In the wake of Brexit/Trump a wave of influencers (including me) theorized the end of liberalism, a retrenchment of globalization, and an insurgent, resurgent Right. With populist parties on the rise and rise across Europe and in the USA, and Orbán seemingly unstoppable in Hungary alongside (at that point) Poland’s conservative PiS government, all the cultural energy was bubbling up from this corner. It felt as though the pendulum had swung as far Left as it could, and was beginning its inexorable “RETVRN”.

Now, though, Orbán is out. Trump, meanwhile, has abandoned his campaign promise to end US interventionism in the Middle East. Forever wars are back; Hungary is “normalizing” relations with the EU. Is it over, then? Are we back in the End of History? Where does this leave the movement in which Orbán and Trump seemed such symbolic keystones? And where, in turn, does this leave Britain’s own would-be national populist insurgency?

The end of Orbán’s reign suggests there’s nothing inevitable about the ideological Right as it was envisaged by both proponents and opponents after Trump 1.0. But while Hillary Clinton is already gloating, this may be premature. I don’t think it follows from Orbán’s defeat that it’s just progressivism all the way now. Rather, the Hungarian turn against Orbán underlines the fact that structural factors driving so-called “national populism” have not gone away. And it underlines the fact that anyone who pledges to address those grievances, and fails to do so, will in time face the same anger. These things remain unchanged; what has altered, though, is something that should not elicit any gloating from the likes of Hillary. It does indicate a shift in for European populist movements: but less away from the Right, than away from America.

The picture was very different within the New Right that emerged following 2016. There, Orbánism served as a Rorschach test. His program rested on rejecting mass migration and LGBT activism in the teeth of pressure from Brussels and the international NGO class, all while seeking to incentivize pro-Christian Hungarian culture and family formation. The efficacy of the program itself was a mixed bag, but merely by pursuing it for 16 years Hungary came to occupy a dual role: both as a real place, with its own history, language, and local politics, and also an imaginary “place” in (heavily America-inflected) online political discourse.

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Viewed in meme terms, Orbánist Hungary symbolized, among Anglophone progressives and their Eurocrat friends, the threat of authoritarian nationalist backsliding. For their opponents, it was as a pocket of resistance to woke totalitarianism, like the Right-wing equivalent of Asterix’s village holding out against the Romans. In practical terms, Orbán cultivated the latter image as a source of soft power, often in English, via a network of publications, think-tanks and other institutions funded by the Fidesz party, that enabled Hungary to punch some way above its weight in New Right intellectual circles.

The vision on offer was of a kind of nationalist Internationale, envisaged as a mutually respectful world of center-right sovereign nations, with strong borders and greater space for ideological pluralism: a “Europe of nations” as fellow national populist Marine Le Pen put it. In tandem, the geographic Budapest became, especially during the Biden years, a kind of Casablanca for disaffected Right-wing intellectuals. This Anglophone community of conservative expats comprised, in a sense, the real-world manifestation of the Right-wing meme Hungary, superimposed on and only lightly embedded in Magyar-speaking Budapest and its domestic politics.

The first sign that the memes might not be realized with the force of historical inevitability came in 2023, with the electoral downfall of the “based” Visegrad regime in Poland, at the hands of a coalition led by Teflon Eurocrat Donald Tusk. But then came the re-election of Trump to the White House in 2024, celebrated at an inauguration attended by numerous international Right-wing leaders including Giorgia Meloni, Marion Maréchal, and Javier Milei.

JD Vance castigated European states at Munich last February, for too much immigration and not enough defense spending: in other words, not being nationally sovereign enough. In November, a new American National Security Strategy (NSS) stated that Trump’s USA would support a vision of Europe as “a group of aligned sovereign nations”: the very vision promoted by Europopulists such as France’s Rassemblement National and Germany’s AfD. Had the hour of the nationalist Internationale come, at last?

Well. If Trump’s friends overseas hoped for a less globalizing America, and a US foreign policy keen to foster a Europe of nations, what they got was the monkey’s paw curling. Trump 2.0 has, to date, comprised such disorienting moves as punitive tariffs aimed — he says — at improving America’s relative position, but imposed every which way including upon putative allies. It’s included demands to annex Greenland from fellow Nato member Denmark, accompanied by some startlingly abrasive rhetoric. Latterly it’s included bombing Iran, in a joint operation with Israel, a move that has spiked energy costs in Europe, and been condemned by numerous European states, not to mention the Vatican.

Taken together, the impression is definitely of a less multilateralist USA. But if it’s increased European enthusiasm for more defense spending and sovereignty, it’s also scuppered the cozy vision of a nationalist Internationale — especially one led by a Trumpist USA. Indeed, Trump’s actions to date have rendered him so wildly unpopular across Europe that the surest way for the USA to lend support to a European populist party now would probably be encouraging King Don to say rude things about them on Truth Social.

These parties seem, themselves, to have recognized this, and are taking steps to disavow any electorally toxic association with Trump. RN and AfD have both spoken out recently against him. Even Nigel Farage, grinningly photographed in 2016 in the gilded Trump Tower elevator, has begun to distance himself, as have other supporters of Brexit.

But none of this tells us anything about the structural issues that drove those populist movements in the first place: immigration, living standards, and energy policy. This trifecta of wicked problems is so intertwined that it can appear as though solving any one of them will make another one worse. Some variant or other of this three-legged stool of populist disaffection can be seen across Europe, and none of these challenges have gone away just because Viktor Orbán became too firmly linked in Hungarian voters’ minds with crony capitalism and a pedophile cover-up.

Indeed Orbán’s successor, Péter Magyar, is hardly a squashy progressive. Himself a former Fidesz member, his campaign promises on immigration were even more restrictionist than Orbán’s. Meanwhile, Europe overall may be coming round to a more Hungarian stance on borders: recently it transpired that Brussels is exploring “Rwanda-style” offshore processing for asylum claims. So it may turn out, in the end, that Orbánism wasn’t so much defeated by the EU as assimilated into its program.

