnier down. The appointment of Valls is a red rag to the socialist bull. Borne is also a snub to the Left, embodying, as she does, the much-hated pension reform. Bayrou is clearly hoping that his relatively cordial relations with Marine Le Pen will help him avoid the fate she handed Barnier as she worked with the Left to bring the last prime minister down.

Bayrou symbolically offered Marine Le Pen his support back in 2022, when she was struggling to acquire the necessary signatures to run in the presidential campaign (candidates have to secure at least 500 signatures from mayors across France). Back then, Bayrou argued that democracies are nourished by ideological differences and that candidates such as Le Pen should not be prevented from standing by an alliance of anti-far Right mayors. Le Pen’s memory is short, however. Her response to Bayrou’s nomination was the same it was to Barnier’s: he will be judged by his actions.

And so, this week, Bayrou’s theory about it being hard to censure a government a second time around is being put to the test: he delivered his speech of political intent on the 14 January and deftly avoided making any firm commitments for fear of angering one of the camps in the parliament. Instead, he presented a vision of government that evolved through time, adjusting its actions in line with the compromises it must make. It was impressive in its ability to transform a significant lack of commitment into a noble principle of government. Perhaps this is how the wily politician has survived so long — he was, after all, education secretary when Emmanuel Macron was still a love-struck student.

Reactions to his speech, and to the censure motion put forward by the far-Left La France Insoumise, suggest that Bayrou may be sticking around for a little longer. It seems he has succeeded in undoing the unity on the Left, at least with regards to the censure motion. The Socialist Party decided, in extremis, not to support it, thus in effect splitting the New Popular Front alliance which has been in place since the legislative elections last year. The sticking point for the Socialists was pension reform. Bayrou took a classic middle-way position: he refused to suspend the reform but he did say he would organize a three-month consultation. When pushed, he said he would be inclined to support a new deal for pensions should there be agreement as a result of the consultation. This was just about enough for the socialists.

As well as all the parties of government, including the center-right Républicains, making it clear they will not support the vote of censure, the far-Right appears is also on side. Jordan Bardella lambasted Bayrou’s speech but the Rassemblement National as a whole has opted to hold its fire. Only days after the death of Jean Marie Le Pen, the party’s co-founder, Marine Le Pen and Bardella are playing a somewhat longer game. Thinking of their electoral prospects over the next two years, neither wishes to be seen as the harbingers of doom nor as needlessly reckless or radical.

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In essence then, Bayrou’s calculation may have been correct. Bringing down a government is an exhilarating and dramatic gesture and a month ago it sent a clear message to the president, holed up in the Elysée Palace with a few of his cronies. But bringing down a second government would tell the country, and the world, that France has become ungovernable. There would, too, be serious consequences such as the need to survive without passing a proper budget and to pay increasingly higher interest on the renewal of its debt.

It would be quite wrong, though, to present Bayrou’s survival as some kind of political triumph or success. The cost of his strategy is considerable. As the prime minister tries his hardest to prevent the parliament from censuring him, it is hard to imagine that his government will pursue anything like a coherent plan for France. His legislative outputs will end up being an aggregate of whatever can make it through the parliament unscathed. Peace in the national assembly is no longer the means via which the government can pursue its program; it has become an end in itself. His is a government that will be defined not by what it does but simply by its capacity to survive.

This is a low bar, particularly given the challenges France is facing, from a faltering economy to the need to determine Europe’s response to the imminent arrival of Trump at the White House. It is unlikely that history will treat the Bayrou government very favorably, even if he does last longer than his predecessor.

Yet history’s severed heads have a troublesome habit of growing back. The Russian invasion of Ukraine served as a powerful reminder of this reality for the European mainstream, but other unresolved threads of the continent’s brutal and very recent past have also re-emerged in much more subtle ways.

Last week, Poles had hoped that one such long unresolved injustice, the matter of German reparations for the Nazi occupation during the Second World War, would be clarified during German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit to reset German-Polish relations under Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s new government. Back in 1953, under the rule of a Soviet-backed puppet government, Poland had formally renounced its claims to much of the reparations it had been promised, leaving the matter unsettled for decades. Yet the issue resurfaced under the previous Law and Justice Party (PiS) government, which, in an effort to appeal to its nationalistic base, argued that the 1953 declaration was inadmissible since it had been made by a government beholden to Russian interests. PiS intensified its efforts in 2022, when it formally requested that Berlin pay Poland over €1.3 trillion in reparations — the total estimated value of Polish wartime damages as determined by Poland’s Jan Karski Institute for War Losses. Although Tusk had previously supported such moves, his government appeared to soften its stance earlier this year, and signalled it was open to receiving other forms of compensation aside from cold hard cash. 

Tusk’s new approach and Germany’s newfound willingness to address the reparations issue didn’t emerge from a vacuum — both Poland’s swing from Eurosceptic populist rule to a pro-Brussels centrist government and the recent Rightward shift in the European Parliament have scrambled politics within the bloc. Despite its ultimate loss in this weekend’s elections, the recent success of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has forced Scholz to prepare for an unruly France in years to come and to look for allies wherever he can find them — opening the door for a rapprochement with a newly sympathetic Poland.

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At the joint press conference in Warsaw, though, despite saying all the right things about “a clear view of the past” and the “unmeasurable suffering” of Poles at the hands of Germany, Scholz dashed any hopes that Poland would receive anything close to what it is truly owed. Instead, he spoke of compensation for the few thousand still-living Polish victims of the Third Reich, the opening of a house of memory for such victims in Berlin, and closer defence cooperation with Poland along its eastern border with Russia and Belarus. In response to questions from journalists, he indirectly invoked Germany’s official state position that the 1953 decision had been legally binding, and that Berlin was no longer responsible for fulfilling its reparations obligations to Poland.

The backlash in Poland was immediate, and alongside the predictable criticism from PiS leaders such as President Andrzej Duda, commentators across Polish media denounced Scholz’s comments as “a sign of disregard for the Polish side by our Western ally and partner”. The importance of the matter to everyday Poles was also confirmed shortly after the visit — a new survey released last week found that a majority of Polish citizens supported continuing to demand compensation from Germany for the war.

Getting Germany to pay the full cost of reparations to Poland was always going to be a Herculean task politically, and PiS’s all-or-nothing approach had been bound to fail. But even in trying to make good with a Polish government that had pivoted back to his camp after years of PiS rule, Scholz offered Poland — which proportionally suffered more civilian deaths than any other nation during the war — little more than symbolic gestures and nice words about German guilt, all while leaning on flimsy, decades-old legal arguments. This attitude plays into a long-running and convenient logical fallacy that has allowed modern Germany to divorce itself from its Nazi past: that because it has reformed itself ideologically and spiritually since the Third Reich, it deserves to be tacitly absolved of its sins without having to foot the bill for them in full. 

This attitude, which hardly started with Scholz, underscores the enduring lack of understanding among modern German leaders when it comes to contemporary Polish political identity. Although wartime reparations themselves may not be front-of-mind for every Pole, Scholz’s unserious approach to the matter speaks to a much broader concern Poles have about Western Europe’s continued inability to treat their country with dignity in the international arena — especially at a time when Poland has become so crucial for countering the increasing threat to the continent from Russia. 

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This isn’t to say that Germany has been wholly dismissive of the reparations issue. In 1992, two years after German reunification, Berlin did in fact pay Poland a portion of what it was owed, granting Polish victims of the Nazis around €295 million before disbursing additional funds for Poles who had been forced into slave labour in years afterward. But throughout its relationship with Germany, Poland has repeatedly had to balance its historical grievances with the needs of the present. In 2004, shortly after Poland joined Germany as a member of the EU, the Polish government itself issued a statement confirming that it had lost its right to full reparations in 1953. In the interest of European integration, Poland found it more advantageous to let go of history and satisfy itself with what it had received from Germany, at least for the time being.

Yet on the eve of yet another opportunity to gain the recompense that their country is owed, Polish leaders’ contemporary political interests appear to have trounced earnest desires for full historical justice once again. With his eye on Poland’s most immediate concerns, Tusk declared that he had heard what he needed to hear from Scholz and agreed to effectively put the wrongs of the past aside in exchange for Germany’s help with the pressing security challenges on Poland’s doorstep.

It would, however, be in Tusk’s interest to keep up the pressure on Scholz to satisfy Poland’s demands. Arguments that he has been too conciliatory towards Germany and other European heavyweights have historically been easy fodder for the narratives of PiS and other Right-wing parties, and although Tusk’s party came out on top in Poland’s European elections last month, the far-Right Confederation party’s strong showing should set off alarm bells in his mind about the future of Poland’s electorate. His failure to secure meaningful reparations at such an opportune moment in Poland’s relationship with Germany would haunt his political prospects not only with Poland’s Right, but also with parts of his own base, too. While it may indeed be the case that Poland has no leg to stand on with regard to reparations under international law, as Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said in February of this year, “the issue of moral, financial and material compensation has never been realised”.

This point is particularly salient because the reparations process at the end of the war was indisputably tarnished by politics and corruption. At Potsdam in 1945, the Western Allies gave the USSR the right to dispense reparations from Germany on behalf of Poland, which, after the war, became a Soviet satellite state. Poland received only a portion of the machinery, raw materials and military hardware the Soviets seized from Germany on its behalf after the war, until of course the USSR compelled Poland to make its 1953 declaration in an effort absolve communist East Germany from further obligations. As a result, the country that would have likely benefited the most from its full share of reparations was robbed of them prematurely — a reality that, while unchangeable in the eyes of the law, remains otherwise indefensible to this day.

Germany has been critical for Poland’s post-Cold War development and national security, which has made these historical loose ends difficult to satisfactorily address. But adequately dealing with history and developing a mutually beneficial relationship should not be a binary choice — the latter would only be strengthened through the former. And even if full reparations to the tune of over €1 trillion is out of reach, alternative forms of compensation, like rebuilding historical buildings the Nazis destroyed across Poland, additional funds for economic development, and payments not just to still-living survivors, but also to the countless families across Poland that remain impacted by the war almost 80 years later are all on the table as substitutes.

