In the fantasy of Altneuland, the racist Dr Rabbi Geyer’s party is resoundingly “beaten in almost all the districts where it had presumed to set up candidates”. As of this morning, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s bloc is at 56 seats, with over 60% of the votes counted, while Gadi Eisenkot’s so-called Change Bloc is on 48 seats, a number expected to rise slightly as its heartlands come in. The remainder of the Knesset’s 120 seats look set to go to a pair of Arab parties.

Every Israeli has woken up knowing the existential question this projected hung Knesset, with Arab parties as kingmakers, is asking of them: what kind of democracy is Israel? But one thing is clear. This election was a referendum on Netanyahu himself, and he seems to have lost that poll. It looks like the Bibi bloc has collapsed from a 68-seat majority in the last Knesset, to a minority this morning. Early numbers suggest most Israeli voters have rejected him and his allies. We will have to wait until Thursday for final results, and these may well prove slightly different.

But either way, it is not clear this morning, despite probably losing his majority, if this removes Bibi from power. Because in the real contest here — the election to form a new government — the four-party opposition bloc itself failed to achieve a majority.

For generations, Israel has prided itself on being a multi-ethnic democracy within its 1967 borders. Around a fifth of Israeli citizens are Arabs, and their parties surged in this election. This result is a test of that. It looks like a majority of Jewish voters supported the Bibi bloc despite him likely losing his majority. That means that anti-Bibi parties will probably only have a majority in the Knesset if one combines the Change Bloc, made up of Jewish and Zionist parties, with the Arab parties. The issue is that many of the four-party leaders in the alliance have ruled working with the Arabs out.

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Bibi has become the new King Herod

By Ben Judah

The upshot? Unless these leaders break their promises to reflect the electoral math, there are several ways for Bibi to survive. Should Israel truly have a hung Knesset, the country potentially faces a new election. This offers Netanyahu the opportunity to cling on in a caretaker government until then. This has happened before: in 2019 and 2020, Israel had three elections in under a year, and Bibi remained Prime Minister throughout.

The real politics begins now. For the Israeli opposition, this is not just the usual politics of tensely brokered backroom deals, but something much more fundamental. Can they truly embrace Israel’s promise of multi-ethnic democracy? The opposition has campaigned vociferously that Bibi is to blame for October 7, and remains a danger to Israel’s future. They now face a choice: form a minority government with one Arab party inside the coalition, and supported by another outside it to block Netanyahu, thus relying on Arab-Israeli politicians — or let Bibi’s rule continue by choosing to spurn them.

There is a precedent for collaboration. Before October 7, in the brief Naftali Bennett-led government of 2021-2, the Ra’am party, led by Mansour Abbas, was a member of the ruling coalition. Despite Ra’am being an Islamist-rooted party, albeit one that talks about coexistence with Jews, Netanyahu even flirted with including Abbas in a coalition of his own. But post October 7, with the Bibi bloc pointing to the fact that Ra’am has been evasive about whether or not Hamas is a terrorist organization that needs to be “destroyed”, this is a more fraught task.

To better position himself for government, Abbas has made his number two on his party list a Jewish former Israeli police chief. But it seems unlikely the Change Bloc and Ra’am alone have enough to reach the 61 seats needed to form a majority in the Knesset. They may also need to rely on the votes of the Arab Joint List, a coalition of overtly Palestinian nationalist parties, and Hadash, the old Communist party. These would not want to join any Change coalition, but have explicitly said their votes would be available to ensure a minority government could dispatch Bibi.

What Ra’am wants to see from any deal is urgent action on Arab-Israeli’s main priority: rampant organized crime, dramatically worsened during ultranationalist Itamar Ben-Gvir’s tenure as the minister who oversees the police. Abbas has put Yoav Segalovitch, the former police chief, as his number two precisely with the hope he could take over from Ben-Gvir as a bridge figure between the Jewish and the Arab public. Abbas has also signaled he would want action against racism, and a change in policy towards Israeli authorities being trigger-happy around demolishing illegally built Arab homes. Together with the Joint List, they also want investment in development for their communities and in their educational facilities.

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Jerusalem is Israel's future

By Ben Judah

On the Palestinian issue, looming over everything, Ra’am’s demands are relatively muted, with Abbas avoiding the topic. The moderation of their platform is testament to the Arab sector’s growing participation in Israeli society, with rising rates of integration from university attendance to involvement in the professions, especially healthcare. Both Arab parties as a result have a small Jewish activist base, committed to fostering what they see as an incipient multi-ethnic social partnership.

Overnight, in Israel, pro-opposition voices were calling on Eisenkot to act with absolute confidence and determination, as Netanyahu surely would, to bring this Jewish-Arab partnership about. This is because very few of those supporting the Change Bloc believe that they would fare better in new elections. A confluence of factors — high Arab turnout; disorganization among the ultra-orthodox Haredi Jewish parties; the hyper-mobilization of liberal Israelis, with a Knesset-seat-or-two’s worth flying back from abroad to vote — are all unlikely to repeat.

Eisenkot’s party, too, would certainly lose seats. This time around, he ran a list of former IDF generals who entered politics to oust Netanyahu. But they, in their soldiers’ naivete and unformed expectations about honor, have been found out as not truly political enough. In this, they resemble Benny Gantz, another former officer who nonetheless went from 35 seats to dropping out of this election for lack of even minimal support. His great error was to shore up a Bibi government, as if he were another reliable general, on the promise of a turn as premier that never arrived.

This, then, is the anti-Bibi coalition’s chance. Should the results stay roughly in line as predicted, what happens next will come down to character. Does Eisenkot have it in him? Or is he, like his critics say he sounds, a flat military man, used to giving orders and the army’s square world, up against one of the world’s most ferocious political animals?

For the moment, there seems a path forward for Eisenkot to install an Arab-supported minority government, open a long-promised Commission of Inquiry to expose Netanyahu’s failures on October 7, and then potentially seek to expand his coalition through defectors from the Right, or even build a unity government with a post-Bibi Likud. This would be fragile indeed, and may not last long, but it could be decisive in ending Netanyahu’s career as he faces both a corruption trial and his failings on October 7 without the shield of government at his disposal.

If it is unclear whether the opposition can grasp the nettle, Netanyahu’s strategy going forward is obvious. On the one hand, he will try to do everything possible to delegitimize Arab parties and Arab votes, while fostering an atmosphere of hate and incitement — all to discourage the opposition from embracing the Arab parties and the votes they can offer to push him out of power. His tactic, in particular, is likely to bully and frighten opposition Right-wingers like Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman out a Jewish-Arab partnership for change.

At the same time, Bibi will try what he has done before: “unite the Zionist majority” around him in a government where he remains prime minister. He will offer to drop the extremist religious Zionist parties led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, detested by the opposition and sanctioned by many Western countries. Expect him to enlist Donald Trump in this effort, and claim it is necessary to restart the war on Iran. There is widespread fear among the opposition that Netanyahu, even as caretaker leader, will leap into a major new confrontation with Tehran to force the military-minded Eisenkot to line up behind him. This could scramble things politically, as IRGC rockets again start to fall.

The utmost priority for Bibi is to avoid losing power, which would entail a serious risk of jail time. This is why the Change politicians are so frightened by what he might pull on Iran: a wounded political animal is at his most dangerous. Netanyahu’s ultimate dream is to pressure enough opposition parties to agree to a unity rotation deal, where he is prime minister first — on the condition that his corruption trial is waived and he is parachuted into the presidency for his 79th birthday, in two years time, when the incumbent’s term is up. To get a deal across the line, he might rule out staying in office for longer. Netanyahu may well get there, along the way evading accountability for October 7 and everything else.

To stop him, the opposition will not only need to hope the final results stay roughly in line with what is currently predicted — but also to show unflinching conviction in itself and what Israeli democracy is supposed to be. “Perhaps you believe that that is to your immediate advantage,” prophesied Herzl through one of his liberal Zionist puppets as he defended Arab rights against the racism of Dr Rabbi Geyer. “But it is not. If you adopt that stupid, narrow-minded policy, the land will go to wrack and ruin.”