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What is perhaps changing, though, is the perception among European Right-wingers of America’s role in these dramas. There’s long been a tradition on the European hard Right of hostility to the USA. For example, The American Malady, the “Nouvelle Droite” theorist Alain de Benoist paints America not as the savior of European civilization, as the NSS would have it, but rather as the force threatening it with extinction. Back in the heady days of Trump 1.0, arguments such as de Benoist’s seemed mad. Now, though, the transatlantic relationship is — if not exactly hostile — certainly warier. Shortly before the election in Hungary, Vance traveled to Budapest to address a rally there, in support of Orbán’s re-election. But it’s far from clear whether, at this point, an American endorsement would have been any kind of help.

What, if anything, can Britain’s insurgent Right-wingers learn from these developments? Well, first of all that the nationalist Internationale was perhaps always a contradiction in terms. Trump’s erratic second term has comprehensively and (I suspect) permanently shattered what remained of international faith in American global leadership. This includes the Hillary/USAID version, yes, but it also extends to the New Right version that imagined the USA “preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity to foster aligned conservative regimes internationally”.

My sense is that this is what Péter Magyar is responding to, in Hungary: a cold assessment that Hungary, historically a small state trapped between competing empires, needs to adjust its alignment. Whether or not it’s what he ends up delivering, what he offered voters was broadly the same conservative program as Orbán, but with less cronyism. And, importantly, more deliberate distance from a USA that appears to have set aside any aspiration to serve as moral exemplar, and is now, like China, simply a superpower pursuing its own interests.

Any national-populist government coming to power in Britain will need to make a similar assessment: taking cold-eyed stock of our country’s actual clout, and interests, and re-learning the art of statecraft based on these factors, rather than on sentiment or ideology. But any government offering solutions will also need to be frank about the trade-offs. Anyone who promises everything but fails to deliver, or just delivers more of the same plus some dank memes, will eventually face the kind of electoral anger that eventually turned on Orbán, and may turn on Trump.

As it stands, the hour for us is late. Britain hovers increasingly uncomfortably between the EU, the USA, and the Commonwealth, all of which now ask competing things of us. Our renewable energy aspirations, meanwhile, are unnervingly dependent on China. Our energy prices are some of the highest in the developed world. The cost of living is soaring yet again, thanks to Trump’s Iran war. Our welfare spending is unsustainable, our military is laughable, and despite all this Labour is putting asylum housing contracts out to tender that reach into the 2030s.

Sorry, Hillary: populism isn’t going away, because the problems causing it aren’t going away. What might be going away, though, is the short-lived dream of an America-led solution.

The story does vary from one country to another, and, just as fringe parties come into the mainstream, so can the mainstream come to the fringe. Few places demonstrate this more clearly than Denmark, where politics in recent years has adapted in a way unlike anywhere else in Europe.

The international press regularly describes the Danish People’s Party as ‘far-Right’. But what precisely does the term mean?

There is no hard and fast definition. That’s part of the problem with the term. But by their fundamental nature, ‘far-Right’ parties do not believe in extending the rule of law to all citizens, and either do not support the democratic process or believe that it should be supplanted.

Other specific platform policies — in particular racism and anti-Semitism — are associated with the extreme Right, but attempts to make legitimate and often common and mainstream opinion into signifiers of extremism have made identifying the phenomenon unnecessarily hard.

The Danish People’s Party was founded in 1995 after a split within the Right-wing Progress Party. In its early years, the party distinguished itself by its criticism of the then existing consensus in Denmark on immigration and multiculturalism, and while not deserving of the ‘far-Right’ label, the DPP might accurately be said to have been (in a non-pejorative sense) a nationalist party.

They argued for immigration restrictions, for the state to put an emphasis on integration of newcomers, and for the primacy of Danish values within the country. As with all such parties, they were easily caricatured by the political centre and their concerns often dismissed. But in Denmark, as in neighbouring Sweden, the events of the first decade of the century caused the political centre to move towards them rather than the other way around.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s the DPP were consistent in their attitudes: they never advocated for the use of violence as a political tool, and argued for the extension of equal rights to all citizens. So long as people lived up to the provisions of the citizenship laws of the country, they did not advocate for discrimination along racial or confessional lines. But they were early in raising the central question that was going to keep returning to Danish (as in all European) politics during the 2000s: how much immigration is enough?

In the mid 2000s, the state underwent a remarkable stress-test on this question when the mainstream newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a set of cartoons in response to the discovery that no Danish illustrator could be found willing to do the drawings for a children’s book on Islam in a series on the world’s major religions.

The then culture editor of the paper, Flemming Rose, recognised that this comprised a sort of unwritten blasphemy law in the country and commissioned a number of cartoonists to test the taboo. The results, whipped up by a number of Danish imams who sought to portray the cartoons as unimaginably insulting towards the founder of Islam, led to worldwide protests, many deaths, and a number of threats and plots against those deemed responsible for this ‘blasphemy’.

And in the wake of that incident, Denmark got a dose of international attention of a kind it was unused to. As a result, the country’s politicians — and the country itself — were startled into a discussion centred not just on questions of free speech but of integration. Polls showed almost full opposition among the country’s Muslim population to the portrayal of Mohammed. In wider Danish society there was a split but it was fairly even, one Gallup poll showed 48% against the publication and 43% in favour.

Over the next decade, that was to change dramatically. In 2015 – after the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris — fully two-thirds of the Danish population thought that Jyllands-Posten had been right to publish the cartoons.

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The shift was a response not just to the political discussion that raged intensely over the nature of Danish-ness and the centrality of free speech, but also to the global attention, often intensely hostile.

During this period I had one conversation with a number of representatives from the DPP in the Parliament in Copenhagen, and I recall one expressing their belief that the country should not allow in any more migrants of Muslim origin. I questioned whether this wasn’t too stark a conclusion to come to, and the MP in question replied that since opinion polls showed that the vast majority of Danish Muslims did not believe in freedom of the press, why invite more people who also would be opposed almost in their entirety to such a fundamental pillar of democracy?

So while the DPP grew on a platform of immigration restrictions and integration, something interesting began to happen in the international media. As Denmark’s politicians were made to come to terms with one of the sharpest edges of the integration debate, parts of the international press muddied things considerably by presenting almost the whole of mainstream Danish politics as having lurched to the extreme Right.