Satisfying such material demands would be a step towards not only closing the darkest chapter in Polish-German relations and delivering justice for its victims, but also affirming that Poland is indeed an equal partner to Germany in a rapidly changing EU. While Europe’s West may be content to live out its post-historic fantasy, in Poland and other eastern members of the bloc, the past haunts our lives at every turn. As it becomes clearer that the EU’s destiny will be defined by its eastern half, acknowledging this and addressing it seriously is no longer a luxury for the European mainstream — rather, it has now become central to its very future. 

First came the market’s attack dogs. As soon as Macron called the election, a massive sell-off of French government bonds began, causing the “spread” between French and German government borrowing costs to rise to the highest level since the euro crisis. This has been described as a “natural” reaction of financial markets to the prospect of a RN-led government — and the “fiscally irresponsible” economic policies many expect it to pursue.

While the party hasn’t published a manifesto for the upcoming election, in the 2022 election Le Pen’s RN campaigned on a strongly interventionist-welfarist economic platform: it included reducing to 60 the retirement age (which Macron last year raised to 64, amid massive protests) and raising minimum pensions, increasing welfare support for families, massively subsidising energy bills, boosting healthcare spending and renationalising the highways. It represented a radical break with the neoliberal orthodoxy.

Back in 2022, the Institut Montaigne think tank estimated that Le Pen’s policies would increase France’s deficit, which currently stands at around 5.5% of GDP, by around €100 billion a year — hence the widespread accusations that a RN-led government would cause France’s deficit and debt to “spiral out of control” and potentially plunge the country into a fiscal crisis. Markets, we were told, are simply acting upon legitimate concerns about the sustainability of France’s deficit.

There are, however, several problems with this narrative. Most obviously, financial markets have no reason to be concerned about a higher deficit. Such concerns would only be justified if there were a real risk of France defaulting on its debt, but this is extremely unlikely: for the simple reason that the European Central Bank (ECB) would never allow it to happen, as it would mean the end of the euro.

Even more importantly, all this talk of “the markets” ignores the fact that the spread is ultimately determined by a central bank — in the EU’s case, the ECB — which always has the power to bring down interest rates by intervening in sovereign bond markets. We saw this clearly during the pandemic: despite France’s budget deficit ballooning to nearly 9% of GDP, bond yields on French government bonds actually fell below zero — as the ECB bought up all the new debt issuance. Indeed, even during the decade prior to the pandemic, France registered a relatively high deficit on average — well above the EU’s deficit-to-GDP limit of 3% — but very low bond yields, thanks to the ECB’s post-euro crisis quantitative easing (QE) programme.

Moreover, in 2022, despite the tapering of its pandemic emergency purchase programme, the ECB launched a new “anti-fragmentation tool”, the Transmission Protection Instrument, explicitly aimed at keeping spreads under control by allowing the central bank to purchase the government bonds of countries whose interest rates diverge excessively due to speculation. What is currently happening on the French bond market perfectly fits this scenario. The ECB could close the spread and put an end to the panic with the press of a button. In fact, one could argue this would be particularly justified: with all the talk of electoral interference, it’s hard to see why financial markets should be allowed to manipulate elections by spreading unwarranted panic.

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Yet the ECB has so far refused to take any action. “What we are seeing is a repricing but it is not in the world of disorderly market dynamics right now,” said Philip Lane, chief economist of the ECB. His comments were backed by ECB president Christine Lagarde. “We’re continuing to be attentive, but it’s limited to that,” she disclosed, signalling that the bank sees no reason for activating its bond-purchasing instrument.

Taken at face value, such comments would have us believe that the ECB has taken a technical decision based on arcane economic parameters. In reality, however, the ECB’s decision not to intervene has nothing to do with economics — and everything to do with politics. By looking the other way, the ECB is using the “bond vigilantes” as proxies through which to scare voters — and send a message to Le Pen. Adam Tooze has likened this “agreement” between bond markets and the ECB to that of “state-sanctioned paramilitaries delivering a punishment beating whilst the police look[s] on”. But look beyond the smokescreen, and it becomes apparent that it’s not the markets interfering in the French elections; it’s the ECB.

This isn’t the first time the ECB has engaged in financial and monetary blackmail to coerce governments into complying with the EU’s political-economic agenda. Former ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet made no secret of the fact that he effectively engineered the European “sovereign debt crisis” of 2009-2012, by refusing to support bond markets in order to pressure governments into consolidating their budgets and implementing “structural reforms”. But over the years, the ECB has gone even further than simply turning a blind eye to market speculation. On several occasions, it has engaged in speculation itself, engineering sell-offs of the bonds of certain countries, or other comparable actions, in order to plunge hostile governments into fiscal crises. Most recently, Giorgia Meloni and Lagarde have clashed on various occasions, with the latter often using the spread to turn the heat up on the Italian government.

What is playing out today in France, then, is nothing new. And yet, there is something unprecedentedly brazen about the ECB’s latest attempt at electoral manipulation. What we are witnessing is effectively an unholy alliance between an increasingly discredited national elite and the supranational institutions of the EU against the common “populist” threat. The strategy should be clear by now: the EU creates an artificial financial panic and national elites then use that to scare voters away from the “wrong” candidate. As an MP from Macron’s party told Le Figaro: “First and foremost, we need to scare people… to show the consequences and financial risks of the [National Rally’s] proposed measures.”

Thus, Macron was quick to seize onto the turbulence in the markets to paint Le Pen as an economic menace and invite voters to rally against the National Rally. Meanwhile, his finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, has made the spectre of a financial disaster his main campaign argument. “I would like to know who is going to pay the bill of the Marxist programme of Marine Le Pen,” he said in an interview. (The news that Le Pen is a Marxist will, of course, come as a surprise to many on the French Left.)

As mentioned, the goal of this strategy is twofold: to scare voters and — should that fail — to send a message to the next government. While such fear-mongering appears to be failing on the first front — Le Pen continues to surge in the polls — it is definitely delivering on the second. Over the past week, the RN has backpedalled on many of its flagship economic proposals, in particular the idea of reducing the retirement age to 60 for some categories of workers.

Yesterday, the party’s young and charismatic president, Jordan Bardella, made clear that his party’s programme would be far from radical: the RN would focus on “realistic” measures to curb inflation, he said, primarily by cutting energy taxes. On Sunday, meanwhile, Jean-Phillipe Tanguy, the RN favourite to head France’s finance ministry, pledged that his party will not “let the deficit run out of control”, and that it will stick to the EU’s fiscal rules. The party has also shifted away from its longstanding Gaullist and anti-American stance, rowing back on its previous promise to pull out of Nato strategic military command.

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The party’s “normalisation” has left many on the French Right feeling that Le Pen has gone too far in her bid for power. “Bardella has already sold out completely. It is not the patriotic economic model that I wanted,” said Bernard Monot, once the party’s chief economic strategist. “He’s changed the party’s position on fundamental positions. He’s pro-Zelensky and pro-Nato, just like Meloni. He is entirely compatible with liberal Atlanticism.”

But accusations of selling-out ultimately miss the point. This has little to do with Bardella, but instead is a consequence of the inevitable constraints that the euro system places on governments. The reality is that even if the RN manages to win an absolute majority, they will be forced to toe the EU-Nato line on economic and foreign policy if they want the ECB to play ball and keep the French bond market afloat. After all, all it takes to engineer a fiscal crisis is for Lagarde to look the other way as bond vigilantes do the dirty work.

Indeed, only last week, the EU hinted at what this might look like after it opened an “excessive deficit procedure” against France, along with six other member states. This means that the next government will be forced to rein in the deficit — or face disciplinary action. While it is true that France’s deficit exceeds the bloc’s 3% borrowing limit, this has been the case for a very long time — and yet the Commission has often let France off the hook in the past, provided pro-EU governments were in power.

But now that a Le Pen majority looms on the horizon, the EU’s economic police force is suddenly sounding the alarm. As with the ECB’s refusal to intervene in the French bond market, this is a wholly political decision aimed at pre-emptively tying the hands of a future RN-led government. As Politico put it, saying the quiet part out loud: “It’s one thing to let off a pro-EU, statesmanlike leader for the type of reckless spending that endangers the economic stability of the eurozone. It’s quite another if it’s carried out brazenly by a nationalist firebrand.”

The implication is all too clear: within the eurozone, “populists” such as Le Pen and Bardella may very well come to power — but radical change will always be beyond their reach.

It was in honour of this mission that EU leaders held an “informal” dinner in Brussels last night. Amid frenzied briefings and counter-briefings, the discussions largely centred on the presidency of the Commission — the most powerful and coveted post in the EU. And even if they failed to reach an agreement for all three posts, von der Leyen’s reconfirmation seems all but certain.

As far as the European Council is concerned, von der Leyen can count on the backing of the 11 heads of state or government who are affiliated with the EPP bloc, as well as the four belonging to the centre-left S&D, including Germany, and the five belonging to the liberal Renew Europe, including France. These three groups are, after all, part of the “super grand coalition” that has supported von der Leyen in the European Parliament for the past five years.

For now, Germany and France haven’t formally endorsed her, but everything indicates Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron — faced with record-low domestic support and massive gains by the AfD and the National Rally — are betting on a second von der Leyen term as a way of securing an “anti-populist” ally in Brussels. “We will build a bastion together with others against the extremes of the Left and Right,” von der Leyen stated after the elections — something which Scholz and Macron are desperately in need of.

This is arguably why Scholz has said that “there is every indication that Ursula von der Leyen will be able to serve a second term”, and why even Macron, who had previously flirted with replacing her with the former Italian prime minister and president of the European Central Bank (ECB) Mario Draghi, would appear to have fallen in line. “I think that things can move quite quickly,” he coyly remarked before last night’s summit.

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It was, if we needed it, a reminder that the EU shouldn’t simply be viewed as a supranational authority that infringes upon the autonomy of nation-states (though it is also that, of course), but also as an institution which pro-establishment national authorities can, if needed, deploy against their own “populist” adversaries — and against their own electorates. France is a case in point. As soon as Macron called a snap election in response to Le Pen’s crushing victory last week, the “spread” between French and German government borrowing costs immediately rose to the highest level in years. Now, this could be seen as a “natural” reaction of financial markets to the prospect of a “populist” majority coming to power in France — and this is certainly how much of the media is framing it. But this ignores the fact that, ultimately, the spread is determined by the central bank — in the EU’s case, the ECB — which always has the power to bring down interest rates by intervening in sovereign bond markets. Markets only have power over states insofar as the central bank refuses to act.