His victory tells a broader story. A story about a war: the class war that the few are waging against the many across the Western world. It’s a war acknowledged by its victors, including Warren Buffet who once quipped: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Mr Buffett was not exaggerating. For almost four decades, Western governments and central banks have pulled every policy lever in the same direction: to make the assets of the few burgeon at the expense of the incomes of the many.

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The centre-left's slow suicide

By Yanis Varoufakis

Consider the numbers. Between 1952 and 1988, economic growth was behind nearly all the gains of the West’s stock market. From 1989 onwards, though, growth explains only about a quarter. The largest share, around 40%, came from income diverted from workers to shareholders. Another third came from cheaper money and lower perceived risk. This is not wealth creation. It is wealth extraction: a transfer from those who work to those who own, exacerbated by states making cheap money available to those who already have loads, and trumpeted on the evening news as “a strong economy”.

And the wealthy rarely pay taxes: they don’t actually earn an income, but, rather, own assets, which are taxed only when sold. So they avoid selling, borrow against their soaring assets at 1 or 2% and live on the loan. Then they die without ever paying tax on their capital gains and pass on the loot to their kids at ridiculously low inheritance taxes. Meanwhile, the worker borrows on a credit card at 20% to pay bills and put food on the table, her debts the mirror image of their fortunes.

This arrangement relies on one crucial thing: asset prices must be protected from collapse. And when they are threatened, the state comes to the rescue: 2001, 2008, 2020, the British gilt crisis of 2022, Silicon Valley Bank in 2023. Together this string of bail outs reveals the rule: when financial wealth is threatened, governments discover that money can be found. Today, in the United States, the top 10% own almost 90% of all shares. It’s a similar picture in the UK and the EU. The US federal government and the Fed, the UK governments and the Bank of England, Brussels and the European Central Bank have repeatedly intervened to insure the wealth of the wealthy, doing “whatever it takes” to prop up their asset prices. The rest of the population pays the premium, in the form of the austerity that follows every bailout.

Yet austerity does more than redistribute the costs of a crisis. It also changes the balance of power between those who own and those who work. To understand why it keeps returning, even though it undermines economic growth, consider the story Marx told about Thomas Peel, who in 1829 sailed to Western Australia’s Swan River with £50,000 of provisions and three hundred working-class men, women and children. On arrival, his workers walked off into the bush and worked for themselves. Peel had brought money, tools and labour, but he could not bring capitalism along, because his workers had alternatives.

Capital, Marx concluded, is not a thing, a mere asset, but a social relation: the power of those who own to get those who don’t own to do things they’d rather not do. Austerity is not an economic policy. It is a disciplinary device, keeping the many sufficiently insecure and indebted to accept “an offer they can’t refuse”. The ruling class’s deepest fear is not inflation or debt. It is to end up like Peel: asset rich, but without the power to compel.

Here is the part of the story that keeps me awake at night. When center-left politicians, from Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Tony Blair to Gerhard Schröder, François Hollande and Andy Burnham, abandoned the language of class, a void opened up in the working-class heartlands of the West. Into that void stepped a venomous storyteller with a century of experience in filling such voids: the resurgent far-right, including its rebranded fascists. It offers left-behind workers a story of dignity, then redirects their fury away from the owner who shipped their factory abroad, or the minister who sold their council house to some fund, and towards the migrant next door. It does not end the class war. It merely divides one side — the workers — to rule over them. It camouflages the war.

From the red suburbs of Paris to south Piraeus, from England’s red wall to Italy’s rust belt in Taranto, from the American rust belt to eastern Germany, the pattern is relentless. And so a fatalism has set in: the class war waged from above, we are told, must inevitably end in a neofascist, racist, misogynist revival.

Brazil has just refuted this fatalism.

Brazil knows the monster intimately. It lived through four years of Jair Bolsonaro, with his nostalgia for the military dictatorship. On 8 January 2023, his followers stormed the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace. Brazil’s far Right is not a fringe. Unlike Trump’s ragtag stormtroopers, they had years of running a dictatorship.  They won the first round of this election. They had the White House fully behind them, while the US Democrats, once again demonstrating their irrelevance, stayed mute. And yet, yesterday, they were defeated.

How? Not by hand-wringing about “populism”, nor by a centrist promise to manage the status quo more efficiently. Lula won because he did what the Western center-left has forgotten how to do: he spoke the language of class, and backed it with policies that shifted power, however modestly, from the few to the many. His government exempted those earning up to 5,000 reals a month from income tax and paid for it with a minimum tax on the very richest. During Brazil’s G20 presidency, he proposed a global minimum tax on billionaires. When Lula tells Brazilian workers that the elites have rigged the game, he points his finger upwards, at the rentier and the speculator, not sideways, at the migrant or the poor. But the most innovative weapon in Brazil’s arsenal is one that few outside Latin America have heard of. It is called Pix.

Every time you tap a card to pay for a coffee, a toll is levied. Visa, Mastercard and the banks take a cut, often 2% or 3%, from every transaction. Multiply this by billions of purchases a day and you begin to recognize one of the most lucrative rent-extraction machines ever devised. These are not profits made in competitive markets but a toll extracted by those who own the digital rails on which our economic lives now run. It is a key weapon of technofeudalism.

Unlike Britain, Europe or, of course, America, Brazil’s central bank moved to limit this rabid exploitation. It launched an alternative: a public, instant payment system, free for individuals and with capped fees for merchants. A Brazilian pays a street vendor in Salvador or sends money to her mother in Recife, instantly, using Pix from her phone, with no card company or bank taking its slice. Brazilians adopted it with astonishing enthusiasm. Last year, Pix processed almost 80 billion transactions and overtook credit cards as the most popular way to pay online.

Pix is the Swan River of the digital age. It gave tens of millions of Brazilians, including the poorest, who had never had a bank card, an alternative to the toll booths of Big Finance. And, like Peel, the collectors did not take it lying down. This summer, Washington imposed 25% tariffs on most Brazilian exports, and its trade representative explicitly named Pix as a grievance, complaining that it “unfairly disadvantaged” American payment companies! The most powerful government on Earth deployed its trade arsenal against a Brazilian free public service for being too successful at denying rents to Visa and Mastercard.

Lula did not blink. He defended Pix as a Brazilian public good, and Brazilians rewarded him for it. Here, at last, is a concrete example of limiting the power of Big Business, Big Finance and Big Tech: not with slogans, but by building public digital infrastructure that removes the opportunity to extract rent in the first place.

Let me, however, refrain from romanticizing Lula. Lula is no revolutionary. His margin was admittedly narrow. Brazil’s Congress remains in the grip of agribusiness and evangelical blocs. Its central bank still keeps interest rates punishingly high, a weapon of the class war if ever there was one. Lula himself has compromised much too much with those vested interests, and lost support as a result.

But Brazil has shown us three things: first, that the class war waged against the many does not have to end in fascism. Fascism flourishes only when the Left vacates the battlefield of class. Second, a progressive government can win by pointing upwards, at those who extract rent, rather than downwards, at those who suffer. And third, Big Business can be defeated, at least forced to lose some battles, by building public alternatives to its rent-extracting machines.

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Bon courage to the French protesters

By Yanis Varoufakis

So, here is the challenge to Britain, to Europe, to the people of the United States. Build your own Pix: public payment rails that end the tolls of Visa and Mastercard. Tax capital gains, not just income. Make every rescue conditional, with the public receiving real, permanent equity in return. Create a public investment bank as an alternative to the bond markets. Restore the bargaining power of the workforce. And give working people what Peel’s workers found at Swan River: an alternative, and thus the freedom to say no.

Buffett was right. There is a class war, and his class has been winning hands down. But yesterday, in Brazil, it lost a battle; though not the war. It lost because a working-class president dared to name the war and fight it using weapons fashioned to defend the many.

Compared to the election of 2026, the difference is like night and day. Though 2006 was, in essence, a true watershed election, one that ended an entire political era, the political rhetoric of the day hardly reflected it. Back in those days, the campaign saw genuine debates about the policy differences between the major parties, as the Moderates, restyled the “New Moderates” by their then-leader, angled to make the case that Sweden’s old social-welfare model had become stultified and unresponsive, and that the Social Democrats themselves, so used to automatically gliding into power every election, were unwilling to reform. The most famous Moderate slogan from that election was “Det Nya Arbetarpartiet” — literally branding themselves as Sweden’s new (and only) working-class party.