The New York Times, in particular, got into the habit of portraying Denmark as a country which had somehow turned to the dark side. Even the story of Danish citizens saving the country’s Jews by getting them out of the country to safety in neutral Sweden to avoid the Nazis — almost all of its 5,000 Jews survived — was highlighted in order to be used against modern Denmark. Events that had been the focus of civic pride in the country were turned into a weapon against it; if a country had saved its Jews in the 1940s, so this logic went, then it had no right to turn away any of the world’s citizens in the 2000s and 2010s.

There is an interesting technical explanation for this, something Danish journalists and politicians understand. Countries like Denmark (with a population throughout this period of around 5.5 million people) will rarely be a centre of press attention, so that when they are, there is a tendency for international reporters – especially American ones — to fly in and play “find the Nazi” before flying back out again. Few spend much time focused on the country.

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What is more, there is a tendency in the international media (as with the story of the Danish treatment of Jews in the 1940s) to know one or two facts about a country and then use these as the basis of all subsequent analysis. Observers who noted the number of international correspondents who referred to Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia while covering the recent Catalan crises (with which Orwell’s book has no connection) might recognise the trend.

While covering this small, Scandinavian social democracy, reporters from the NYT and elsewhere would call people critical of the government and then use these not-very representative Danes as the “voice of the people”. Inside Denmark, these same critics, often campaigners or activists, would then point to the international furore and say “Look, we are clearly doing something wrong: even the NYT is criticising us”.

And when the international media misreported or misrepresented events, any rebuttal barely got further than Copenhagen, meaning that the allegation stuck and the gap between the reality inside the country and the wider international view grew. As a result, few people have tried to understand what it means for a country the size of Denmark to repeatedly become a focal point for major issues, issues that every European country has also been going through.

So it was that, in the mid-2010s, when the migration wave from north Africa and the Middle East began to disturb politics across Europe, the Danes had already lost much of their previous naivety. The Danish government recognised that the challenge affecting every country was not just a problem of numbers, but of the ability of countries to absorb or integrate people.

During the 2015 crisis, the-then Danish government (most notably the immigration and integration minister Inger Støjberg from the liberal conservative party Venstre) made it clear that they would not go the way of their neighbour Sweden — they would not allow the borders to be open.

So in January 2016, the Danes passed legislation stating that any arrivals who had travelled through multiple safe European countries in order to reach Denmark should expect to help pay for themselves in the country, and not simply expect to rely on the Danish taxpayer. The law was passed with the support of all the main parties, including the Social Democrats.

This became known as the ‘jewellery law’ in international media, in spite of the fact that the legislation made it clear that wedding rings and other personal items should not be seized. Still the story went around the world claiming that the Danish government was going to seize jewellery and other valuables from desperate people arriving in the country. Again, the 1940s comparisons were made, with supposedly chilling echoes of history’s darkest moments. Four years on, and there is still no record of even one incidence of such confiscation of personal jewellery.

There was, in 2018, a similar row. Thanks to misreporting in the NYT, the story went around the globe that the Danish government was proposing to create different categories of citizen, specifically separating out people in ‘ghettos’. Once again, the corrections to the reports failed to get anything like the international attention of the original allegation; the more prosaic truth is that all citizens in Denmark continue to have equal rights and the country continues to operate an asylum system.

Throughout this period, the Danish People’s Party did increasingly well in the polls. Their success peaked at the 2015 election in which they became the second largest party in the Folketing, the Danish Parliament, winning 37 of 179 seats. Unlike in neighbouring Sweden, the party had never been excommunicated from politics, in the way that the Sweden Democrats have been. Indeed, within three elections of the party’s founding, it was providing support to the government.

But 2015 was a breakthrough year and Pia Kjærsgaard became the Speaker of the Danish Parliament, reflecting the fact that the DPP’s core preoccupations had proved pertinent. But the other political parties had also realised that they had to catch up if they were to remain politically successful, and rather uniquely in Europe, adapting to the DPP in their platforms.

Such changes are often represented as though they only exist on the political Right, but one of the most interesting aspects of the Danish story is that even a party like the Social Democrats — who have run a minority government since 2019 under the leadership of Mette Frederiksen – now has policies in many ways indistinguishable from the DPP.

And so Denmark’s equivalent of Labour campaigned in 2019 as being tough on immigration, advocating the same policies as the DPP in processing asylum applications outside of Denmark rather than once people had arrived into the country.

They recognised that the country could not absorb large numbers of migrants and that in order for migration to work, the country needed to focus on integrating the people already there. These policies reflected a widely-held belief in Danish politics that the country had inadvertently created ghettoes and failed at the task of integration.

So while the DPP performed remarkably badly at the 2019 election, winning their smallest share of the vote since 1998, and some party members blamed poor leadership, the larger reason would appear to be that the other parties had simply adapted to almost all of the policies distinguishing the DPP from the mainstream.

If one person could be said to demonstrate this shift it would be Mattias Tesfaye. The now 39-year old Social Democrats Immigration and Integration Minister (himself the son of an Ethiopian immigrant to Denmark) has repeatedly said things that are all but indistinguishable from what DPP leader Pia Kjærsgaard used to argue.

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Earlier this month the Danish government released an 800-page report from the Ministry of Justice which concluded that while the Danish public are strongly committed to freedom of speech, immigrant communities have far less of an attachment to the principle. The report found that among immigrants and descendants of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Pakistan, 76% thought that it should be illegal to criticise Islam. Just 18% of the Danish population as a whole thought the same thing — and in response to these findings, Tesfaye announced that immigrants who didn’t respect Danish values should leave the country.

For elements within the international press, this is one more proof that Danish society has lurched to the Right. It is more plausible that the political class has simply responded to the concerns of a citizenry historically used to consensus, but which has found itself in recent years having to repeatedly defend and stand up for some of their most fundamental societal values.

As in every other country, actual far-Right parties do hover in the wings. In 2017, Rasmus Paludan formed Stram Krus, or ‘Hard Line’, whose policies might be guessed at by the organisation’s name. Having achieved some notoriety for burning a Quran, Paladan stood for election on a platform advocating d the removal of all Muslims from Denmark. Despite some warnings in the international press that this new ‘far-Right’ party was about to enter the Danish Parliament, Paladan’s party failed to make the threshold for election in 2019.