Regrettably, the ECB has a long history of selectively refusing to intervene in support of sovereign bond markets, and engineering financial and fiscal panics. It did this, for example, with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni — allowing interest rates to rise as soon as her government came to power, and only intervening to bring them down once the new government pledged to submit to the EU’s economic agenda. It would now appear to be pre-emptively applying the same strategy against Le Pen in France.

This does, of course, run contrary to what should be the ECB’s principal job: keeping the spread down, or at least mitigating its rise, and thus allowing the democratic process in France to proceed as smoothly as possible. But unfortunately, the ECB isn’t a normal central bank; it’s a full-blooded political actor that has no qualms with coercing governments to comply with the overall political-economic agenda of the EU. It seems inevitable, for instance, that if Le Pen were to win the next election, the central bank’s pressure on France would only increase: expect hysterical takes on France’s ballooning fiscal deficit, despite the fact that France has had a higher-than-average deficit for years, though this was never a problem so long as pro-EU governments were in power.

It also goes without saying that this strategy plays perfectly into Macron’s hands, who can point to the turbulence in financial markets to paint Le Pen as an economic menace. Le Pen, it seems, is about to learn that dropping her anti-euro agenda might help her get into power, but it won’t help her hold onto it, unless she jettisons her economic populism and aligns herself with the establishment on major economic and foreign policy issues.

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A variation on the same logic applies to Meloni. Though she hasn’t officially endorsed von der Leyen, she’s likely to come round in the end for very much the same reason: her political survival depends on having an ally in the European Commission, and on the good will of the ECB, especially with the threat of a new round of crushing austerity measures hanging over Italy’s head. Von der Leyen has worked hard behind the scenes trying to lock in Meloni’s support, even reportedly going as far as burying an official EU report criticising Italy for eroding media freedoms. As one Commission official told Politico: “There is visibly a willingness to put the brakes on issues related to Italy and the rule of law.”

If, as appears likely, von der Leyen succeeds in getting the backing of the European Council, she looks set for a smooth ride in the European Parliament. Von der Leyen’s current “super grand coalition” actually increased its seats compared to the past legislature. This means that, even accounting for some rebellious MEPs within those groups’ ranks, she appears to be on a clear path to re-election — especially if she can secure the support of the 24 MEPs elected with Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party.

And if this does happen, it’s hard to imagine a bigger slap in the face to the millions of voters who used the recent ballots to express their opposition to the disastrous consequences of Brussels’s agenda: rising living costs, growing socioeconomic precarity, high immigration, creeping deindustrialisation, divisive identity politics and the growing risk of war with Russia. But then again, the EU was never about democracy.

A similar logic is likely to inspire the choice of the president of the European Council. According to the Italian press, one of the names being touted is that of former prime minister Enrico Letta, as mediocre a politician as they come, whose main claim to fame is to have failed miserably in every position he has ever held. As an unflinching pro-EU zealot, however, he would be a perfect sparring partner for von der Leyen, helping her to keep recalcitrant governments in line — especially in view of Hungary’s upcoming six-months-long rotating presidency of the European Council, which the EU establishment looks upon in horror.

But as stitch-ups go, will it endure? It was hard not to shake the odour of complacency wafting through Brussels last night. Yes, the only thing less predictable than last week’s results was the EU machine’s response to them. But even so, looking at the populist sweep across the bloc, one cannot help but wonder: for how much longer can Europe’s delegitimised elites continue to override popular discontent with “informal” dinners and horse-trading deals?

Consider the victors: the ECR and ID groups, who made significant gains. Both blocs are made up of various Right-populist parties who are deeply divided on several crucial strategic issues: social and economic matters, European enlargement, China, EU-US relations and, most important, Ukraine. This means that, even if they succeed in pushing the European Commission to the Right, they will struggle to turn their electoral success into political influence; on Europe’s most important challenges, it seems unlikely they will vote as a bloc. But on a more fundamental level, to assume these elections will radically alter the course of the EU’s policymaking agenda, or even threaten democracy itself, implies that the EU is a functioning parliamentary democracy. It is not.

Despite the fanfare that surrounds every European election — each one tediously described as “the most important elections in the history of the European Union” — the reality is that the European Parliament isn’t a parliament in the conventional sense of the word. That would imply the ability to initiate legislation, a power the European Parliament does not wield. This is reserved exclusively for the EU’s “executive” arm, the European Commission — the closest thing to a European “government” — which promises “neither to seek nor to take instructions from any government or from any other institution, body, office or entity”.

And this, inevitably, includes the European Parliament, which may only approve, reject or propose amendments and revisions to the Commission’s own legislative proposals. Nor is the Commission itself by any means democratically elected. Its president and its members are proposed and appointed by the European Council, which is made up of the leaders of the EU member states. Even in this case, the Parliament may only approve or reject the Council’s proposals. Hence the paradox of Ursula von der Leyen running a (comically disturbing) electoral campaign for a second term despite not actually running for a seat.

In 2014, this was supposed to be fixed: a new system — the so-called Spitzenkandidat, or “lead candidate” process — was introduced, whereby prior to the European elections, each major political group in the European Parliament would nominate its candidate for the role of Commission president, and the nominee of the group with the most seats would automatically become president. But the system never took off. Indeed, in 2019, Ursula von der Leyen herself was chosen behind closed doors by EU leaders, despite the fact that she hadn’t run in the elections, and that two candidates had already been put forward by the centre-right EPP and centre-left S&D groups. Today, that system is considered all but dead, which is why the other groups didn’t even bother to choose a candidate.

And yet, despite such democratic constraints, judging by yesterday’s results, one could argue that even the EU cannot remain fully insulated from the continent’s Rightward shift. This is true: the increased weight of the Right-populists within the European Parliament might force the Council to put forward a more Right-leaning candidate than von der Leyen.

Before we fall down the trap of predicting a Right-populist dystopia, there are, however, some important caveats. While it is true that the Commission is nominated by the national governments, and thus it may appear like the latter are in control, it is equally true that the supranational institutions of the European Union hold a huge sway over national governments, insofar as they control crucial aspects of their economic policy. This is especially true in the eurozone, where the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB) can effectively enforce whatever policy they want on elected governments — and even forcibly remove them from office, as they did with Silvio Berlusconi in 2011.

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This means that, in the eurozone at least, the political survival of governments largely depends on the goodwill of the EU. This is why even Right-populist parties, once they get into government — or start to think that they have a good chance of doing so — tend to quickly realign with the establishment, in the European Council as well as in the European Parliament. Take Giorgia Meloni. On all major issues, Italy’s prime minister has aligned her government with the EU and Nato — and has signalled her willingness to support a second term for von der Leyen, with whom she has developed a close relationship. In France, meanwhile, Marine Le Pen has also started to undergo a process of “Melonification” — abandoning her anti-euro platform and softening her position on Russia-Ukraine and Nato. Even if her National Rally party wins France’s forthcoming elections, all the signs suggest it won’t be the disruptive force she is promising.

There’s also another to point to be considered. On the one hand, the fact that the European Parliament, the only democratically elected institution in the EU, exercises some oversight over the Commission’s policies, might be seen as a positive development. In this sense, the bigger presence of the Right-populist parties will certainly have an impact of the legislative process, especially on highly polarising issues such as the European Green Deal and immigration.

But on the other, this doesn’t change the fact that the European Parliament remains politically toothless. The entire legislative process — which takes places through a system of informal tripartite meetings on legislative proposals between representatives of the Parliament, the Commission, the Council — is opaque to say the least. This, as the Italian researchers Lorenzo Del Savio and Matteo Mameli have written, is exacerbated by the fact that European Parliament is “physically, psychologically and linguistically more distant from ordinary people than national ones are”, which in turn makes it more susceptible to the pressure of lobbyists and well-organised vested interests. As a result, even the most well-meaning politicians, once they get to Brussels, tend to get sucked into its bubble.

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On an even more fundamental level, none of this will ever change, even if the European Parliament is granted full legislative powers; for the simple reason that there is no European demos for the Parliament to represent. Such a demos — a political community generally defined by a shared and relatively homogenous language, culture, history, normative system — still only exists at the national level. Indeed, the EU remains deeply fractured along national economic, geopolitical and cultural fault lines — and this looks unlikely to change.

All this means that, while we may expect a change of direction on some issues, these elections are unlikely to solve the pressing economic, political and geopolitical problems afflicting the EU: stagnation, poverty, internal divergences, democratic disenfranchisement and, perhaps most crucially for the continent’s future, the bloc’s aggressive Nato-isation and militarisation in the context of escalating tensions with Russia. In this sense, it’s hardly surprising that around half of Europeans didn’t even bother to vote. Ultimately, the EU was built precisely to resist populist insurgencies such as this one. The sooner populists come to terms with it, the better.

To mobilise his base, Tusk has seemingly placed his bets on the reliable call to arms of national security. With Moscow’s escalating its hybrid war against Poland, he has seized on his country’s centuries-deep animosity towards Russia to bolster his own credentials while also raising doubts about PiS’s own loyalties — mirroring very closely the ways that PiS had itself vilified him during last year’s election season.

Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote about PiS’s committee to combat Russian influence, deriding it as an obvious political ploy meant to disparage Tusk as a Russian agent. Surreally, Tusk has now resurrected this committee for a very similar purpose, aiming its barrel at PiS and its political allies ahead of this weekend’s elections. His government has taken other pages from PiS’s national security playbook too — late last month, Poland re-established a border exclusion zone along its border with Russia-aligned Belarus that PiS originally put in place in 2021 and 2022.

The overt reasons for this are not hard to glean. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Belarus has continued, at Russia’s behest, to manufacture a migrant crisis at the border, while Russian agents continue to spread disinformation in Poland by, for instance, hacking into its state press service. According to European intelligence agencies, Russia is embarking on a campaign of increasingly more violent acts of sabotage across the continent, and Poland is likely to be in its crosshairs.

But just like PiS utilised this set of circumstances to go after Tusk, so too is Poland’s new prime minister unduly leveraging the Russian threat for political gain today. Fuelled by intense ideological rifts on everything from abortion rights to rule-of-law issues and the authority of the EU, Poland’s ever-expanding conflict between its two dominant partisan camps has inevitably begun to seep into its military and national security architecture — presenting a cautionary tale of political polarisation’s ability to undermine a country’s ability to respond to a potentially existential adversary.