Today, by contrast, elections in Sweden bear increasing resemblance to the electoral process of the United States, right down to the political rhetoric used by both sides. In 2026, after all, both political blocs were eager to dub this election the most important, most critical, most life-and-death election in history. If the evil Right-wingers won, fascism and darkness would descend on all and sundry, and there wouldn’t even be a Sweden left come 2030. If the crazed leftist Islamo-Marxists won, meanwhile, tens of millions of immigrants would descend on the country; no election would ever be winnable again due to changed demographics; being heterosexual or white would soon be punishable by death; and Sweden would shortly become Europe’s first Islamic emirate.

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Of course, the problem here is that the “evil Right-wingers” have been in power for the last four years. Despite some internal drama, the four parties that make up the so-called “Tidö government” — the Moderates, the Liberals, the Christian Democrats and the Sweden Democrats — have ruled the country largely without incident, and certainly not with jackboots sounding in the distance. Some things, like food-price inflation, have certainly got worse, but it’s hard to blame that on any specific policy. Meanwhile, big planks of the 2022 election, like massively expanding Sweden’s fleet of nuclear power plants, have quietly been thrown overboard in the last few years. But, again, there is no reason to think anything would have been different had the so-called “Red-Green coalition” been in power instead.

Certainly, it’s unsurprising that electoral participation actually plummeted this time round. The figures, with turnout in the eighties, would, of course, be impressive in many other countries. But for ultra-democratic Sweden, this is one of the lowest figures since the Second World War. The point, of course, is these figures hit up against the electoral rhetoric. If the future really was at stake, and this really was the last election before migrants or fascists destroyed the state, why did fewer people than ever bother to vote?

The answer is probably structural. In Sweden, just like in America, the louder the pundits’ voices, the less elections actually seem to matter in terms of hard policy. Nobody talked about the looming end of the Swedish democratic system or nation in 2006, but the choices on offer were actually meaningfully different. Today, though, those meaningful differences are becoming rarer and rarer. Consider the American example: as the Trump campaign put it in the lead-up to the 2024 election, a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote for sending America’s sons and daughter to war against Iran, and a vote for ruinous price inflation and unaffordable gas at home. To be fair, that description is probably true as far as politics under a Kamala Harris presidency would have turned out. Unfortunately, the idea that Trump was against these things turned out to be a huge lie. No matter which side you picked, the end result was the same.

This dynamic seems to have spelled the end of the current Tidö government. It came into power with much fanfare, promising a drastic reduction of immigration. Yet critics are today quick to point out that little has changed in terms of migrants granted citizenship. And, indeed, even as a government of the Right looks slated to be replaced by a government of the Left, the chances of anything meaningfully changing in the other direction look very slim as well. The number of granted asylum applications may have diminished, after all, yet other forms of migration — for family reunification or labor — have picked up the slack. Other policy differences between the political blocks, notably attitudes toward Natos, have been retired too. One way or another, business as usual looks set to continue.

One doesn’t need a crystal ball to make that prediction in 2026: the general trend in Europe is that little will change whoever you vote for. Once again, that’s clear on demographics. Boris Johnson promised to cut down on immigration: what he delivered was the “Boriswave”. Giorgia Meloni, the current Italian prime minister, belongs to a party that traces its history back to the Italian fascists. Yet despite these august credentials, Meloni’s tenure in power has seen her quietly increase migration. The structural reasons for this aren’t hard to understand: Italy’s demographics are terrible and the country has long been plagued with financial woes. No matter how much Meloni might rage against immigration rhetorically, her deeds aren’t particularly different from anyone else. Perhaps a figure to Meloni’s Right — such the former army officer Roberto Vannacci — would finally change course if voted into power. But the question one has to ask here is simple: why didn’t Meloni do it?

Perhaps our political classes have simply given up because the problems are too intractable. It wouldn’t exactly be shocking if that was the case, and it would mean that America and Europe are in the same boat. Consider the fact that, less than two years ago, the second Trump presidency promised to fix the deficit, reindustrialize America, and cut huge amounts of waste from the budget. Back then, DOGE was at the top of the news cycle, for good and for ill. Today, that organization no longer even exists. Americans, after trying to fix the national debt or stop the forever wars in the Middle East, simply gave up. It was too hard to change anything meaningful. The same might be said of the Europeans and migration: trapped by the remorseless logic of globalization and with native birthrates that simply refuse to go up. Amid these seemingly intractable challenges, why not grant another few thousand visas? Voters are perhaps to blame here too, unwilling to countenance much change, whatever they might claim in vox pops.

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By Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski

Whatever the cause of this malaise, in it we can spot the paradox of European politics in the 21st century. We can all clearly see that monumental, historical changes are happening. Wars and energy shocks rage all around us, deindustrialization and demographic problems keep getting worse and worse, and yet everyone seems too afraid to do much beyond shouting, with the rhetorical temperature seemingly rising in inverse proportion to actual policy solutions. But as the American economist Herbert Stein put it, things that cannot go on forever simply won’t. If fixing pensions or finding a new geopolitical strategy or addressing the deficits is too hard for anyone to make the attempt, there will eventually come some sort of crisis that forces the change that politicians have been avoiding.

Unlike 2006, the election of 2026 was heralded the most important Swedish election of our lifetimes  — if not the most important election ever. Every election these days seems to be the most important election ever, of course, and just as in America or the United Kingdom, the more important an election is, the less anyone expects anything to actually change. But as the Middle East burns and an energy crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Seventies approaches, the age of business as usual may be ending sooner than many people think.

Where Starmer seemed perplexed by Labour politics, Burnham is Mr Labour, and now hegemonic in its structures. MPs have kissed the ring, and crowded for their selfie; once-hostile factions find themselves in strange, unprecedented agreement: “Andy” is their last hope, and the soft-Left, hard-Left and Blue Labourites are, for now, jostling behind an inchoate vision of “the productive state”, and other vague Labour things.

But Burnham must soon govern the country, not just his party. And he’ll find that compared to the unwieldy beasts of city-regional governance or the NHS, the pressures of No. 10 are of an entirely different order of magnitude even at the best of times. And these are not the best of times. We’re in the middle of a once-in-a-century fragmentation of the two-party system, while smartphones cheerily obliterate our collective sense of what reality even means. Add two decades of wage repression and a collapsing public realm; meanwhile, the tax and debt burden only ever seem to rise, and international gilt traders circle like sharks.

This, then, is Burnham’s unenviable inheritance. Which is why, if he wants to survive beyond 2029, the PM-in-waiting should call an early election.

Whether he likes it or not, Burnham’s strengths lie not in his policy platform, which is a confused set of woolly principles, but in his charisma — both within Labour and among the public. He should exploit that, during his Mr Labour honeymoon period, while he still is their unassailable king, before the cultural-political projections of his putative “Manchesterism” have been sullied by time and close reading. And he should hew close to the image that the public holds of him, with a manifesto stuffed with radical constitutional reforms: the replacement of the House of Lords with an elected Senate of the Regions; maximum devolution to municipalities and city-regions; proportional representation for the Commons.

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The latter would lock in center-left coalition governance for a generation. Labour’s existing record of incremental Leftward shifts could meanwhile be repackaged as the start of a genuine project of national renewal: encompassing nationalized rail, a public energy firm, a sovereign wealth fund, and a higher minimum wage. In addition to these nods to a more “pro-investment” political economy with greater public ownership — now painted in proudly progressive colors — a reforming constitutional package would allow for additional radicalism at a time of fiscal constraint.

Taken together, then, a Burnham manifesto could be framed as “taking back control”, as rebuilding Britain while giving power back to the forgotten places, the provincial Britain ignored by distant elites. Burnham’s task in all this would be to articulate a broad, positive vision for the country, one that adapts what the cultural theorist John Clarke has pejoratively called the “vernacular ventriloquism” of populist tendencies. For Clarke, this ventriloquism involves claiming to speak for England — for “The People” — while in practice pushing an agenda that blends turbo-Thatcherism with mass deportations (or at least their promise).