Both the success of the Social Democrats and the failure of Hard Line can in part be attributed to the DPP, a party that has shown how the label of far-Right is so widely misapplied by a media less interested in informing than in setting the boundaries of opinion.

If the policies of the DPP are far-Right, then all major parties in Denmark would also have to be described as such, from centre-left to centre-right, in a country that scores higher than almost any other on any measure of equality, gender freedom and human rights.

The furthest edge of the European Union has recently become the centre of the continental bloc’s attention; and what happened in Kastanies is reverberating in Brussels, Paris and Berlin, as Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan, humiliated by the loss of at least 33 Turkish soldiers in an airstrike in Syria’s Idlib, takes his rage out on Europe.

Since the multi-billion Euro refugee deal with Europe in 2016, Erdogan, like Gaddafi before him, has wielded the prospect of unleashing an unstoppable wave of migrants as a threat against the soft, rich and disunited European powers he incessantly rails against.

Until now, the threat has always worked, both for extracting Danegeld at will from fearful European leaders, especially the perennially pliant Angela Merkel, and for ensuring European acquiescence to his military adventures in Northern Syria. Among them, the January 2018 invasion of the Kurdish region of Afrin, and the October 2019 invasion of the country’s Kurdish-dominated northeast each saw hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians flee their homes in the face of war crimes carried out by Turkey’s rebel proxy militias and a systematic Turkish campaign of ethnic cleansing and forced demographic change.

But this week, when Erdogan finally pulled the trigger, European leaders did something few expected, least of all the Turkish despot himself: they said no, and pulled together in what became the first display of European diplomatic unity and common purpose since Brexit unsettled the fragile union.

Erdogan had hoped that European leaders would support his faltering war against the Syrian government and its Russian backer in the county’s northwestern Idlib governorate. Here Assad’s forces, backed by brutal and indiscriminate airstrikes against civilians as well as the mixed rebel and al-Qaeda-linked jihadist forces backed by Turkey on the ground, are regaining territory lost in the first years of the almost decade-long war, causing one million civilians to flee their homes in the process.

Erdogan’s propaganda channels, like the state-run broadcaster TRT, linked the sudden arrival of tens of thousands of migrants at Greece’s border with the humanitarian crisis in Idlib, claiming that the huddled masses seeking to gain entrance to Europe were fleeing Russian and Syrian government bombing. Despite this claim being boosted by well-meaning Western commentators, it is entirely untrue. The dispossessed of Idlib remain trapped in Idlib, barred from entering Turkey by the second-largest wall on earth, manned by Turkish border guards ordered to use lethal force to prevent their entry.

Instead, the flow of migrants who appeared at Greece’s border demanding onward passage to the UK, Germany and Sweden were drawn from the migrant underclass of Istanbul and other Western Turkish cities, mostly Afghans from the country’s Hazara Shia minority working in the country’s booming sweatshops as well as Pakistanis, Moroccans and other recent migrants drawn in by visa-free travel to what has become the easiest point of access to the European Union.

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Lied to by the Turkish state, which informed them that Europe’s borders were now open, they were then bussed to the border in free coaches laid on by the Erdogan government for this sole purpose. When they realised that the border was closed, they attempted to gain entry by force, hurling rocks and tear gas grenades at the Greek soldiers and police guarding the border, or rushing weak sections of the border fence as Turkish police fired tear gas at Greek officials to distract them, and used armoured cars to pull down the border fence.

The images of an angry mass of mostly economic migrants attempting to enter Greece by force, urged on and openly supported by Turkish security forces, have awoken a strong feeling of patriotic and indeed nationalist sentiment in Greece, where the new conservative government has directly labelled the events at the border as a form of hybrid warfare, in which Erdogan utilises migrants as weapons and the Turkish and international media as a force multiplier to secure his aims.

Civilian hunters, fishermen and military reservists from border villages have formed semi-official patrol groups along the frontier, capturing and detaining migrants who have broken through and handing them to the Greek army and police for immediate return to Turkey. Convoys of military reinforcements trucked to the frontier have been met by applauding crowds as they trundle through the towns and villages of Greece’s border regions, where many Greeks see the sudden, forced migrant crisis as part of Erdogan’s longstanding campaign to weaken Greek sovereignty over areas of the nation only liberated from long centuries of Ottoman rule in 1913, and which Erdogan repeatedly threatens to take back under Turkish control.

It is unclear why Erdogan attempted to achieve his goals in this precise fashion, using unhappy humans as weapons in a manner directly contradicting claims that this crisis has its roots in Syria. Greek government statistics disseminated to journalists last week asserted that of the 252 migrants who had then been detained after illegally entering Greece over the land border, 69% were from Afghanistan, 19% from Pakistan and only 4% from Syria- fewer than the 5% from Turkey itself.

If Erdogan had wanted to round up a sufficient number of genuine Syrian refugees to hurl at the border, he could easily have done so. But by weaponising a random assortment of migrants of dubious or non-existent refugee status, the Turkish government not only weakened its case to be acting out of a humanitarian desire to assuage Syria’s human misery, but has also weakened the entire concept of asylum in the eyes of European observers and voters.

The Greek government’s response, halting all new asylum claims, whatever their merits, until the end of the border crisis and immediately returning all new arrivals to Turkey, has met with the warm approval of Europe’s political mainstream.  Greece has been termed Europe’s “shield” in a newly warlike turn of phrase, and €700m of support for new border infrastructure has been pledged, as well as hundreds of personnel to repel attempts to enter what is now an officially sanctioned Fortress Europe.

The massive disjunct between the Turkish government’s narrative of events at the border and that witnessed by journalists on the Greek side has also highlighted the sadly now firmly established weaponisation of media in 21^st century conflicts. In attempting to expand the Syrian war to the frontiers of Europe, Erdogan also expanded the online meta-conflict to the sphere of European politics, a trend which will not enhance ordinary consumers’ trust in the news they watch and read.