The Russian influence committee Tusk has put in place, which officially started work on Wednesday, has important differences from PiS’s equivalent. It will, according to Tusk, not be an “investigative” body, and rather than sanctioning individuals outright, it will present potential cases of interest to the state prosecutor’s office.

Yet according to Bartłomiej Kucharski, an analyst at the publication Wojsko i Technika, Tusk’s committee will likely be just as partisan as PiS’s version, as it will possess no ability on its own to conduct truly robust fact-finding investigations or to uncover conclusive evidence of wrongdoing. “Perhaps there are such cases of [Russian] influence [among PiS and other parties],” Kucharski told me. “However, this committee doesn’t have the ability to really substantiate this or to punish anyone for it. In reality, this is an attempt to mutually pelt each other with accusations in order to limit support for the other’s political rival.”

Tusk’s committee was created at least in part as a response to the defection of administrative judge Tomasz Szmydt to Belarus last month, where he requested asylum and claimed he had been persecuted in Poland. Since his flight from Poland, a warrant has been issued for Szmydt’s arrest due to his alleged participation in information operations on behalf of Belarus and Russia.

Szmydt’s actions triggered a wave of finger-pointing by Tusk — in comments last week, he suggested that Szmydt’s connections to Poland’s enemies raised red flags about the man who hired him, PiS-era Minister of Justice Zbigniew Ziobro. Yet the individuals who have garnered the most scrutiny from Tusk’s government lately have been former PiS Minister of Defence Antoni Macierewicz and one of his trusted deputies, Colonel Krzysztof Gaj. When announcing his new committee against Russian influence, Tusk claimed a “noose of information” was tightening around Macierewicz, accusing him of “disarming” the Polish armed forces during his tenure and surrounding himself with people allegedly tied to Moscow, like Col. Gaj, an infamously anti-Ukrainian military leader.

Investigators reportedly conducted a search of Gaj’s home last year, during which they found an extensive archive of military documents. However, no charges have been brought against him, and no investigation has been launched into Macierewicz’s alleged connections to Russia. Misconduct by such leaders is certainly possible — but experts believe Tusk’s increasing proclivity to suggest guilt by association in his campaign against Russian infiltration, often without any solid evidence, has the potential to rattle the rank-and-file of Poland’s military and security services.

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“I imagine that certain officers who were promoted by Macierewicz may feel uneasy,” Marek Świerczyński, head of the security desk at the Polish research institute Polityka Insight, told me. “It would be a risk to the system if some suspicions about Macierewicz were to be automatically applied onto the officers who were appointed by him.”

Such politicisation of Poland’s armed forces would undermine critical components of their cohesion, hampering their ability to function meritocratically at a time when Nato’s security hinges on it. Beyond such practical concerns, though, Tusk’s accusations and the resurrection of his committee present reputational risks for Poland’s security architecture as well. As Kucharski told me: “The very institution of the state becomes less reliable if a committee arises that is really for nothing, that does not have clear goals, doesn’t carry out real work, and could really be replaced by two or three paid publicists who would argue that those on the other side are Russian spies.”

In tandem with political mudslinging, Tusk’s government has utilised every possible opportunity to underscore its credentials as a bulwark against Russian infiltration, even in cases where none exists. After a fire destroyed a shopping centre in Warsaw last month, Tusk claimed the incident was “likely” connected to Russia and arrested several suspects in the case — even though, according to Kucharski, the event was more probably the result of arson related to localised mob-style score-settling. In an interview with the Polish press, a former Polish lieutenant colonel dismissed the Russia connection a conspiracy theory.

Of course, Russian acts of sabotage are indeed taking place in Poland, and pose a serious security threat to the country. But like his committee, Tusk’s politically motivated speculation undermines the real work of Polish counterintelligence services working to uncover Moscow’s influence in the country, cheapening legitimate charges of Kremlin infiltration in the process. Ask supporters of either Tusk’s ruling coalition or PiS, and you’ll find people in both camps who are convinced the other side is working for Russia. This reality is emblematic of Poland’s political divide today, and explains why encouraging such theories plays well with both sides’ core voting blocs. Already, Macierewicz has shot back at Tusk with claims of his own about the prime minister’s cooperation with Moscow.

The truth, however, is that, regardless of the reality of Russian influence in Polish politics, its wholesale politicisation has only served to benefit Moscow, whose core aim in its operations against Europe is to foment doubt, discord and intransigence among its rivals. A polarised Poland where matters of national security are treated as mere tools to garner votes ultimately favours none of Poland’s actors. Generating anti-Russian headlines may help Tusk win a few more seats this weekend — but at what cost?

The most perceptive commentators on this phenomenon, such as Wolfgang Streeck, understood that this Continent-wide failure of the Left was in large part the consequence of the straitjacket in which European politics operated — a straitjacket created above all by the economic policies built into the constitutional structures of the EU which made, for example, renationalisation of utilities, state aid to politically important industries and predictable levels of immigration virtually impossible to implement. Socialist politicians had everywhere been reduced to claiming merely that they would be more efficient managers of late-capitalist economies than their competitors, and in the process had become indistinguishable from the various rival politicians on the centre-right.

This was pretty thin gruel to offer their electorates, particularly as the global financial crisis of 2007-8, the European bond crisis of 2008-9, and the thousands of immigrants dying each year in the Mediterranean all conveyed an urgent sense that something way beyond managerialism was required. In these circumstances, the voters’ rejection of the old Left parties came as no surprise, and there was no reason in 2016 to think that, if Britain stayed in the EU, the Labour Party would miraculously avoid the fate of its continental counterparts. As Captain Shotover says in Shaw’s Heartbreak House when the bombs of a European War begin to fall: “Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favour of England because you were born in it?”

This was the general reason to think that departure from the EU might at least give the Left a chance to recover its old position in British politics, if it were bold enough. But there was another more parochial reason, to do with the relationship between Scotland and England.

In the past, when there was a close election (as in 1964 and February and October 1974), a Labour government at Westminster could have a minority of English seats but secure a majority through its reliable base in Scotland. But for the past decade or so, since the rise of the SNP, Labour has effectively had a permanent reduction of 40 seats in its representation at Westminster, compared with previous elections; if, for instance, it had secured as many seats in Scotland in 2017 as it had as recently as 2010, it could have been within striking distance of forming a government.

But what has seldom been appreciated is that the rise of the SNP was intimately bound up with Britain’s membership of the EU: as soon as the SNP dropped its old hostility to the European Union in the mid-Eighties and adopted the stance of “independence within Europe”, it began the climb to its dominance of Scottish politics. The logic behind this was perfectly clear: independence for Scotland if both England and Scotland remained in the EU was virtually costless, since almost everything guaranteed by the Act of Union — above all an integrated economy for the two nations with no trade barriers — would also be guaranteed by the EU treaties. The only stumbling block might have been the currency, but that was unlikely to dissuade Scots at some point from voting for independence, knowing that much of their old life would continue unchanged.

This could not be the case if England were outside the EU and Scotland in it: for the first time for centuries (and arguably for ever), there would be a hard border between the two countries, with immense disruption to every aspect of their lives, and almost everyone who has seriously considered this possibility has recoiled from it. In my 2016 article, I argued that because of this, if Britain left the EU, the cause of independence for Scotland would be dealt a potentially fatal blow, and the Labour Party could begin to rebuild its Scottish base. The fact that the Scots voted (albeit narrowly) to stay in the EU is widely misunderstood. The question put to them was whether the UK should leave the EU, and anyone who wanted a costless independence for Scotland would naturally vote No. But that is a very different question from” Should Scotland stay in the EU if England leaves? The SNP for obvious reasons has misrepresented the result, constantly describing it as a vote by Scotland to stay in the EU — but in fact it was nothing of the kind.

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It is against this background that we should think about the recent calamities of the SNP. An air of corruption now hangs about it, as it did for many years over the Labour Party in the west of Scotland. But if its leaders still displayed some sense of genuine confidence in the party’s aims, it is probable that the corruption would be forgiven. Rather, the SNP’s real problem is that it is impossible for its leaders to sound convincing, in the face of the enormous challenges that Brexit has posed to their movement. All they can produce are empty platitudes and a refusal to face the obvious facts, and voters can hear the desperation in their voices. It is revealing that John Swinney scrapped the post of “minister for independence” immediately after he became leader of the Party.

I argued in 2016 that in both these respects — the general sense of new possibilities, and the collapse of Scottish nationalism — the Labour Party should be the principal beneficiary. The advantage to it of the changing situation in Scotland was obvious, but the freedom properly to differentiate itself from the tired managerialism of the Conservatives was also important.

Hints of this were already to be found in its surprising success in the 2017 election, when the party was led by someone who was not at all managerial, and when it had not as yet clearly repudiated the result of the referendum. But the signs were always there. The central paradox of EU membership all along was that it buttressed the economic policies which most Conservative politicians favoured — this, after all, was why membership was originally forced through by a Conservative government against the wishes of most of the Labour opposition. As a result, when Brexit was finally delivered, the members of the Conservative government were at a loss as to what to with it, since fundamentally they had been comfortable with many of the EU’s economic policies. They looked rudderless because they were rudderless. As in the case of Scotland, the electorate did not need a conscious analysis of the situation: they simply needed to recognise the symptoms of a political party which no longer had a clear agenda, and which had consequently descended into pointless internal faction fighting.

The Labour Party has duly reaped the benefits. It has risen very quickly from the catastrophe of 2019 — caused above all by what had become its open rejection of Brexit — to a position where it may well hold an absolute majority after the next election, bucking the trend of all other European Social Democratic parties. And it has been able to do so largely because of Brexit.

It is tempting for its leaders to think that it is the party’s official hostility to Brexit which has led to this, but 2019 illustrated that its hostility was a liability; rather, it is the structural changes that have resulted from Brexit, and not Labour’s opposition to it, which have helped it. The worry for sympathisers with Labour, however, is that the party hierarchy has failed to learn this lesson. The timorousness with which Starmer is approaching the current election suggests very strongly that he wants to return Britain to its economic and social identity prior to June 2016; not necessarily in the EU, but so closely aligned with it that Scotland can dream of independence again, and there will be no break with managerial politics.