Against this, Burnham must set out a new paradigm for British politics: he’ll have to triangulate between a Right-wing populism on the march and the Left-wing instincts of many of his voters and supporters. In this space, he can root his normie populism, reassuring voters nostalgic for the imagined community of secure, social-democratic Britain, while also seeming positive and forward-looking. But he’ll have to unite discrete political positions into a coherent whole: seeming both patriotic and inclusive; both radical and insurgent, yet with operational competence; both comfortable with multiethnic diversity, but alert to the mess of a broken asylum system and the disordered chaos of a low-waged, low-productivity Deliveroo economy dependent on cheap foreign labor.

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Could Mr Labour really pull it off? The vibes are currently in his favor. One Labour MP tells me that “Manchesterism” has the power to “take out the toxic component of nationalism” just like “the civic nationalisms of Scotland and Wales”. “Andy” they say, “has the potential to do that for England.” The “place-first politics”, the Northern identity, the soft-disruptor vibes, the unthreatening, mum-friendly pneuma — all of it can appeal to that sweet spot in the electorate which both despises the political classes yet remains largely anti-Reform. We saw a hint of this strategy in his invocation of “HMO Britain” during his next-day victory rally in Makerfield: this was as close to a dog-whistle as is safe to blow in Labour circles, shifting blame onto negligent landlords but also hinting at asylum seekers. In a similar vein, the return of utilities and natural monopolies to public ownership satisfies voters across the spectrum, initiating a kind of economic patriotism that leans Left but pleases many on the Right.

And, for now, the public is willing to buy into the story of Burnham-as-outsider. That might be ridiculous — given his New Labour pedigree — but his easy manner makes him the very opposite of Starmer. Which is why it’s only downhill from here. To be sure, More in Common has positive polling on the incoming Prime Minister, and focus group and survey data suggest he could give his party a second chance. But as Lenin said, politics is about “who does what to whom”. The moment Burnham enters Downing Street, he’ll learn that governing involves picking losers as well as winners, and that someone will always be alienated. Better, then, to snatch his mandate now, and attempt to secure a full term he can call his own, rather than run in 2029 and fail as a paid-up member of the dreaded Establishment.

That’s especially true when, at the moment, a mandate is so obviously lacking. Old tweets are already resurfacing from Labour MPs — including Burnham himself — demanding that new Conservative prime ministers go to the country rather than serving the rest of a parliamentary term. The longer he waits, the louder cries of hypocrisy from Britain’s hostile media will become, especially when Nigel Farage is cheering them on. The fact is that outrage sells, and the national atmosphere turns fast. At low ebbs, and during the inevitable crises that beset any government, the noise will become deafening: get “the squatter” out, the public must have their say. Indeed, Burnham can seek to appear magnanimous as he reintroduces himself to a public that already leans towards thinking that an election should be called. Any kind of radical program, either a new path on the political economy or major constitutional reforms, will anyway need public consent.

The counter to all this, of course, is that we live in a parliamentary democracy, whereby the legislature can oust prime ministers at a whim. Yet it would be wrong to ignore the smuggling of presidential norms into our unwritten constitution. MPs have the right to change their party allegiance as often as they like. But this in-built malleability masks the fact that when most voters enter the polling booths to back a party, they’re in effect stating their preference for an institution represented and embodied by the leader-as-godhead, the personification of the party’s current values and political direction. Recall, if nothing else, that Labour’s abysmal showing at the recent local elections — the ultimate trigger for Starmer’s resignation — was largely to do with its association with the leader himself.

The mandate of a prime minister, then, is deeply personal. And not only with the electorate at large. Even before he’s officially prime minister, cracks are beginning to show (or reappear?) in Burnham’s strange parliamentary coalition. One Left-wing Burnham-supporting MP has complaints about the centrality of Josh Simons in Burnham’s operation: the former Makerfield member, who stood down to give the future PM his by-election, is “toxic, and it won’t end well”, they tell me. “I think,” they add, “he’s an Achilles heel.” The PLP as a whole isn’t much better. “There’s so many groups,” my source tells me, “so many factions.” The point of leadership, though, is to bind colleagues together by setting out a clear direction of travel, crafting a common project that each of Labour’s weird strata can, roughly speaking, get behind. “The fights have started”, according to the MP, but there’s still plenty of goodwill. “On the Left generally, the feeling is that we would have given our left testicle to be in this position six months ago.” Why, then, not take the plunge, trusting that a successful campaign — even with a reduced majority — would strengthen Burnham’s position in the PLP yet further?

Not every new leader triumphs after rushing to the voters. Theresa May’s doomed effort to “crush the saboteurs” is remembered as an instructive blunder, after which Corbyn’s Labour Party made up a large polling deficit to deny her the supermajority she needed to push through a Brexit deal. But on the other side of the ledger, we have Gordon Brown, who hesitated and eventually failed to call an early election in 2007, only to see his popularity plummet thereafter. Jim Callaghan, too, plowed on after Harold Wilson’s resignation in 1976. By the time election day came round three years later, the Winter of Discontent was fresh in the memory, ensuring the avuncular, well-liked Callaghan, who easily out-polled the grocer’s daughter on his personal ratings, was beaten regardless.

In other words, an election would be a gamble. Many Labour MPs would doubtless be out of a job. The party has a dismal reputation after two years of hopeless, directionless dither. But there is unlikely to be a better time for Burnham: before too many difficult decisions have to be made, too many Labour tribes disappointed, too much of the general public frustrated by the slow untangling of Britain’s countless problems. Burnham has restored Labour’s hope and, at least in Makerfield, made his party normal again. His best chance to do the same across the country is now.

I asked her what it was about the Fidesz system she disliked. “It’s about the corruption,” she said, “and selling our country and our nation to the Russians, and stealing our money, and EU taxpayers’ money, and this sort of feudalism that he built.” Beatrix, her niece, nodded along emotionally. “I want to get married and have children,” she said. “We all have good jobs but we don’t earn EU wages. My boyfriend lives in London, and if we lose now I’ll move there and leave Hungary forever. I see this as an election for the EU and against Russia — I’m a European and I don’t want to belong to the East.”

But as polls closed, and the crowds gathered in front of the giant screens showing the televised results coming in, the outcome still seemed to hang in the balance. Government-aligned commentators had made much of what they claimed were strong showings across the country; earlier in the day, turnout had looked strongest in rural areas long seen as Fidesz strongholds, with liberal Budapest only rousing itself to vote in significant numbers in the afternoon. It had been assumed that the initial results would show a strong showing for Fidesz and Orbán, with the true dynamics only revealing themselves late into the night — or even, in case of a close-fought battle, later in the week, once the results from the sizable Hungarian diaspora had been counted. But whatever inner trepidation the crowd felt was not to last long. As each new tranche of results came in, the crowd roared in joy at the victory suddenly unfolding before them, chanting “Dirty Fidesz” and “The Tisza is Flowing”, the motto of their party, named after Hungary’s second-largest river. Fidesz’s vote share in the provinces had collapsed, a source at the government’s rival election night party told me, and the mood there was grim. A Trumpian election night party, Patriots of Europe, was abruptly canceled.

Perhaps this wasn’t the shock it seemed. The evening before, I had attended Péter Magyar’s final campaign event in Debrecen, Hungary’s second city, close to the eastern borders with Romania and Ukraine. Long a Fidesz stronghold, Debrecen was now contested territory. Orbán had pulled large crowds into the city center a few days earlier, but the crowd for Magyar, gathered in the University Square, was larger still. The sight of tens of thousands of Tisza voters, young and old, bearing flaming torches in the lowering night sky and chanting for Magyar’s victory was impressive enough from the middle of the crowd. Seen on television, the sea of fire filmed from above by a drone, it was overwhelming. The speech from Magyar, a fluent and charismatic speaker, was good enough, but the sheer size of the crowd was the real message being sent to the wavering voters watching at home. Provincial Hungary was now in play, Gabor, a 22-year-old trainee teacher from a nearby village told me. “The majority are still Fidesz voters, unfortunately,” he said, “but we are trying to convince our parents and grandparents, and things are definitely changing.” Daniel, a 19-year-old student, agreed. “Hungary’s history has always been pretty bad, to be honest. And now we feel that things are finally beginning to change.”