Accelerated by social media, the Syrian War has blurred the distinction between protagonist, activist, analyst and journalist like no previous conflict. As various factions and proxy militias battle on the ground, this meta-conflict between western commentators rages on social media, as each side, radicalised by the secret DM groups in which they communicate, attempts to sway the public narrative in their chosen direction.

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Consequently, those journalists and commentators keen to promote Western military intervention in Syria on behalf of either the civilians or armed rebel groups of Idlib have uncritically shared Turkish narratives of desperate Syrians pleading to enter the safety of Europe, despite their almost total lack of correspondence with reality.

As Stalin learned nearly a century ago, and other dictators have realised since, Western journalists will quite happily ignore the evidence of their own eyes if doing so allows them to flaunt their humanitarian and progressive values, a situation drastically exacerbated by Twitter.

Yet whatever the merits of Western military intervention in Syria, the dire situation of the country’s civilians will not be improved by allowing Turkish-resident Afghan and Pakistani economic migrants to enter Europe en masse whenever Erdogan deems it useful. Instead, by eroding the already-waning attachment of European voters to the very concept of asylum, Erdogan’s cynical border gambit will do great harm to those genuine victims of conflict, now and in future, who need it most.

What Erdogan did not realise is that the Europe of 2015 no longer exists, shunted into distant, unrecoverable history by the political hangover of that year’s refugee crisis. The wave of right-wing populism that has eviscerated Europe’s once dominant centre-left now threatens the continent’s centre-right, causing mainstream conservatives to shift dramatically rightwards for their own survival. In 2015, right-wing populists in Hungary and Poland were shunned outliers in the European system, written off as aberrations from an only semi-liberalised Mitteleuropa. Five years later, right-wing populists are the rising challengers even in the continent’s western heartlands.

In France, only a few percentage points separate Le Pen from Macron for dominance entering next year’s presidential election. In Italy, the likelihood is that Salvini will assume power within the next year or so, most likely in coalition with the far more radical Brothers of Italy party. In Spain, the outlandishly Francoist VOX party seeks to enter coalition government with mainstream conservatives nationally, as it already has in Madrid.

In Sweden and Finland, the heartlands of the Nordic social democracy so beloved by British and American liberals, right-wing populist parties seeing to halt migration and overturn the liberal consensus are the most popular political forces in each country.

In Germany itself, the entire political system has been paralysed by the rise of the right-wing AfD party in response to Merkel’s handling of the 2015 crisis, with Merkel taking six months to form a government after the 2017 election, and German politics now reducible to a series of experiments in unlikely and unstable coalitions just to keep the populists out of power.

The country has also been shaken by a series of extreme right-wing terror attacks against both ethnic minorities and pro-migration politicians alike, and a rolling drumbeat of alarming incidents of radicalisation within the German security forces, like the 2017 Day X plot in which troopers in the German equivalent of the SAS allegedly conspired to assassinate liberal politicians, including the country’s president, and launch a guerrilla campaign against the state.

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In Austria and Denmark, the onward march of right-wing populism has been halted, but only by centrist governments of right and left adopting the rhetoric and policies of the populist right, including a zero tolerance approach to illegal migration. It is little wonder that Orban himself has declared the European Union’s reponse to this crisis a moral victory: the policies he was shunned for in 2015 are now the stated policy of the European Union as a whole, with Europe’s mainstream conservatives falling over themselves to claim Greece’s hardline border policy as their own.

This is not, as an aside, the Europe that Britain’s FBPE contingent so idealised during our own long-running political crisis, but it is the continent’s political mainstream for the foreseeable future. Given that the majority of Afghan and Pakistani migrants will have aimed for the UK as their ultimate destination, drawn by long-existing communities of fellow kin and a facility with the national language, it is ironic that at the same time Turkish police were firing volleys of tear gas at their Greek counterparts to enable their entry, Dominic Raab was in Ankara declaring his full-throated support for Turkish foreign policy, despite the fact that its success at Europe’s borders would direly threaten his own government.

The European Union — with the exception of Merkel’s Germany, lumbering distractedly and painfully towards geopolitical irrelevance — has finally awoken to the threat posed to the continent by a Turkish autocrat lurching from one self-engineered crisis to another in his desire not to relinquish his hold on power.

Threatened at home by a secular Kemalist section of the electorate dissatisfied at the country’s bloody and so far unsuccessful war in Syria, by the presence of millions of refugees, by slow-motion economic collapse and by the country’s growing slide into authoritarian Islamism, Erdogan survives only by engineering crises which pit the Turkish nation against the world. Switching from the United States to Russia to Europe and back again as the existential foe of the moment, Erdogan’s Turkey is the greatest destabilising factor in our near abroad.

Claiming that Turkey’s borders as settled by the 1923 treaty are too small to contain the might and needs of the Turkish nation, Erdogan has effectively annexed large chunks of northern Syria, expanded its military presence in Iraq and Libya, claiming them to be within the Turkish “borders of the heart,” and threatens constantly to invade and annex Greece’s eastern islands.

It is only by chance that the 2016 coup attempt against him failed and that Turkey avoided a serious civil conflict, and Europe will need to be similarly fortunate to avoid being dragged into a conflict of the autocrat’s choosing in the near future. The chances of a peaceful transition of power away from Erdogan are exceedingly slim, and Europe, including Britain, will need to reassess its relations with its unhappy neighbour sooner rather than later, a process begun, it seems, at a sleepy Balkan border crossing the Turkish strongman last week turned, on a whim, into a battlefield.

To be precise, this is the West’s second class war. The first, in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, pitted the big-firm corporate managers and professionals against industrial and service workers, who had not shared in the gains of the early industrial revolution. During the Great Depression and World War II, that class war came to a negotiated end in Europe and America, thanks to cross-class peace treaties such as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the British welfare state.

Today, many people consider those postwar ‘settlements’ solely in terms of safety-nets that redistributed income or expanded public services like Britain’s NHS. But the class peace that lasted for a generation after 1945 in the West was based as much on power-sharing as on wealth-sharing.