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Seen in this light, Starmer looks as if he is going to be an ungrateful beneficiary of the Brexit which he struggled so hard to subvert, and which he (probably) intends if Prime Minister effectively to reverse. His ingratitude, however, is not merely morally objectionable: it is also unwise. Suppose that in a few years Britain is once again within the EU, to all intents and purposes — say in a relationship similar to Norway’s. What will stop a resurgent Scottish nationalism, once again wielding the slogan “Independence in Europe”? And what will stop a resurgent radical Right, embittered by the return to managerialism?

By bringing Britain closer to the EU, Starmer would ultimately return the Labour Party to the dismal condition it was in before Brexit. At the moment, it looks as if in Britain — uniquely in Europe — a historic party of the Left is in pole position, and there is no effective standard-bearer for the radical Right. But the uniqueness of the British situation is a product of Brexit, and anything that undermines Brexit will sooner or later undermine Labour too.

Since then, “Pfizergate” has ballooned into one of the biggest scandals in EU history. Following von der Leyen and the Commission’s refusal to hand over the text messages — not only to journalists, but even to the EU Ombudsman and the EU Court of Auditors — the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), an independent EU body responsible for investigating and prosecuting financial crimes, announced in late 2022 that it had opened an investigation into the pandemic procurement process (though not into Pfizergate specifically). It confirmed that it had received “an exceptionally high number of reports and complaints” asking that “it investigate the purchase of Covid-19 vaccines in the European Union”.

Then, in April 2023, Frédéric Baldan, a Belgian lobbyist specialising in EU-China trade relations, filed a lawsuit against von der Leyen before a Liège court, accusing her of usurping official powers, destroying public documents, pursuing illicit interests and committing corruption, and damaging his country’s public finances. Shortly after, Baldan’s lobbyist accreditation was withdrawn by the European Parliament. The story, however, doesn’t end there.

Despite von der Leyen’s clumsy attempts to sweep the case under the carpet, or arguably because of them, Pfizergate continues to rumble on. Since Baldan filed his criminal complaint, several individuals, organisations and even two countries — Hungary and Poland (under the previous PiS-led government) — have joined the lawsuit. With Brussels steeling itself for the EU elections in June, all the signs pointed to a big legal bust-up and an even bigger PR disaster.

But then, earlier this month, von der Leyen’s hearing in front of the Belgian court — to decide whether the EPPO or the Belgian investigators should prosecute the case — was mysteriously postponed to December. This is not a trivial matter. Even though a year and a half has passed since the EPPO first opened its investigation, no one has yet been charged. Indeed, it’s unclear whether the EPPO has actually been looking into the case at all. A few days before the recent hearing in Liège was supposed to take place, Baldan’s lawyer, Diane Protat, visited the EPPO’s offices in Brussels and Luxembourg to request a copy of its case file — standard procedure from a legal standpoint. However, not only was she told that there was no such file, but on both occasions security was called on her.

Such behaviour is typical of the EPPO. For several months after beginning its probe into the EU’s vaccine procurement, it showed little interest in Pfizergate; as far as we know, it didn’t even demand that von der Leyen hand over the infamous text messages. However, shortly after Baldan filed his complaint in Belgium, the EPPO quickly moved to obtain a copy of the document from the Belgian prosecutor’s office — and almost immediately claimed exclusive jurisdiction over the case.

It argues that, if there was any misconduct relating to EU-wide vaccine-procurement deals, this represents a damage to the EU budget, and that under EU law it is up to the EPPO to investigate, prosecute and bring to judgment the perpetrators of criminal offences that affect the EU budget. The complainants see the situation differently: they note that the vaccines were purchased with money that came from member states’ national budgets, not the EU budget — as even von der Leyen herself admitted in a recent presidential debate. That is why they argue that the case should be tried in national courts, such as the Belgian one, rather than by the EPPO.

As for the immunity from legal proceedings that von der Leyen enjoys as president of the Commission, the complainants suggest this applies only with respect to acts carried out within the scope of her defined function as Commission president. Suffice it to say that whether carrying out billion-euro deals behind closed doors, and then leaving member states and taxpayers to foot the bill, falls within the purview of her role is questionable. That said, the plaintiffs face an uphill struggle: if the case moves forward, the request from prosecutors to waiver von der Leyen’s immunity would be handled by the College of Commissioners — which is usually chaired by von der Leyen herself. However, they have an ally in the Belgian investigating judge, Frédéric Frenay, who has successfully investigated several corruption cases in the past: according to Euractiv, he doesn’t agree with the EPPO taking over the case and is insisting that it remain in Belgian hands.

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But why is the EPPO, after showing hardly no interest in it for several months, now so adamant about taking over the case? Given the organisation’s behaviour since Pfizergate broke, one could be forgiven for wondering if they were ever interested in truly investigating von der Leyen — or whether they were covering up for her. As the German MEP Martin Sonneborn told the Berliner Zeitung: “Why does the EPPO, which reports to Justice commissioner Didier Reynders, who reports to Commission president von der Leyen, need a year and a half to search von der Leyen’s office in the Commission building and confiscate her work cell phone to view the Pfizer SMSs?”

Questions have already been raised about the body’s judicial independence: last year, for example, it attracted criticism after Giorgia Meloni’s government helped install a new prosecutor despite an independent panel of judiciary experts ranking him last among Italy’s three candidates. Previously, other countries had faced criticism for the same reason. As Sonneborn put it, with the EPPO, “another organisation seems to have been created that does not have the interests of the citizens in mind, but rather the shielding of EU officials from their democratic accountability”.

Seen in this light, the EPPO’s efforts to assume jurisdiction over the Belgian complaint could be read as an attempt to stifle an independent investigation into Pfizergate — or at least delay it until after the EU elections and the nomination process for the new president of the Commission. Certainly, if that was the aim, they’ve succeeded. We can rest assured that Baldan’s recent demand for von der Leyen to be sacked and barred from running for office as long as she is the subject of criminal proceedings will likely fall on deaf ears.

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Von der Leyen, however, is far from off-the-hook. After all, the Belgian court may still decide to allocate jurisdiction to the state’s investigative authorities. And who knows, the EPPO might actually decide to start doing some serious investigating itself. Besides, this isn’t the only legal cloud hanging over von der Leyen’s head: another case was filed by the New York Times against the European Commission at the European Court of Justice after they failed to provide them with the text messages, but the court has yet to rule on the matter.

Paradoxically, far from pointing to a well-functioning rule of law, all of these investigations only serve to highlight the complete lack of accountability of EU politicians, and of the EU system more generally: despite all the courts and bodies that have looked into this so far, not one has managed to get von der Leyen to hand over some text messages. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Ultimately, Pfizergate isn’t an isolated incident, but a reflection of the EU’s true nature: a haven where unelected politicians and corporate leaders can cosy up to each other away from prying eyes, unhindered by obsolete concepts such as transparency and the rule of law. The only difference is that, this time, they might finally be caught out.

Come next month’s European Parliamentary elections, Orbán hopes a Right-populist wave will allow him and his ideological kin to seize top positions and institutions. With Hungary set to assume the rotating presidency of the European Council in July, its prime minister’s influence could be unmatched.

But rather than just being a question of power, there is something more ideological, philosophical even, at play within this conflict. Orbán’s many liberal detractors characterise him as a threat to fundamental “European values”, but there is a strange lack of clarity about what these “values” actually are. We can assume that people wielding the idea of “European values” mean the “religion of universal progress”: liberal democracy, free markets and, in more recent years, neoliberal identity politics. There is also a hint of secular evangelism in the term; these “European values” can seem like imperialism with a human face.

Orbán, however, also sees himself as the champion of European values, and his critics as the ones who are imperilling them. At stake in this continental insurgency, then, is the very meaning and direction of the EU’s core principles — as well as the equally opaque alternatives offered by Orbán.

At the level of rhetoric, the Orbán concept of a “Europe of nations”, with values rooted in the Christian tradition, is clearly at odds with the progressive liberal vision of a secular Europe premised on human rights and equality. But even the pathologies that Orbán’s opponents rightly ascribe to him — nationalism, clientelism, authoritarianism — are ultimately as European as Eurovision. Indeed, the fact that “EU values” are vulnerable to attack in this way at all reveals a certain vacuousness at the heart of the European project. It is, in other words, an empty vessel ripe for hijacking — and a stealth takeover has already begun.

In 2022, the European television network Euronews was purchased by an obscure Portuguese investment fund close to the Orbán government. The Hungarian sovereign wealth fund, Széchenyi Funds, which is a public body, also invested €45 million in the purchase, and a communications company owned by a close Orbán associate contributed €12.5 million more. The motivation here was not hard to glean: according to internal Széchenyi Funds documents obtained by journalists, Euronews, which was described as “the seventh most influential brand on EU politics”, had been purchased “to mitigate Left-wing bias in journalism”. It is an approach to managing media that Orbán has already perfected at home: recent estimates suggest that Orbán and his Fidesz associates now own or control up to 90% of the Hungarian media landscape.

As part of the Euronews makeover, the network recently moved its headquarters from Lyon to the heart of Brussels. There, in terms of soft power at least, it is in very good company. In 2021, the Hungarian government bought a sprawling 18th-century mansion on the same street in Brussels that officials are already calling  “Hungary House”. Other existing Hungarian government initiatives include the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (often referred to as MCC), a think tank which opened a new branch in Brussels in 2022, promoting conservative values and discussions of EU affairs in accordance with Orbánist thought. Finally, the Hungarian government also funds the European Conservative, an English-language publication that runs conservative commentary on European news. Taken together, the proliferation of these Orbán-backed institutions highlights the scale and seriousness of his Brussels ambition.

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In Orbán’s view, the conflict in Europe is defined by two competing camps: his own cohort, the sovereigntists (or nationalists), and his opponents, the federalists. The federalists want to create a centralised “United States of Europe”, undermining the nation state and reducing its powers. Sovereigntists like Orbán, meanwhile, believe the EU should be reduced to a loose, mostly cultural body that unites European nation states in their shared Christianity. For their part, federalists see the sovereigntists as regressive blood-and-soil nationalists — the ideological cousins of fascists responsible for the worst horrors of the 20th century.