Back in Batthyány Square, the whole crowd pulsed with a mass intake of breath and then let out a vast roar of victory as the ticker ran across the screen announcing that Orbán had congratulated Magyar on his win, long before anyone expected — such was the scale of Tisza’s victory. Magyar had won a countrywide landslide, and the generation-long political experiment of Orbánism was over, at least for now. Breathless and alarmist commentary, from Hungarian opposition activist-journalists and their aligned thinktankers and commentators in the West, had warned that Orbán would, in the face of defeat, try to hold onto power through some malign dodge or other, whether dragging the election through the courts or staging some kind of provocation to annul the results. But in truth, this was never Orbán’s style: illiberal he may have been, but he was never a dictator, however his opponents framed him. In the end, the genuine popularity that kept him in power for a generation meant too much to him, and when he lost, in a free and fair election, he relinquished power gracefully. 

Even so, it was a historic moment for those gathered in the square, debating what should be done with the man who had shaped Hungary in his image for so long: I hope he goes to Russia, one said; no, I hope he goes to prison, her friend said; no, said an older woman, shaking her head slowly as if asserting the wisdom of age, I hope he stays in Parliament, and is made to answer for everything he did. “We feel the breath of ‘89,” Hanna, an 18-year-old goth, told me. “All our lives, we lived through the Fidesz system, it’s kind of a new breath to see this change. Fidesz never cared about us, until we make children.” Her companion, Milos, agreed. “Thank God, Thank God,” he said, casting his eyes upward. “I really hope we get closer to the European Union, and we can distance ourselves from Russia.” 

This election, cast externally as a battle between liberal Europeanism and something approaching Asiatic despotism, was perhaps swung by hard-nosed domestic rather than broader philosophical concerns, centering on the struggling economy, on corruption that was “simply indefensible”, as one Fidesz insider had previously put it to me, and on the parlous state of public healthcare and social infrastructure. Yet it must be said that the liberal, middle-class inhabitants of urbane Budapest, gathered in the square, some of them waving EU flags as well as the far more numerous Hungarian ones, certainly fit the image of Tisza positively projected by its supporters outside Hungary, and negatively by Fidesz loyalists domestically and abroad. Budapest, which still looks and feels like the polyglot imperial capital it once was, is a liberal city in a conservative country: but the final electoral map made the country as a whole look far more like Budapest than anyone had expected.

Yet Tisza’s leader, a Right-wing nationalist with a far more restrictive stance on legal immigration than Orbán, is hardly the radical liberal Fidesz and its army of MAGA influencers made him out to be. The crowd’s most animated and vehement chant was “Russians Go Home”, a relic of the 1956 revolution latterly applied to Fidesz, but Magyar has already signaled he won’t be unplugging the country from Russia’s cheap and plentiful energy bounty any time soon. Hungary has moved from one version of personalist conservative rule to another, this time round led by a former Fidesz insider with a European focus, ready to unlock Brussels’ long-withheld and sorely missed financial bounty. Magyar’s victory seems less a defeat for the European Right than a generational evolution of it, which — at least in Hungary’s unique circumstances — has brought liberals and Leftists, both political nullities in this country, under its conquering wing. Perhaps that’s why Phil, a 26-year-old voter for the far-Right Mi Hazank party, was calmly philosophical about the new regime, as he watched the crowds of ecstatic zoomers beeping horns and waving flags as if Hungary had just won the World Cup, pulsing Eurodance blaring from car windows. “Orbán was just too close to America, and Hungary is a European country,” he shrugged. “At least Tisza is Right Wing.”

In the election’s final days, the tone of campaigning has become unusually dark, with both sides accusing each other of being the playthings of foreign intelligence services, conjuring apocalyptic visions of the other’s victory. The news cycle is now dominated less by campaign pledges than by competing leaks of wiretaps, intelligence service interrogations, arrests and accusations of treachery and espionage. The claims and counter-claims, simultaneously dramatic and unprovable, are as dizzying as they are plausible. Even independent commentators, like the former leader of the Green Party András Schiffer, now allege the British, French, German, Polish and Baltic security services have involved themselves in influencing the election’s outcome, while journalists and activists supportive of the opposition assert Russian interference and looming false flags to keep the incumbent in power.

In the meantime, Volodymyr Zelensky’s face looms everywhere here in Budapest: in posters depicting him smugly reaching out his hand for Hungarian taxpayers’ money, or cackling evilly at passersby. As Hungary’s relationship with Ukraine, frosty at the beginning of the war, has dramatically worsened, it feels as if Ukraine itself, personified by its leader, has become Orbán’s primary antagonist in the election.

According to Gábor Győri, a political analyst from the progressive Policy Solutions think tank, this focusing on Ukraine is a tried-and-tested Fidesz tactic. Aware that the opposition’s strength lies in Hungary’s faltering economy, Ukraine is a useful external enemy for Orbán — one previously played by transnational migrants and their NGO lobbies; Brussels; and the international LGBT movement. “Since the war seems like a stalemate from a Hungarian perspective,” Győri told me, “and it hasn’t moved that much in Hungary’s direction, the recent effort has been to portray Ukraine as an active threat.” At the beginning of the war, Hungary condemned the Russian invasion, sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and opened its borders to Ukrainian refugees, despite Orbán’s amicable relationship with Vladimir Putin. Yet since then, Győri observes, “it has shifted to saying that, well, Russia was provoked, to now saying that, essentially, Ukraine is the culprit, the really aggressive power, so much so that they are a threat to Hungary. And I’m not sure if they can sell this, to be honest, but that’s the effort now.”

At least in liberal Budapest, not everyone is on message: it is common to see posters linking Magyar to Zelensky torn off advertising columns, or defaced with stickers saying “Vile, Deceitful Propaganda”, “Dirty Fidesz”, or simply, “Shit”. But at the Peace March, the message seemed to play well enough among the crowd, which had thronged to Budapest’s vast neo-Gothic parliament behind a banner declaring: “We will not become a Ukrainian colony!” “Viktor Orbán is one of the few in politics who is proud to be Hungarian,” attendee Marco, 42, told me, “But Tisza and Péter Magyar, I think he will make steps outside of Hungary, maybe in Brussels against his own country, against the government, and this I think is not correct.” The crowd cheerily waved placards demanding “Stop War!”, and when Péter Szijjártó, the foreign minister, gave his speech railing against the “Ukromafia” the crowd booed Zelensky’s name like a pantomime villain.

The Kyiv government, which has at times exasperated its European allies with a demanding and sometimes alienating approach to diplomacy, is partly to blame for the worsening of its relationship with Hungary. The European Union has sided with Hungary and Slovakia in the dispute over Ukraine’s closing of the Druzhba pipeline, which carries the cheap Russian oil on which both countries depend, and whose smooth operation, despite the war, is a central plank of the Fidesz electoral offer to voters. By apparently directly threatening Orbán, Zelensky recently earned another direct EU reprimand. As relations worsen, Hungary has used its veto to block the EU funding package on which the Ukrainian state survives, while Hungarian intelligence officers recently arrested their Ukrainian counterparts transporting a shipment of money across Hungary for what was heavily implied to be nefarious purposes.

In response, Zelensky’s security services arrested a Hungarian alleged to be running Budapest’s spy network in Ukraine’s Zakarpattia oblast, home to the country’s Hungarian minority, and long an area of contention between the two countries. Despite multiple requests, neither Tisza nor the Ukrainian foreign ministry agreed to an interview for this piece. The Hungarian government was more accommodating, offering unusual access to some of its senior leadership. Framing a Tisza electoral victory as a risk to Hungary’s energy security and neutrality, Péter Sztáray, State Secretary for Security Policy and Energy Security, told me “We [would] have to let through weapon deliveries through the Hungarian-Ukrainian border… while, at the same time, Ukraine is closing our energy supply, Ukraine is shrinking the rights of the national minority communities, including the Hungarian community. So why should we do that? And their political messaging is very insulting at the same time.”