By the mid-20th century, universal suffrage ensured that all working-class citizens in Western democratic nations could vote (a goal finally achieved for nonwhite Americans in the civil rights era). Yet working-class citizens exercised power in the three realms of government, the economy and the culture by more than votes alone.

Thanks to what I describe in The New Class War as ‘democratic pluralism’, non-college-educated workers had their own mass membership organisations that represented their interests between elections. Local political parties were the basis of national party federations, in which messages went up the chain as well as down.

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Today's liberals dream of a workerless paradise

By James Bloodworth

In many major industries, corporate managers were compelled to negotiate with trade union representatives. On top of this, religious and civic organisations policed the movies and the media and education, to align their content with the values of working-class majorities.

Today, the petty tribunes of yesterday’s working class — the local party officials, private trade union officials, and, yes, the censorious church members —are all but extinct as social types in many Western democracies. Power has migrated upwards to national political, economic and cultural elites. At the same time, these have grown more homogeneous and insular, fusing into a single, college-credentialed, managerial overclass clustered into a few major hub cities including New York, San Francisco, London and Paris.

Neoliberalism, a combination of free-market libertarianism in economics with social liberalism in culture, has been the orthodoxy shared by Thatcher and Reagan conservatives with centre-Left leaders Blair and Clinton and Obama.

On both sides of the Atlantic, national elites have promoted the technocratic neoliberal vision of a glorious globalised future of dissolving borders, free migration of goods and people and ever-growing demographic diversity — combined, it was assumed, with monolithically liberal values and opinions.

Today’s populist politics is best understood as a counter-revolution from below against this neoliberal revolution from above. Some try to explain populism solely as a backlash by native working-class whites against increasing racial diversity driven by immigration, but this cannot explain why a third of BAME (British, Asian and Minority Ethnic) voters supported Brexit, or why nearly 30% percent of Hispanics in the U.S. voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

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How I overcame my class stigma

By Roger Scruton

Those who argue that economics is the key to understanding populist revolts are closer to the truth, since across the West, the heartlands of populism are often deindustrialised former manufacturing regions such as the North of England and the American Rust Belt.

Centre-left parties have lost their working-class constituents to populists and conservatives, replacing them with a new alliance of highly-educated white managers and professionals allied with native minorities and many upwardly-mobile immigrants, for whom even low wages and poor working conditions in Western hub cities are better than their former circumstances.

What an exclusive emphasis on economics misses, however, is power — or its absence. Human beings care about power and agency, not just as means to income and wealth, but as ends in themselves. In otherwise quite different societies — many nations in Latin America, the states of the Southern U.S. between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Revolution, and the immigrant-packed Northern cities in the U.S. in the early 20th century — a feeling of powerlessness and exclusion by large elements of the population drove conditions in which demagogic populists thrive.

Populists such as Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Matteo Salvini sometimes represent the legitimate interests and values of groups that have been excluded by a closed and nepotistic power elite. But history also suggests that populist insurgencies usually fail, through cooptation by the existing establishment or corruption by demagogues who build their own ephemeral cults of personality and personal patronage systems.

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How to understand the rise of national populism

By Matthew Goodwin

A new democratic pluralism is needed to bring today’s class war to an end in the way that the power-sharing pluralism of the 1950s and 1960s ended the first. This is a challenge far greater than merely revising trade or immigration or social welfare policies to win over populist voters. It requires compelling corporate executives, media tycoons and high-ranking civil servants who have grown accustomed to a lack of pressure from below to show deference to less-educated people in the national heartlands beyond a few economic, cultural and administrative capitols.

This, in turn, requires creating the functional equivalents of yesterday’s trade unions, local political machines and civic pressure groups, in forms suited to the twenty-first century. This would allow those citizens who today are alienated and atomised members of an anomic population, disconnected from the centres of national power, to once again belong to organisations that can pool their numbers and amplify their influence.

With their own lesser, local tribunes to represent their interests and values, members of the working-class majority are likely to be less attracted to Caesarist demagogues who claim to speak for the virtuous people as a whole against the treacherous few.

The details of a new democratic pluralism cannot be specified in advance, and by nature must be negotiated by different actors in society, rather than drawn up in advance in 10-point plans by intellectuals or committees. These new class peace treaties will also vary among Western democracies, depending on local conditions and cultures.

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Will Boris save social democracy?

By David Goodhart

It is possible that Britain, the mother of parliaments and the first modern industrial nation, and the one that pioneered neoliberalism under Margaret Thatcher, will now blaze the trail for what has been called “post-liberalism”. Modern British history is rich in traditions that reject the extreme aspects of liberalism without rejecting democracy, from the One Nation Toryism of Disraeli to the guild socialism of members of the early 20th century English pluralist school like Cole and Laski. More recently, Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour and Philip Blond’s Red Toryism have sought to correct the excesses of neoliberalism while avoiding the trap of demagogic populism.

Can a new cross-class peace settlement unite those whom David Goodhart has called communitarian, working class “Somewheres” with metropolitan, libertarian “Anywheres” in the UK and other nations? Failure is always an option. In this case, failure would consist of a few token gestures towards alienated populists by establishment elites who remain committed to the neoliberal consensus of the past generation and have no intention of sharing real power with the powerless of all classes and ethnicities.

But we can be certain of this: the political earthquakes of the past few years are not the last. It is not the beginning of the end of a new era in Western democratic politics, but the end of the beginning.

Throughout all of this, we learned a great deal about the current state of politics: that national populism has consolidated as a political force, that Green movements are gradually becoming more significant, that social democracy remains stuck in a state of crisis, that Europe’s political systems are continuing to fragment and that Brexit is now definitely going to happen.

Underneath all of this, we also learned some other things; that for millions of voters around the world feelings of cultural insecurity continue to matter as much as feelings of economic insecurity; that centre-Right parties such as Britain’s Conservatives or Austria’s People’s Party are starting to adapt far more effectively than Left-wing parties to this new political era; and that the Left still does not appear to have much of an answer to its fragmenting electorate.

Against this backdrop, then, what might 2020 have in store for us? Here are a few predictions to see us through.