But while the divide between the two camps has grown wider and more acrimonious in recent years, Orbán believes that the sovereigntist-federalist tension was once integral to the EU’s functioning. In the past, he explained recently, it was thought that “if [the] sovereigntists defeat the federalists, then the cohesive force will cease, but if the federalists eliminate the sovereigntists, then what follows can only be the creation of another oppressive empire”. However, Orbán says, this constructive balance was degraded as the federalists began to change. In his view, the old federalists of yore were “Catholic universalists”; they did not call for the abolition of nation states, but rather for their protection within something like a united Christendom, an Occident, or a Res Publica Christiana. What has changed is that those federalists have mutated into “progressive liberals… [who have] become like the communists and are now a real threat to our freedom”. There is some irony in Orbán’s conflation of progressive liberal “European values” with communism. As historian Samuel Moyn and others have written, these values were often championed by post-war European politicians and institutions in an effort “to combat domestic socialism”.

Hungary has been at odds with the federalist eurocrats since Fidesz came to power in 2010. Before then, the technocratic elite of the ruling socialists generally got on well with the technocrats in Brussels. The EU played a leading role in helping Hungary avoid bankruptcy in 2008; along with the IMF and World Bank, it assembled a 25-billion-euro rescue package for the country. Punishing austerity measures were introduced, and the socialists replaced their anti-poverty programme with workfare, placing enormous strain on already struggling Hungarians. Fidesz seized on the accompanying discontent.

The party campaigned on a platform opposed to globalisation, supranational institutions and the concept of an “ever closer union”. The battle lines sharpened around the time of Brexit. The British, Orbán said in March, “always thought in terms of nation states”, and with the UK gone, the countries of Central Europe were tasked with upholding the sovereigntist position. But around the same time, something else also provoked major fissures between the so-called Visegrad Group (Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland) and much of the rest of the EU: the 2015 migration crisis. That year, Hungary’s notorious border fence became a site of contestation for the meaning of “European values”. For the progressive liberals in Brussels’s federalist camp, it was a symbol of brutality and violence, a dereliction of those essential European “fundamental values”. For Orbán and others in the V4 camp, it was an expression of Hungary’s sovereignty and the Orbanist concept of “European values”, a fortress shielding Christian civilisation from the Muslim hordes. To drive the point home, Orbán invoked the Ottoman invasion during the crisis, stating “when it comes to living together with Muslim communities… we had the possibility to go through that for 150 years”.

This fundamental disagreement about the meaning and maintenance of “European values” is part of what Orbán is hoping to exploit ahead of the European Parliamentary elections. But it won’t be easy. Fidesz abandoned the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) in 2021 after facing expulsion over Hungary’s multiplying democratic deficiencies and rule of law concerns, and has yet to join either of the two Right-wing nationalist political groupings in the European Parliament. The two groups are divided on a single issue: support for Ukraine. The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, which includes Poland’s Law and Justice party and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, strongly supports continued military aid for Kyiv. In contrast, the Identity and Democracy (ID) group, home to Alternative for Deutschland and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, is critical of arming Ukraine and wants to maintain friendly relations with Russia — a position Orbán shares. Polls suggest that both Right-wing groupings are poised to amass more power in the European Parliamentary election.

Some have speculated that, despite their differences on Ukraine, the ECR and ID could merge into a single populist-Right bloc. In mid-April, Orbán held a joint press conference with Former Polish Prime Minister and leader of Law and Justice, Mateusz Morawiecki, and former Frontex chief, Fabrice Leggeri, a candidate for France’s National Rally. The event, hosted by ECR, was attended by numerous members of ID, including MPs from the German AfD and the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang. On the potential for further cooperation, Morawiecki told Euractiv: “I can tell you that I have a very good feeling with my colleagues from Fidesz; I know that Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orbán have a good relationship.” But the prospect of a merger is highly unlikely, as there are others who are far less enthusiastic about the prospect of welcoming the Hungarians into their ranks. Some ECR members from Czechia’s ODS and the Sweden Democrats have objected to the idea of aligning themselves with Fidesz, citing Hungary’s insistence on maintaining warm ties with Russia. Czech MEP Alexandr Vondra drove the point home in an interview earlier this month: “If someone simply parrots Putin’s propaganda, he has no business being here (in ECR). I have told Fidesz this and no negotiations with them can take place now because of this.”

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And there are further contradictions within this emerging Right bloc. Though many in Brussels may have forgotten it, prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it was Hungary that pushed hardest for enlargement of the union to include its eastern “neighbourhood”. Budapest has long insisted that the EU embrace expedited membership for Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. This enthusiasm is based in part on Orbán’s personal rapport with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and the president of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska territory, Milorad Dodik. In early April, Orbán was even awarded the Order of Republika Srpska, and referred to Dodik as “my friend Milorad” during his acceptance speech. In the UK and US, meanwhile, Dodik has been sanctioned for pushing for the secession of Serb-majority Republika Srpska, an act that would very likely trigger a new war in Bosnia.

Upon receiving the award in Banja Luka last month, Orbán also spoke of the necessity of EU enlargement: “Without the Serbs, there is no European security. Without the Serbs there is no healthy European Union… And of course… there is a lot wrong with the European Union — I fight there every day. But today there is no better framework for our nations to strengthen themselves than the European Union.” On the surface, this pro-enlargement rhetoric may seem puzzling — but upon closer inspection, it is entirely coherent: Orbán desires a larger but more fortified bloc. Extending membership to other sovereigntist Christians also has the potential to stymie the federalists’ centralising aims. As Bulcsú Hunyadi, a senior analyst at the Budapest-based Political Capital Institute, explained in 2016: “The bigger the EU gets, the less integrated the union becomes”.

Orbán has always presented his Euroscepticism as part of his broader plan to remake the social fabric of Hungary itself. But such rhetoric often masks the fact that his grand visions are at odds with his meagre domestic record. In the very beginning, he wasn’t entirely without promise. Orbán came to power disavowing neoliberal orthodoxy and the “rescue package” dictated by the IMF, World Bank and EU — and his interventionist economic policies produced some initial success. Yet with time it has become clear that this supposed flaunting of orthodoxy has amounted to little more than “neoliberalism in one country”. As Hungarian sociologist Andras Bozoki has written: “Orbán skilfully attacked the banks (most of them being in foreign hands), the multinational corporations, the foreign media, and EU officials on the basis of [his own preference for] economic nationalism and sovereign independence, but he also combined this with business-friendly domestic policy, such as the introduction of a flat tax, reduced employment rights, and attacks on the homeless, unemployed and trade unions.” In December 2018, for instance, the Orbán government adopted a so-called “slave law” which permits employers to demand 400 hours of overtime per year, a dramatic increase over the 250 hours allowed before. The law also allows employers to delay payments to workers for up to three years.

Meanwhile, Orbán has transformed the state into a vehicle for his own interests, with EU-funded public procurement contracts creating a new class of convivial oligarchs. Consider Orbán’s childhood friend, Lőrinc Mészáros, who became the richest man in Hungary in 2018. Mészáros had previously worked as a pipe fitter for decades, but that year, his companies won the most taxpayer-funded public tenders in the country. These contracts were worth a staggering total of €826 million — 93% of which came from the European Union. He has also appointed allies to key positions of the state and maintained total control over the public prosecutor’s office, ensuring that he and his associates can be shielded from scrutiny.

And while Orbán claims to be the defender of Christian Europe, the number of people who identify as religious in Hungary has plummeted: more than 50% of the country say they do not practise a religion or decline to name their faith. The number of people who admit to practising a religion is at an all-time low — even lower than it was during the socialist period when religious practice was frowned upon by the state. Orbán himself reportedly does not attend Church. He has also fallen out with key religious leaders in Hungary, including some who were once his closest associates. Pastor Gabor Ivanyi, the man who officiated Orbán’s wedding and baptised two of his children, is now among his fiercest critics, enraged by Orbán’s decision to deprive more than 200 religious institutions of official state recognition, leaving many churches near bankruptcy. “Orbán’s Christianity is political Christianity,” Pastor Ivanyi has said. “It has nothing to do with Christ, with humanism or with the Bible.”

Despite his rhetorical trade in nationalism and conservatism, this speaks to an essential vacuity in the Orbán project. Like Vladimir Putin, Orbán’s cultural strategy mostly sees him tilting at windmills, making an enemy of a “wokeness” lifted from the Anglo-American culture wars that have little or no domestic resonance; predictably, his targets have included drag queens and Gender Studies departments. His fixation on “anti-wokeness” in homogenous Hungary can give the impression that he would rather shadowbox with American college students than confront his country’s punishing economic reality, where inflation peaked at over 25% in 2023 — the highest anywhere in the EU — and where food prices surged to more than 45% over the year. Beyond mere domestic distraction, however, fanning the culture war serves an additional function: it allows Orbán to position himself as a leading figure in the transnational Right, and Budapest as a beacon of “anti-wokeness” — a narrative that will serve him if he is to rally populist-Right forces across Europe ahead of next month’s EU parliamentary elections.

Orbán has his own sexual culture war to deal with too. In February, it was revealed that President Katalin Novak had pardoned a man imprisoned for covering up child sexual abuse by the director of a state-run orphanage. President Novak and then justice minister Judit Varga, two of the most prominent women in Fidesz, were subsequently forced to resign — almost certainly on Orbán’s order. But further details soon emerged. As part of the Pope’s visit to Budapest in April 2023, Novak pardoned the former deputy director of a children’s home who had blackmailed children into withdrawing testimony against the orphanage director, a prolific paedophile.

When the full story was made public, protesters filled the streets of Budapest. The inevitable charge of hypocrisy has been levelled at the government: Orbán the great defender of “the family” found protecting such debased criminality. The scandal was made more significant by the defection of Peter Magyar, Varga’s ex-husband and a former Fidesz insider, who in March published a recording of Varga detailing the extent to which members of Orbán’s elite inner circle interfered in the prosecution of a corruption case. Magyar has since styled himself as the new face of the opposition, where he hopes to reclaim the political centre.

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And yet, Orbán’s authority has emerged a little dented but intact. While his credibility has taken a hit, he will survive — though whether his domestic staying power can translate into an illiberal wave that will engulf the whole of Europe remains to be seen. He has proven himself as a political survivor and a chameleon, rising first through the ranks as a young liberal dissident and then to the heights of power as an anti-liberal Svengali. This has led some of his Hungarian critics to assert that his anti-liberal turn was entirely opportunistic, and that he is devoid of any real principles or ideology. Journalist Paul Lendvai has written about then-liberal Fidesz’s crushing defeat in the 1994 election, which reduced the party to the smallest in parliament. He claims it was at this point that Fidesz began its Rightward shift, even swapping their long hair and jeans for more conservative dress: “There seemed to be no deep ideological soul-searching involved — just clear-eyed calculations about what it would require to win power.” Soon, their speeches were filled with references to tradition and the homeland. In this, perhaps Orbán is not so different from the EU with whom he has long been at odds: vacuous and politically malleable, invoking supposedly ironclad “European values” to mask an impoverished spiritual core.