Now, the war next door has moved from a source of background anxiety for Hungarian voters to the very foreground of Fidesz’s campaign. As polling day nears, it is more openly being alleged by government figures that Tisza is directly funded by Kyiv, and that it is infiltrated by the Ukrainian intelligence services. In a rather dubious riposte to claims of electoral inference, the Ukrainian government last week launched a 24-hour Hungarian-language radio broadcast, aimed directly at Hungarian voters. Should Orbán pull off a last-minute victory, despite the strong polling lead claimed by the opposition, it is difficult to see how the relationship with Kyiv could be salvaged. For Fidesz, it may not matter. Hungarian government policy is driven by the assumption that, however long it takes, Ukraine will eventually lose the war, and the rest of the EU will slowly come around to this reality, just as it eventually did on Hungary’s isolated stance on the 2015 migrant crisis. As a consequence — and fueled by equally hostile rhetoric from Kyiv — a working relationship with Hungary’s larger neighbor is seen as an acceptable sacrifice for a domestic election victory.

A few days after the march, I asked one of the most powerful men in Hungarian politics, Balász Orbán — Viktor Orbán’s strategic advisor, and campaign manager — whether the temporary demands of the election were setting up a longer term enmity with its larger neighbor.

“The conflict between Hungary and the Ukrainian leadership is based on three issues where we have complete disagreement, and there is no in-between,” he replied. The first, Orbán said, was active financial and logistical support for the war against Russia. “We don’t want to finance the war, we don’t want to give our weapons to them, and we don’t want to send soldiers for Ukraine.” The second issue is European Union membership for Ukraine: “it goes also against the interest of Hungary, because if anything happens in Ukraine, it would mean that we are in the war. And the second thing is, we don’t want to be a net contributor.” The third issue “is the Russian energy. In this situation, when the Middle East is blowing up and energy prices are again skyrocketing, we cannot say no to Russian energy, simply it goes against the interest of Hungary, and I think it goes against the interest of all other European nations. These are the three critical issues, and these are just black and white issues. So either we give it up and we surrender, or we keep our positions.”

Yet while the Tisza party is portrayed by the Hungarian government as zealous pro-Kyiv radicals, and is indeed heavily promoted by Ukraine’s excitable online fanbase on this basis, Magyar himself has avoided talking about the war on the campaign trail. Indeed, in his rare interventions so far, Magyar, a former Fidesz functionary and conservative nationalist, has seemed to echo Orbán’s policy platform, opposing sending weapons to Ukraine; insisting that Kyiv’s EU bid should be subject to a Hungarian referendum it would almost certainly lose; and stressing that weaning Hungary off Russian energy would take at least a decade. Hopes in Brussels or Kyiv of a post-election about-turn in Hungarian attitudes to Kyiv seem unlikely to survive the apparent inclinations of Magyar himself, let alone the broader suspicions of the Hungarian electorate.

Four years ago, the risks and uncertainties brought about by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine helped turn the tide in an election campaign where Hungarian voters seemed, until the results came in, to be leaning toward the opposition. The Fidesz messaging at the time, that Orbán’s long track record of steady governance was the safest option in a volatile international situation, is now being replayed, in an election where the opposition would rather focus on Hungary’s domestic problems. But the rhetoric has, since 2022, dramatically escalated, with the added novelty of Ukraine itself now being presented as a direct threat to Hungary’s sovereignty and security. Now both sides are trading accusations that their rivals are deeply enmeshed with foreign security services, working against the national interest.

If it is confusing and exhausting for foreign journalists, it must be doubly so for Hungary’s voters, 79% of whom believe foreign intelligence agencies will attempt to meddle in the election. On Easter Sunday, the Hungarian government, alongside its regional ally Serbia, revealed what it has claimed to be a plot to sabotage the vital Turkstream gas pipeline with explosives, a development that Magyar has immediately claimed to be a false flag to sway or delay the election. As Hungary’s hard-fought and ill-tempered campaigning season approaches its climax, the European Union’s most important election of the year has now fully adopted the murky and paranoid tone of a spy novel.

Whatever you think of his politics, Zack Polanski embodies the outsider narrative he preaches. His background is varied: actor, activist, youth worker — and, most infamously, hypnotherapist, where he apparently tried to enlarge a woman’s breasts. Polanski’s political development is just as striking. Elected as deputy leader of the Greens in 2022, he became the first openly gay Jewish deputy leader in British history. Born David Paulden, he reclaimed his former family name, and his religious heritage, at 18.

Polanski has made much of his unconventional personal journey, projecting authenticity and charming much of the media in the process. Branding himself as a youthful and emotionally charged disrupter, he has been careful to contrast himself with Green Party stereotypes — less Home County geriatric and more insurgent with a green beret. Even Polanski’s insistence that the Greens select a single head, dumping the party’s traditional system of co-leadership, points towards an incipient form of personality cult. The ex-actor’s showmanship is easy to criticize, as are his rather undignified scraps with Right-wing rivals online. Yet the results speak for themselves. Polanski’s campaign launch video received over two million views, while Green Party membership has surged roughly 8%, and is now approaching its 2015 peak.

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This change of tone is echoed by policy, with Polanski’s Greens enthusiastically embracing so-called “eco-populism”. Aiming to strip environmentalism of its stodgy middle-class baggage, it instead aims to inspire apolitical voters. Polanski ties these reforms to redistributionist themes, painting every green policy as a step toward greater social justice. One example is linking climate action to wealth inequality, even as he argues that obsessing over immigration misses the bigger picture: a super-rich elite not paying its share. Unsurprisingly, Polanski also champions a comprehensive wealth tax of 1% on assets exceeding £10 million, and 2% on assets over £1 billion. This, he claims, means the green transition can be achieved without burdening ordinary people.

A longstanding tenet of the Green Party has been the so-called Green Economic Transformation, which the party’s leader will be expected to deliver. At its core, this is a commitment to spend £40 billion a year in new public investment. This will fund sweeping eco-friendly retrofits, from home insulation and low-carbon heating. Beyond that new wealth tax, this would be paid for via a steep carbon levy on all fossil fuels. Alongside canceling all new oil and gas licenses, and ending the relevant subsidies, the Greens would effectively legislate oil and gas out of existence.

Such radicalism is reflected elsewhere. For starters, Polanski hopes to renationalize key utilities, bringing trains, water and energy back into public ownership. Then there’s foreign policy. Polanski has called for the UK to leave Nato, in large part due to Donald Trump, whom he deems an unreliable ally. As for Gaza, Polanski has attended pro-Palestine marches, using his Jewish upbringing to assail Labour’s support for Israel. These stances underline his anti-establishment appeal, which has also started to reshape the party’s base. Much of its growth comes from former Labour activists and Corbyn-era allies. Eager to take on both the Right and mainstream Treasury orthodoxy, Polanski has even indicated a willingness to collaborate with other Left-wing insurgents, notably Corbyn’s and Zarah Sultana’s new outfit.

This approach seems to be working: internal Green Party figures suggest 30% of young people may now vote for them, an excitement apparently echoed by one-in-ten voters nationally. Yet if this is a 43% jump from the already-record vote share the party secured last year, the Green prospectus is very far from perfect. Consider, for instance, the question of carbon levies. In 2024, the Institute for Fiscal Studies noted that any success the tax had in cutting emissions would directly result in revenues collapsing. Many of Polanski’s spending pledges, in areas from health and social care, would effectively be financed by a revenue stream tailor-made to shrink.

The party’s proposed wealth tax is also flawed. An annual levy on complex assets, which make up the bulk of this wealth, would be administratively costly and prone to evasion. This is mirrored in the experience of other developed economies, notably the Netherlands, where the supreme court went so far as to rule that the tax was a violation of European law. Elsewhere, countries from Germany to Sweden were forced to repeal their wealth taxes due to capital flight, and because they deterred foreign investment and cut tax revenues. And if these fundraising measures look faulty, so too do the outlays.