First, starting here in Britain I predict that Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party will enjoy a lengthy honeymoon period. With the largest Conservative majority since 1987, Prime Minister Johnson will inevitably pass his Withdrawal Agreement Bill. Aside from formalising Brexit this will allow him to claim with credibility to have honoured the result of the 2016 Referendum, as well as his 2019 promise to “Get Brexit Done”. It will also leave Johnson as the only Conservative leader to have truly triumphed over the Europe question, an issue that dogged all of his predecessors.

This year will also allow us to see how Johnson and his party plan to hold together an electorate that looks and feels fundamentally different from that which elected David Cameron in 2010 and 2015.

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Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

Johnson’s following is older, more working-class, less well educated, heavily white and more socially conservative. This is why I predict some big, bold offers on immigration reform, crime, spending on infrastructure and other investment for the (non-London) regions. Expect lots of pictures and speeches outside the capital.

With a big majority, I also predict that this generation of Conservatives will want to go much further than their predecessors in pushing back against a “soft Left” bias that runs across much of Britain’s education sector and media. There is no point in winning a battle over Brexit if your party is simultaneously losing the longer-term war over culture.

Meanwhile, Remain will inevitably drift into Re-Join. Not only will this be a harder movement to sustain but it will also be one that will soon run out of steam. Babyboomers will struggle to turn pro-Remain sentiment into a viable political project, especially when the much younger Generation Z are far more concerned about the issue of climate change. There will be a hardcore of diehard Remainers continuing to rally around podcasts and Twitter Land but this will be a fringe movement, nothing more. More Brits will identify openly as “European” but this will not translate into any significant political change.

Labour, which just sunk to its lowest number of seats since 1935, will struggle to regroup this year. Corbynism has been removed as one possible reply to the wider crisis facing social democracy in Europe, as well as to questions that are being asked in the United States about where next for the Democrats. Economic populism, it turns out, is not as popular as many people think. It will also lose every time when presented with a centre-Right leader who is willing to lean Left on the economy while leaning Right on culture and identity. That too contains a message for the United States as it begins to gear up for November.

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How to understand the rise of national populism

By Matthew Goodwin

Labour’s sudden rush into a leadership debate, the lack of any serious self-reflection on its defeat, the unimpressive opening statements of the leadership contenders and the deeper structural problems within its electorate all point to a long and slow walk through the wilderness rather than a quick recovery. Local elections in the spring of 2020 will likely add to this challenging year.

Look ahead at 2020, and when it comes to populism all eyes will be on the United States where I think, on balance, that Donald Trump will probably be re-elected.

There is certainly a lot running against the incumbent. His path to winning the electoral college remains narrow and his approval ratings are weak, especially when seen in historical perspective. In fact, his ratings are the lowest in any election year since Gerald Ford in 1976 (who went on to lose to Jimmy Carter).

But there is also a lot going for Trump, too. Among his core groups of voters — evangelicals, committed Republicans and the working class — his ratings are far stronger. And the Democrats have, at least in my view, so far shown little understanding about why Trump was elected in the first place or what they might say to win back key chunks of his electorate. Mobilising minorities and committed leftist activists will not be enough.

Then comes the narrative; Trump actually has a lot to say to voters. You might not like what he has to say but on the American economy, standing up to China, working to defend national borders and clamping down on terrorism and gang violence he does have a story to tell. What, in contrast, is the Democrat narrative? I’m not really sure. On top of this, we knew that Trump had a lot of negatives in 2015 and he still won.

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Can the Tories cling on to the Red Wall?

By David Jeffery

Europe’s national populists will continue their current success after their best year yet, when this disruptive political family went on to win its largest number of seats in the European Parliament. In Britain over 2019, Nigel Farage continued to pile pressure on the main parties via the Brexit Party, whose call for an Australian-based immigration points system and more work on tackling regional inequalities would later be adopted by Boris Johnson’s Conservatives.

Elsewhere, new parties broke through; Forum for Democracy at municipal elections in the Netherlands and, more significantly, Vox at national elections in Spain. While In Italy, Matteo Salvini and the Lega lost power but won a record number of seats in the European Parliament and continue to enjoy healthy leads in the polls. Flemish Interest in Belgium won a new record share of the vote while the Alternative for Germany advanced at state elections in Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia. In Poland, Law and Justice won their largest share of the vote on record.

Rather than weakening, national populism has consolidated and, as we head into a new decade, looks set to remain as a permanent force on the landscape, particularly as Europe’s political systems continue to fragment.

One final thing to watch out for in 2020 are the shifting political alliances. Boris Johnson is interesting because of the way in which he is seeking to usher in or revive a different brand of conservatism, which has seen his party forge an alliance-of-sorts with the left-behind working class — but this is not the only new alliance to keep eyes on.

At the recent election in Austria, the Greens enjoyed their strongest ever result but then proceeded to join a coalition government with the centre-Right People’s Party. And, interestingly, while they have introduced new environment taxes, the Greens have also signed up to some pretty hardline positions on immigration and integration; supporting measures to crack down on illegal migration, to curb “political Islam”, including the banning of headscarves for under-14-year-olds, and introducing preventative custody for individuals who are considered a risk to security but have committed no crime.

All of this is a reminder of the fact that, just because Green movements are doing a little bit better than in the past, that does not necessarily signal the return of a nice, fluffy brand of social liberalism. On the contrary, on the all-important questions about identity and culture much of Europe continues to drift further to the right, in response not only to national populism but also to the public mood. I see few reasons why that will change in 2020.

One of the frustrating aspects about my job as an academic is that I have little time to read. It’s a funny thing to say, but between teaching, administration and writing research articles for obscure journals, there are not many hours left in the day to actually sit down with a book.

This is especially problematic in my area of research, which includes populism, Brexit, Europe and anything that can be lumped under the header ‘political volatility’. There is simply too much to read. Trump, the 2016 referendum, the rise of national populism in Europe and the looming 2020 election in the US not only triggered a tsunami of public interest but also a rapidly growing pile of books.

This is one reason why non-fiction sales have been surging in recent years, easily eclipsing fiction: non-fiction audiobook sales are also growing. It is also why we have seen a parallel explosion in research monographs and articles on the same topics. Plug ‘populism’ into Google Scholar and since 2016 alone there are more than 37,000 entries. Stick ‘Trump’ in and there are already more than 100,000. All of this is why I find myself trying to relax on holiday while reading books that are way too serious, dark and close to ‘work’.