None of this is to downplay the scale of his ambition. At last month’s CPAC Hungary Conference, Orbán suggested that a “sovereigntist world order” could replace the current liberal one, and that it could do so this year, with critical elections on both sides of the Atlantic. “Let the age of the sovereigntists finally come,” he said. “Make America great again, make Europe great again, go Donald Trump, go European sovereigntists!” He emphasised that the sovereigntist world order would have no ideology, and we can surmise that China, with whom Hungary enjoys warm relations, would also be included in it. Whatever the outcome of the European parliamentary elections, this post-ideological competition, which progressive liberals frame as one of autocracies versus democracies, is here to stay.

The question then remains: who and what is truly “European”, or best representative of “European values”? However widely adopted they may seem today, progressive liberal values are a relatively new phenomenon, and, some would say, somewhat deceptive. As Sartre wrote in 1961, during Algeria’s war for independence from France: “You who are so liberal, so humane, who take the love of culture to the point of affectation, you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name.” Anti-colonial icon Frantz Fanon concurred that same year, when he said that “it is in the name of the Spirit, meaning the spirit of Europe, that Europe justified its crimes and legitimised the slavery in which it held four-fifths of humanity”.

If Europe’s evangelists of “Europeanisation” were to ask people outside the West who best epitomised “European values”— themselves or Orbán — they might not like the answer. As much as it may panic the enlightened liberals of Brussels liberals, Orbán’s brand of exclusionary nationalism is integral to European history — and is sure to be a part of its future too.

For years they’ve been painting Brussels as a beacon of progressivism, peace and democracy, as opposed to the far-Right, racist and economically suicidal project of Brexit. Yet, ironically, it is the European Parliament, not the British one, that is about to swing firmly to the Right, as several European governments already have. Meanwhile, in just over six months, Britain will almost certainly vote Labour back into power — making it one of the few countries in Europe to have a centre-left government.

Across the Irish Sea, by contrast, an anti-immigration backlash has spiralled into country-wide unrest, while several EU governments — and even Ursula von der Leyen’s European People’s Party — are contemplating Rwanda-style asylum deportation deals. Meanwhile, the EU is aggressively cracking down on free speech, both online and offline. Over the past few weeks alone, the police have intervened to break up peaceful assemblies on at least two occasions — a pro-Palestine conference in Berlin and the NatCon conference in Brussels.

On the economic front, Germany, the most important economy in the EU, is mired in stagnation, and facing outright deindustrialisation, along with several other EU countries — all while the EU announces the return of harsh austerity measures. Angry farmers have been laying siege to the bloc’s capitals for months. As for the EU’s “peace project”, all European governments are now on a war footing, while Macron is leading the charge to send Nato troops into Ukraine, lurching Europe closer to an all-out war with Russia.

All this clashes with the Remainers’ rainbow-tinted view of the European Union. But their vision was always predicated on a fantasy: everything that is happening across the Channel is not a betrayal of “EU values”, as they are probably telling themselves — it is an inevitable consequence of the EU’s architecture itself.

Even though Remainers have always tended to view the EU as a bastion of social and workers’ rights, the reality is that the Rightward drift across the EU has its roots in the Brussels-driven assault on the post-war European social and economic model following the 2008 financial crisis. High unemployment rates, stagnant wages and austerity measures implemented in response to the crash exacerbated existing inequalities, fuelling resentment towards the political establishment.

To make things worse, the EU attempted to prevent any democratic backlash to these policies by restricting the scope of democratic decision-making by democratically elected governments, focusing instead on quasi-automatic technocratic rules imposed by undemocratic bodies. The European Union effectively became a sovereign power with the authority to impose budgetary rules and structural reforms on member states — not exactly what you’d expect from the “bastion of democracy” often portrayed by Remainers.

This, however, only exacerbated the disillusion of many Europeans with both mainstream political parties and the EU institutions themselves, which were perceived as beholden to global financial interests and disconnected from the needs of ordinary citizens. Meanwhile, the EU’s handling of the refugee crisis, which peaked in 2015, further galvanised anti-immigrant sentiments and fuelled the rise of Right-wing populist parties across the continent. The influx of migrants, primarily from war-torn regions in the Middle East and North Africa, strained resources, fuelled social tensions and demonstrated once more the failure of the EU’s top-down approach to policymaking — exemplified in this case by the idea of relocation quotas, which several countries refused to comply with.

Today, immigration has once again moved to the forefront of the political debate. The EU’s border agency, Frontex, detected over 350,000 irregular border crossings into the EU last year — the highest total recorded since 2016. EU countries recorded more than 1 million new asylum requests, a 20% increase compared to 2022 — on top of the almost six million refugees taken in from Ukraine since the start of the war. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, to learn that seven out of 10 Europeans believe their country is taking in too many immigrants — and that governments, faced with the prospect of serious social unrest, are running for cover.

On Monday, representatives of several European governments met in Denmark to discuss various types of “durable solutions” to immigration, including plans to relocate asylum seekers to third countries, reminiscent of the UK’s government’s Rwanda scheme. Even more astonishingly, von der Leyen herself admitted in a recent presidential debate of being in favour of third-country migration deals with places such as Tunisia and Egypt, even though this would not be possible under the EU’s recently approved Migration Pact. Ironic, considering that just a year ago several EU governments and senior EU officials were castigating the British government for proposing the exact same policy.

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But then consistency has never been a valuable currency in Brussels. On Sunday, it was revealed  that von der Leyen is also recrafting her image as a grandmother with “traditional, conservative family values”, in the hope of whitewashing her reputation as a champion of the EU’s green-rainbow agenda. “#ProudGrandma” read her hashtag — though this is likely little more than PR. After all, even as the EU establishment pays lip service to the concerns of ordinary Europeans, to try to contain the popular backlash against its various policy failures, it is also doing what it does best: attempting to subvert democracy.

Today, this doesn’t come primarily in the form of economic governance tools, which are already in place, but rather in the form of narrative control. Over the past few months, EU authorities have been peddling their own “Russiagate” hoax, claiming that that Russia bribed European politicians to spread disinformation and interfere in the upcoming elections. Russia “is using dodgy outlets pretending to be media [and] using money to buy covert influence”, said European Commission Vice President Věra Jourová. “We uncovered a pro-Russian network that was developing an operation to spread Russian influence and undermine security across Europe”, claimed Petr Fiala, the Czech prime minister. However, following an investigation, the head of the Czech intelligence agency admitted that his agency had no information about any bribery scheme.

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Even von der Leyen conceded that there is no proof of a Russian bribery network. But don’t expect this to deter the EU from doing exactly what it accuses Russia of doing: interfering in the upcoming elections. On Monday, EU Parliament President Metsola met with 50 pan-European NGOs to thank them for pushing “EU values” ahead of the elections. This followed an announcement that the EU has signed Partnership Agreements with more than 500 NGOs — many at national level — all tasked with promoting EU values ahead of the forthcoming elections. It is, in other words, an explicit attempt to control the official narrative, by designating any communications that don’t conform to the official narrative as “disinformation”.

All of which is to say that, as challenging as Britain’s economic and political challenges may be, the EU’s dysfunctional and increasingly authoritarian nature is evidence of the fact that the UK made the right choice in decoupling from a failing bloc. As much as the British political class failed to address many of the concerns embodied in the Brexit referendum, that vote nonetheless provided a democratic outlet for many of the tensions that are now building up across the EU — and potentially opened up the country to the possibility of democratic national renewal. And if that isn’t justification enough, we need only look to the EU to witness the dismal alternative.

Given the Nato campaign was justified by the need to halt what was described as a Serbian “genocide” against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, the circumstances surrounding the bombing, which left three Chinese journalists dead, remain murky. While Nato insists the attack was accidental, Beijing’s claim that it was deliberate was bolstered by a subsequent investigation in The Observer, which suggested the building was targeted by the US in order to foil Chinese intelligence-gathering efforts on American tactics and weaponry — allegations denied by Washington.

Yet if the circumstances of the bombing remain contested, the international consequences of Nato’s campaign against Serbia are clearer, as indeed is the difference between the China of 1999 and the China of today. There is, in short, no doubting the symbolism of Xi’s visit to the Balkan back-yard of the European Union.

A quarter of a century ago, although China was already the world’s second largest economy, measured by purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, its options for retaliation against the US bombing of its sovereign territory were limited. Today, not only is China the largest economy in the world — it is orders of magnitude more powerful in military terms, with significantly more means of exerting strategic, diplomatic and military pressure on the US and its allies, ranging across Africa to the South China Sea to the Taiwan Straits. On the site of the embassy now stands a new complex, incorporating a Confucius Institute as well as offices, workshops and a hotel. It is a symbol of China’s wealth and soft power as much as its world position. Perhaps even more significant than enhanced Chinese power, however, are the changes in the wider international order.

The Nato bombing over Kosovo was both the moment of peak liberal international hubris, and the moment the so-called “rules-based order” began to crumble. On the one hand, the campaign was justified by the need to defend the human rights of Kosovo’s majority Albanian population from a counter-insurgency campaign against Albanian separatists waged by Belgrade. On the other, the Nato bombing was also in explicit violation of the UN Charter, whose articles protected member-states’ sovereign rights to be free from external interference.

Unlike previous humanitarian military operations during the Nineties, in this case the circle was not squared by the UN granting authorisation for the Nato military intervention. The UN could not offer its imprimatur because of the threatened use of veto by Russia and China, permanent members on the UN Security Council. Both countries were suspicious of Western states’ growing proclivity to use force in defence of human rights, and both had good reason to want to discourage their own restive peripheral minorities from seeking outside military support.