One of the party’s main promises is to make electricity generation 100% renewable by 2035, completely eradicating carbon-based energy. Right off the bat, this goal is made more challenging by the party’s long-standing disdain for nuclear energy, which it deems unsafe and expensive. That’s debatable: but either way, around half of British power currently comes from gas-fired plants, with nuclear providing a further 9%. No less important, the grid isn’t ready for Polanski’s renewable revolution. Building the necessary battery storage infrastructure would cost hundreds of billions alone, far exceeding the party’s calculations. As for renewable projects, many remain stuck in connection queues, unable to hook into the grid, with waiting lists stretching to over a decade. For the Green Party to hit its renewable targets, it would need to connect more turbines than the entire current queue — and all within a decade.

In a way, though, and as Polanski’s own style implies, the point here is less about policy outcomes and more about radicalism per se — with those extravagant green offers simply one pillar of a broader anti-establishment platform. This, of course, raises the perennial question of whether the Greens are mainly an environmental movement, or else a progressive party that uses climate change as a Trojan Horse. Certainly, think tanks on the far Left have been advancing nearly identical policies for years, just without the green branding.

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Whether this socialist turn will expand the party’s appeal is the biggest gamble of Polanski’s leadership. For if the polling numbers seem strong, the electoral fragmentation implicit in his strategy could yet be his undoing. Even a vote share of just 5% could see the Greens gain a number of seats, especially in our dawning age of five-party politics. More to the point, Polanski is probably right in thinking that a chunk of disillusioned Labour supporters are ripe for the taking, particularly after four more years of idea-free Starmerism. At the fringes, though, Polanski’s revolution extends even beyond that. Among other things, he claims that many Reform voters are simply frustrated by low pay and poor public services, and that Green “eco-populism” is clearly the solution.

Indeed, this idea has likely shaped Polanski’s decision to echo Reform’s campaign strategies, with the man himself stating that his party must “learn from Farage”. In practice, though, there are reasons to think that Polanski is overstretching. For one thing, campaigning for Labour voters undercuts any notion of shared purpose. If too many disaffected voters scatter, Reform’s vast poll lead will only grow. By emphasizing that they are not fundamentally at odds with Labour ideology, meanwhile, the Greens risk foundering were Starmer to tack Left. This places the party in a far more tenuous position than Polanski may realize — and that’s before you add his idealistic paean to the material interests of Reform voters, oblivious to the ways immigration and identity are transforming British politics. Hypnotherapy, political or otherwise, just won’t cut it.

Instead, they have delivered a muddled, mixed result that neither fully confirms nor denies either of these projections. With the long, dramatic count not yet completed, it looks like the parliament will be divided between a returned but humbled Liberal government under Prime Minister Mark Carney, holding on to minority status, and a rising but still not triumphant opposition Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre. Both these parties made sizable gains, the more consequential performance likely coming from Poilievre, who stole a number of working-class seats from progressive parties. But both will nonetheless also have to deal with the sting of dashed expectations. Neither side was handed a decisive victory: Carney and Poilievre each fumbled the historic leads they held at different turns of the campaign, failing to provide a compelling or unifying vision of leadership before the electorate.

This is a sharp turnaround in fortune for the Tories. Not long ago, they enjoyed a 25-point lead, with an expected 200-seat landslide; but the resignation of Justin Trudeau powered-up by Donald Trump’s tariff war scrambled their strategy. As a result, the ruling Liberals were sufficiently emboldened to expect their own mega majority at the outset of the race.

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At the time of writing, the Liberals had 167 seats, just five short of the 172 needed for a majority in the House of Commons; the Conservatives had 145 seats, the separatist Bloc Quebecois had 23, the left-wing New Democrats seven, and the Greens one. One leader, Jagmeet Singh of the NDP, has lost his seat, and remarkably, despite his party’s upward movement, Poilievre is in danger of losing his own — which is located next to the constituency that elected Carney to parliament for the first time.

All those hoping for a return to stability after a half-decade of minority rule face only further volatility. There was neither a Blue nor a Red Wave — only more uncertainty, as Canadians face an aggressive threat to their independence in Washington, and a dangerously divided parliament in Ottawa. This would be a trying enough in ordinary times, but these are not normal days.

Roughly two and a half years ago, Poilievre’s Conservatives began their steady ascent to frontrunner status, where they would stay until just a few months ago. The headwinds were with him, as he looked set to become the Canadian incarnation of a global wave of revolt against liberal elites. Poilievre found a formula for translating the populist energies that roiled America and Europe into a distinct local context: he downplayed culture war concerns, which never really took off in Canada, and instead played up the cost of living, tying creeping inflation and spiraling housing costs to Trudeau.

A singular focus on Trudeau’s unpopular carbon tax, distilled by the slogan “Axe the Tax”, seemed to resonate with working-class voters; indeed, it was so effective that it caused the Liberals to cave in the middle of 2023, catalyzing a chain of events that would end with the ousting of Trudeau in January of this year. But success came too early, as the party proved too slow to react to the change at the top, sticking to their anti-Trudeau playbook even as Carney succeeded him; then Trump began issuing threats of annexation, followed by a barrage of tariffs, declaring economic war.

Poilievre had ample opportunity to shift his narrative to one of existential national defense but only did so belatedly or half-heartedly. Instead, the Tory leader banked on affordability, which he intended to hang like a millstone around Carney’s neck: after all, Trump may be the issue of the moment, but how could Canadians forget the “lost Liberal decade” during which Trudeau’s policies, as Poilievre tells it, exploded the cost of living?

Carney, though, canceled Trudeau’s carbon tax on day one, distancing himself from the former PM and rendering useless Poilievre’s Trumpian schoolyard taunt (“Carbon Tax Carney”). Outflanked on patriotism and weakened on affordability, the Conservatives were backed into a political corner.

Meanwhile, Poilievre’s provincial counterpart in Ontario, Doug Ford — with whom a blood feud has now broken out — proved how Canada’s Tories could win in the age of Trump: weeks before, he called and decisively won a snap election centered on tariffs, precisely what Poilievre didn’t do. The federal party had also managed to antagonize provincial sister parties in Nova Scotia and British Columbia, which could have boosted Poilievre’s chances. Repairing the fissures of the conservative movement will be vital for the Canadian Right if they are to continue their quest for national power.

An earlier Poilievre pivot away from his Trudeau-era slogans and towards recognition of the Trump threat could have prevented the bleeding of support. Poilievre was shown to be right, however, in refusing to choose between affordability and Trump, as the spate of working-class votes he stole from the New Democrats in industrial and suburban Ontario can attest. These seats, some held by the union-backed NDP, were expected to defect to Carney rather than Poilievre, who ended up benefiting handsomely.

But the Tory leader could still have been more creative in blending the two issues, that is, showing how the US trade war would compound an already weakened economy. But he was much too cautious in scaling back his counterpunches against the Yankees, as if fearing to cross a line with parts of his base who might still admire the president. In any event, while Poilievre may have secured the best conservative result since 1988, he fell short. If he loses his own Ottawa-area seat, it will be a desperate (but not fatal) embarrassment.

Not that Mark Carney has covered himself with glory. He also had a reasonable hope of marching to power with a thumping majority. When the campaign started, the Liberals were heavily favored to pull off the impossible: a majority after a decade in government. But though they have secured a fourth mandate, it is a vulnerable one. It can survive only by scrapping together ad hoc supply-and-confidence deals with New Democratic and Bloc Quebecois MPs — precisely the dynamic that exhausted the energies of the late Trudeau government, while at the same time facing an aggressive and empowered Conservative opposition.

In the end, Carney’s professions of a new direction for the Liberal government failed to move the needle. The baggage of the Trudeau era proved too much: too many families and young people felt as if they aren’t getting ahead; working-class Canadians in industrial cities such as Hamilton and Windsor identified with Polievre’s “boots-not-suits” message, rather than the expert reassurances of Carney and the old Trudeau ministers; and crucially, the multicultural “905” Greater Toronto Area suburbs, where Canadian elections are won and lost, broke the Liberal “red wall” there to elect just enough Conservatives to deny Liberals the advantage in Ontario, effectively blocking the Liberal Party’s path to a majority.