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Before getting to my picks, I wanted to say that I have both enjoyed and learned a lot from several books that tell us much about the current era of volatility. Many were well ahead of the curve.

Justin Gest’s The New Minority (2016), through meticulous research and interviews with hundreds of voters, tells us much about the appeal of populism among the white working-class in both the UK and the US. In some ways, it is a reboot of Christopher Husbands’ Racial Exclusionism and the City (1983), a classic on why people were drawn to the earlier National Front, especially in the East End of London.

Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift (2018), which explores how demographic change is reshaping the world around us, is one of the most important books to be published in recent years. I have also revisited Karen Stenner’s The Authoritarian Dynamic (2005) – which predicted the populist surge and shows why it is unlikely to disappear any time soon – and looked ahead with Ivan Krastev’s After Europe (2017), a realistic take on the many challenges that are facing the European Union.

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Why has the diversity debate left white working-class boys behind?

By Jenny McCartney

When thinking about how we react to populism, and how our political cultures are changing, I have also enjoyed Mark Lilla’s short book on identity politics, Once and Future Liberal (2018), in which he argues that many on the Left are losing their way and focusing far more on what separates people when they should be talking about what brings them together. This should be read, in my view, alongside Francis Fukuyama’s Identity (2018), which makes similar points.

I also learned a lot from Bradley Campbell’s and Jason Manning’s The Rise of Victimhood Culture (2018), alongside Jon Haidt’s and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), both of which point to worrying developments in our wider culture that look set to increase rather than curb populism and polarisation.

And I’d recommend a few books from across the spectrum that explore how deeper shifts laid a foundation long ago for our current era of political turbulence, including Robert Putnam’s Our Kids (2015), which explores educational divides; Paul Morland’s The Human Tide (2019), which like Eric Kaufmann’s book looks at demography; Charles Murray’s Coming Apart (2012), which shows how America society was fragmenting long before Trump; and Cultural Backlash (2019) by Norris and Inglehart, a book that explores how conflicts over values lie behind the populist turn.

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Victimhood culture will tear us apart

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But this year I enjoyed three books in particular, not necessarily because I agreed with them, but because I found them stimulating.

If you buy the argument that a key faultline today and in the future is geographic – between big cities and the periphery – then you should read the polemical Twilight of the Elites (2019) by the French geographer Christophe Guilluy. In this book the author, who has already made a name for himself by writing about ‘periphery France’, or ‘forgotten France’, takes aim at the big cities (the ‘new citadels’) but also the bourgeois bohemians (‘BoBos’) who appear more interested in sharing hashtags and preaching about the wonders of diversity than delivering serious economic reform and controlling the winds of globalisation.

Twilight of the Elites extends some of Guilluy’s earlier arguments to discuss how supposedly ‘open’ cities are actually not that open at all, how the economic system is rigged against those who have been pushed out of the new citadels and how immigration is now part of the mix. Guilluy, I suspect, would not have been the least bit surprised by the eruption of the yellow vest protests in France.

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Understanding the 'gilets jaunes'

By John Lichfield

Another book that explores where liberals went wrong is Patrick Deenan’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018), which made it onto Barack Obama’s summer reading list last year. It’s not an easy book to read but, like Guilluy’s, it does ask good questions. Deenan’s central thesis is that liberalism has ‘failed’ because it has been so successful:

A political philosophy that was launched to foster greater equity, defend a pluralist tapestry of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity, and, of course, expand liberty, in practice generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation and undermines freedom.

Liberals, he argues, have failed to reflect seriously on how the many contradictions within their creed have alienated citizens and cleared the path for the likes of Trump (though he wrote much of the book before the 2016 election).

Why Liberalism Failed is better on diagnosing where liberalism went wrong than pointing to where we should head next. It talks about the need to sustain things that are often lost through liberalism’s individualistic society – like social bonds and culture – through “forms of self-governance that arise from shared civic participation”. It’s all pretty vague. The call is for a return to the politics of virtue and for the creation of “civic polis life”. But it’s still worth a read for the diagnosis if not the proposed course of action.

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Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

My final pick is much stronger when it comes to thinking through how we might actually respond to some of these social challenges, one of which is our rapidly ageing societies. If you buy the argument that one reason why we are witnessing all of this political turbulence is because of unprecedented rates of demographic change, then I would recommend one book that asks us not to think about why we are here but rather where we are going in the future.

As Camilla Cavendish points out in Extra Time: 10 Lessons for an Ageing World (2019), by next year, and for the first time in history, there will be more people on the planet over 65 than under 5. More grandparents than children. Our ageing societies not only reflect the fact that we are all living longer but also that many of us are having fewer children. There are now 83 countries where fertility rates are below the ‘replacement rate’, while sub-Saharan Africa will see its population quadruple to 4 billion people by 2100, with Nigeria most likely overtaking America as the world’s third most populous country.

We really have not even begun to think seriously about how these shifts will impact on our societies and politics. As Cavendish writes:

Shrinking populations will soon alter the balance of power between countries, and change the politics of immigration. Longevity is bringing back multi-generational households and creating age-diverse workforces. A dramatically changing ratio of older to younger people will force governments to rewrite the social contract … We are not ready.

Though she does not explore it directly, it seems likely to me that one of the more immediate beneficiaries of these changes will be populist politics. One of the peculiarities of our modern age is that many of the nation states that are most strongly opposed to immigration – including some of those in Eastern Europe or Japan – also happen to be the very same ageing states that are going to need it the most. Without large-scale demographic change it is hard to see how these societies will raise the tax revenue and human resource that will be required to care for rapidly ageing populations. Technology will help but perhaps not as much as people think.

Either way, the good news is that Cavendish is full of ideas about how to meet this challenge – from giving free accommodation to university students in exchange for their help with elderly co-residents, to how each of us, as we get older, can find what the Japanese call ‘ikigai’ (a reason for being that gets us to jump out of bed each morning). We can only hope that somebody out there is listening to her suggestions.