Despite the lack of UN legitimacy, the pressure of the Nato bombing campaign, as well as behind-the-scenes Russian diplomacy, eventually forced the Serbian state to withdraw its forces from Kosovo, allowing Nato to occupy the province and establish an international protectorate in the territory, where NATO has remained ever since. Kosovo would eventually unilaterally declare independence from Serbia in 2008 — a claim to independence still denied by Belgrade. Serbia still enjoys the support of Russia and China in its efforts to stymie international recognition of Kosovo’s independence, while independent Kosovo now enjoys the recognition of most of the world’s states.

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The 1999 bombing campaign was, therefore, both a moment of Western triumph and Western overreach. Defended at the time in the most grandiloquent terms as a cosmic battle between good and evil, the Nato campaign showed the West at the peak of its power, able to intervene militarily wherever it wanted on humanitarian grounds, unrestrained by international law or convention and without UN support. But it also amounted to the sabotage by Western states of the very same rules-based order enshrined in the UN, whose liberal maxims — including non-intervention in internal matters — were extended as the guarantee for non-Western states to accept Western leadership. Although the civilian casualties cited by Western states to justify the bombing quickly began to unravel, the precedent had already been established.

After Kosovo, humanitarianism became fused with every Western war-effort — whether the need to defend Afghan women from the Taliban, Iraqis from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, or Libyans from Colonel Gaddafi’s vengeance. From an international order based around sovereign states and citizens’ rights, Nato ushered in a cosmopolitan order based around global states on the one hand, whose political and legal claims have limitless jurisdiction, and a morass of deracinated humanity on the other, which no longer enjoyed any national protections except for the prospect of a humanitarian intervention in their favour.

Today, this humanitarianism is still regarded as the basis of the West’s global right — as seen in America’s efforts to build a “floating pier” to distribute humanitarian aid to besieged Palestinians in Gaza; in effect, the US is shoring up its legitimacy in the Gaza war by ministering to the Palestinians’ humanitarian needs in the midst of an Israeli bombardment by US-supplied arms. What has changed is more on the other side of the geopolitical divide. Across the Nineties and early 2000s, Russia championed the rights of sovereign states against the humanitarianism of Western states. Since the Russo-Georgian War of 2008, however, Vladimir Putin has deployed the Nato model to justify Russian expansionism. It begins with military intervention to defend embattled separatist minorities (Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Donbass) against genocidal central government forces (Tbilisi, Kyiv), followed by the establishment of protectorates (the former People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk). The Kremlin twist to the Nato model is then to annex the protectorates.

Between Nato and Vladimir Putin, there is now no longer anyone in the international order today willing to defend the principle of non-intervention and state sovereignty. Two obvious European successors to claim the mantle of defending national sovereignty — Brexit Britain and embattled Ukraine — have both rejected pursuing a politics of national independence in favour of plumping for Nato, the single transnational organisation that has done the most to destroy not only individual states (Libya, Yugoslavia), but state sovereignty as such, which Nato expressly jettisoned in favour of fighting for the humanitarian responsibility to protect.

And what of Serbia? For all the diplomatic support it has received from Russia in its efforts to stymie Kosovo’s independence, Serbia’s international position is much closer to Ukraine’s than that of any other country in Europe. As with the Nato intervention, occupation and eventual dismemberment of Serbian territory with Kosovar independence, so Russia has done to Ukraine in Crimea and Donbass. If any two European countries have a joint interest in maintaining their sovereignty and territorial integrity from the predations of more powerful neighbours, it is Ukraine and Serbia.

This is partly why Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić has exported Serbian weapons to Ukraine, while also managing to avoid joining the EU sanctions on Russia that have blown back against Western economies. Here, Vučić is trying to perpetuate the diplomatic tradition of neutralism and non-alignment that Serbia inherited from the former Yugoslavia, which sought to balance between East and West during the Cold War.

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Yet while he is no less autocratic than the Yugoslav Communist leader Marshal Tito, Vučić nonetheless lacks Tito’s toughness. Not only did Tito allegedly threaten to assassinate Stalin when Yugoslavia broke with the USSR in 1948, but he also went on to establish an independent geopolitical bloc — the Non-Aligned Movement — alongside Indian independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesian independence leader Sukarno and Egyptian nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser. By contrast, although Vučić assiduously courts outside patronage, he does not have the vision to establish an independent bloc, even though the circumstances for doing so are so much more propitious than in Tito’s day — one need only look at economic growth figures for India and Indonesia to see that. Nonetheless, even Vučić’s limited and unimaginative efforts to balance between Brussels, Moscow, Beijing and Washington D.C. indicate that there are more political options available for those canny enough to pursue them.

After all, long before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, the international rules-based order was buried beneath the rubble of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. While Xi’s China may offer countries around the world more space to exercise political independence from the West, its transactional vision of international relations is no substitute for Western leadership, and its support for Russian revanchism indicates it does not have the vision to lead an international order of sovereign nation-states. Despite many vesting their hopes for liberation from American hegemony in a multipolarity, the truth is Xi’s Chinese nationalism offers no meaningful counter-pole to Nato. Rather, it demonstrates that until there is a state willing to pursue a robust sovereigntist politics of national independence, the international order will continue to be plagued by grandiloquent globalism — with all the strategic overreach and geopolitical rivalry that comes with it.

The reasons for this new hole in the budget aren’t particularly unique: like every other country in the West, Sweden got too used to zero-interest policies being the new normal, and only belatedly caught up with the new reality brought about by post-Covid interest hikes. The central bank thus engaged in a game of buying high and selling low: loading up on bonds at a point where interest rates were low, and then offloading them when the rates shot up and the economy began taking a turn for the worse.

If one wanted to damn the central bank with some very faint praise, one could at least say that they’re hardly alone in this predicament: the UK is suffering from very similar problems, and much of Europe is stuck in a very deep economic malaise. Yet that doesn’t really change the facts on the ground: the Swedish state, which intended to boost defence spending in order to counter the threat from Russia, now finds that it no longer has the required cash in the bank. Thus, a time of very hard choices is approaching: either the Government must abandon the idea of these defence investments (many of which are strictly necessary just to compensate for what has already been given up on behalf of Ukraine), or engage in some very painful and very unpopular austerity elsewhere.

One might think that a budgetary disaster like this would receive a lot of coverage, but that would be quite wrong. Instead, the public debate in Sweden in recent days has been consumed by a very different story, one that, when taken together with the depressing news from the Riksbanken, lends an air of growing absurdity to the state of politics in both Sweden and Europe as a whole.

At the centre of this recent drama is a controversial law intended to make it easier to change gender. In theory, this should be a boringly familiar culture-war story, a tale of woke politics squaring off against supposedly narrow-minded conservatives. But reality is sometimes much stranger than fiction: Sweden today is governed by the Right, not the Left, and it is the Moderate party that is implicated in pushing this law through. The prime minister of Sweden — Ulf Kristersson — is thus leading the effort to lower the age at which one can change one’s legal gender from 18 to 16, even as a massive supermajority of his own voting base are against this change. To further inflame things, his parliamentary group is also opposed to it, although it is being whipped to vote in favour. And to top it all off, some of the law’s fiercer criticism is coming from the Left, where there are deep concerns about its promises to make it easier to access irreversible surgery.

The Swedish Right, in other words, is busy instituting a Left-leaning reform that some significant parts of the Left do not want, over the stringent objections of many politicians on the Right, and in total contravention of the desires of voters on the Right. Confusion thus abounds: why would the Moderates spend all this energy on an issue that only promises to make their own voters feel dismayed?

If one takes a step back, it becomes clear that this sort of political circus fits into a wider, pan-European pattern. Though the disaster at the Riksbanken and the Kafkaesque process to force through a law nobody really wants may seem to be completely separate issues, they are better understood as two sides of the same coin. As a politician, it’s easy to think that your job is first and foremost to be seen doing something, almost regardless of whatever that “something” ends up being.

Here we can again look to Europe-at-large: outside of the political establishment, the war on farmers in the Netherlands and in Germany clearly has very few friends and very many bitter enemies, yet it keeps going. In France and the UK, politicians are now beating on the drums of mass mobilisation and a return to total industrial warfare, even as the polls show that few are interested. Rather than channelling the will of the electorate, the new job of an increasing number of politicians seems to be going in precisely the opposite direction of what most people desire. Giving people what they want, these politicians seem to say, is a sign of weakness. It is a capitulation to “populism”; doing the opposite of what the people who put you in office want, conversely, is seen displaying the strength or “bravery” needed to stand up to the putative mob.

In a twisted sort of way, the logic makes sense. As the actual room to manoeuvre shrinks and shrinks — as deindustrialisation and the blowback from economic sanctions on Russia sets in — there’s progressively fewer popular things that politicians can actually do. Europe’s leaders have clearly put themselves in an almost impossible situation, promising total victory in Ukraine, economic defeat for Russia, and even the economic ring-fencing and isolation of China. These projects are now falling apart, and the fallout from those failures is gradually being felt. Even before the full-scale war in Ukraine, before the Covid pandemic, the European Monetary Union was clearly limping; Germany’s industrial model was slowly succumbing to its internal contradictions, and the EU project itself was stalling politically and economically. As far back as 2015, the EU’s only “solution” to the sort of economic stagnation seen in Italy was to kick the can down the road. Now, it seems, we are quickly running out of road.

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Here, one is reminded of the French historian Jacques Barzun, who published what is probably his greatest work, From Dawn to Decadence, at the ripe age of 93. In our times, it is common to use the word “decadent” as a slur or a moral judgement, but Barzun himself famously took a much more nuanced view:

“All that is meant by Decadence is ‘falling off’. It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance… Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.”

In the case of the Swedish Moderates, it seems that Barzun’s vision of “decadence” has now truly set in. They are far from lacking in energy; in fact, they seem constantly, frantically busy, doing things they themselves do not understand and do not want. The horizon of possibility seems to have closed, and only bad options remain: they can either renege on their promises to deliver a robust defence, or they can opt to fulfil those promises through ruthless austerity measures guaranteed to be incredibly toxic to the electorate.

The result of this is a sort of hypertrophy; a politics emptied of all sense and meaning. The Moderates are not alone in this, however; one only needs to cast a glance at the battles between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer to find an even more egregious case of a political class completely divorced from its own electorate. And so we find ourselves in a peculiar situation: a world where popularity and respect look increasingly unattainable for Western politicians, and where unpopularity and anger will soon become the only real yardstick left to measure success. Sure, you might end up doing something nobody asked you to do and nobody wants you to do — but at least you’re still doing something.