The government’s disastrous mismanagement of the housing, immigration, and law-and-order files has hit hard in these suburbs, where immigrant communities themselves felt the brunt of overpopulation and a surplus of non-integrable newcomers. Indeed, the surge in crime rates and the appearance of tent cities in these otherwise respectable middle- and working-class neighborhoods are what may have lost the Liberals their formerly reliable and vital bedrock of support.

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Only in Quebec did Carney’s Liberals make significant gains, mostly at the expense of the separatist Bloc Quebecois, whose social democratic base feared the prospect of a Poilievre government so much that they voted against their nationalist inclinations to hand Carney enough to claim the win. With 24 seats, however, the same Bloc, which rejects the very idea of Canada, as it exists, may play the part of kingmaker in the hung parliament, further testing national unity in this already fractious federation.

With these results, governing will be far from easy for Carney, and after a short, raucous 45th parliament, Canadians may well have to return to the polls later this year or next to dispel the indecision that has descended over Ottawa. While there were no decisive winners, the loser of this race may just be the national interest, which desperately needs a stable majority government as Canada fights for its sovereign existence and standard of living against a vicious and implacable foe.

At the start of his ministry, Mark Carney made a bizarre gesture: he winked at the camera as if to cross the fourth wall and communicate something to those watching; on social media, Carney was then compared with the protagonists of House of Cards: a shrewd Machiavellian figure who comes in from the shadows to seize and hold power against great odds. Instead, what we Canadians got was a House of Cards in the more literal sense, a fundamentally unstable structure that can be blown away at any time by a strong gust of wind. And a storm is brewing across the border.

These words came back to me the following week when the Hudson Bay Corporation, the oldest in North America, announced that it was going out of business. Incorporated by royal decree in 1670, the HBC was responsible for westward expansion into British North America. Canada became what it is because of this company. For over 200 years, the HBC was the governing authority in Western Canada. In the 20th century, it became the anchor for urban development, emerging as the country’s most iconic retailer. Every major city in Canada had its downtown centered around an HBC department store that spanned an entire city block. Even in recent years, the Christmas windows of its flagship Toronto store attracted the kind of attention that a major tourist destination receives. The floors inside were civic retail Utopia, where teen girls and new moms and corporate bankers and grandpas shopped happily under the same roof. If there was a unifying symbol of Canadian culture in the last century, it may have been an HBC wool blanket. Traded for fur pelts from the late 1700s, the blankets at one point accounted for well over half of all traded goods. There are few fashion staples dating from over 200 years ago that are still popular today, but the HBC Stripes are one of them. Every household has one somewhere in the house.

The end of the HBC, hastened by its owner, an American private equity firm that bought the company in 2012, has happened during a time of a strange resurgence of Canadian patriotism. A few months ago, one experienced a kind of fremdscham — vicarious embarrassment — if one saw a household flying a Canadian flag. We have been told, and told often, that we’re a genocidal nation; it was gauche to be proud of Canada. But now even in the most bourgeois neighborhoods you see the maple leaf flying proudly. Canadian products in grocery stores are now labeled with a maple leaf. Californian wine has been taken off our shelves. There are Canadian flags inside businesses and on clothing, and on hats. (We have our own version of the red and white ballcap: “Canada is Already Great”, it says.) This weekend in my home province there is a Rally for Canada happening at the provincial legislature. I think there will be music, some speeches by local radio hosts, face-painting for the kids, and some fried mini doughnuts and hot dogs. You know, all the things that make us uniquely Canadian, I guess.

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It is difficult to put one’s finger on the pulse of Canadian culture. We seem to define ourselves by one thing: not American. (That’s why it’s still perfectly acceptable for a Canadian backpacker to affix a maple leaf to her bag. At home our patriotism has been a cause for embarrassment, but abroad a worse embarrassment would be to be mistaken for a vulgar American.) Americans, on the other hand, typically don’t think of us at all. Years before the talk of becoming the 51st state, my husband took a trip from his home in Virginia to Canada to give a lecture. He was delayed overnight in the Chicago airport because he left his passport at home and had to have it emergency couriered. “I honestly forgot Canada was a separate country,” he joked, making fun of his own forgetfulness by deflecting it onto Canada’s deepest insecurity. “I just assumed it was like America-North.”

But Canadians forget that we’re a separate country, too, strangely. Consider this: at a party around Christmas, after the US election but before Trump’s inauguration, a fellow Canadian and I were talking about, unsurprisingly, US politics. “Trump is going to be bad for Canada,” he said. “I expect so,” I said, “but he is allowed to do things that he thinks are in the best interest of his country.” “But are you prepared to accept everything he says he’ll do?” he asked. “It doesn’t really matter since I’m Canadian. I didn’t vote for him, and I don’t pay taxes to him.” My friend stood there, as though not quite understanding what I meant, so I clarified: “he is not the president of Canada.”

Canada is a country that has long defined itself by our sense of moral superiority to our uncouth neighbor to the south. To be Canadian is to be more virtuous and more intelligent than our American cousins. But of course we learn our virtue from America, influenced by them in ways we can’t fully apprehend because our culture is so saturated by theirs. The only thing we don’t do better than them is patriotism — until recently, that is. Now that Trump has adopted a stance of hostility toward Canada, we’ve got good at that, too. Our newfound love of Canada is another import from our southern neighbors. Our response to Trump’s tariffs is to buy local, support Canada. In other words, we are now doing by way of patriotic reaction precisely what Trump is doing by way of policy: spending our money in our own country.

I know that this sounds as if I’m unpatriotic myself, eye-rolling at Canada’s reactive nationalism. This isn’t true. First of all, few things are as Canadian as being self-deprecating and self-apologizing. Sorry, eh. But truly I love Canada, deeply. Not only our cold, unforgiving winters, which do forge a different kind of person, but our social and political systems, which in fact are very un-American, and make for a very pleasant society. I was a participant recently at an American conference in New York. There I was surprised by how opposed the Americans were to things like universal healthcare, public daycare and public schools, and even to taxes. One participant there was a third-generation non-social security number holder. She is off the grid so that she doesn’t have to pay a cent in taxes. To a Canadian this is unthinkable. Nobody likes paying taxes, but we certainly do enjoy the benefits of them. And we are certainly aware that we have a responsibility to our fellow citizens.

There is a tangible difference between Canada and the US that made me realize how incompatible our cultures are. Canada is collectivist, if not even a teensy bit socialist. We have government corporations, such as energy utilities and insurance companies. They work well, in general. We pay high taxes, but we get services in return — no, don’t snicker. It’s true. For many years I was a single mother. I had to work. Daycare in my home province is heavily subsidized by the government. The cost to all is $10 a day. Affordable and necessary, so off my kids went. To the average American, I have learned, state-run daycare sounds menacing, as though it’s the kind of institution where toddlers are given sippy cups of Soylent Green as images of blue-haired angry teens are beamed into their innocent eyes, like Clockwork Orange for three-year-olds. But in practice provincial daycares are each run separately by a board made up of parent volunteers. The province provides the funding, but the community determines the policies. And the daycares are truly diverse communities. Professional moms and dads mingle with recent immigrants at pre-school parties. The lawyer and the grocery store custodian become friends as they plan weekend playdates together. The Eritrean refugee family and the Russian Jewish family laugh together as their kids hang from the monkey bars at pick-up time. It is a kind of classless polis. It is beautiful, and it works.

And the same goes with our healthcare system. Although certainly strained and now with a very questionable policy regarding medically assisted dying, it is still highly functional. That is why we hear about cases when the system fails. They are newsworthy because they are not commonplace. A few years ago, my daughter fell on glass and sliced her knee; it was cut open to the bone. My American husband and I took her to the downtown Children’s Hospital. Within three hours, her knee was stitched (10 big sutures and two subcutaneous ones) and we were sent home with Advil and extra bandages. As we drove home, I asked Matthew how much he paid for parking in the hospital parking garage. “Seven dollars,” he said. “Seven dollars!” I replied, shaking my head. “Tsk, tsk. They get you coming and going around here.” He slowly turned his head to glare at me. “In the US that bandage alone would have cost $25.” He is right. Our system is not perfect, but it has in large part been saved from outright corruption because it is a public good.

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” is, as we all know, America’s saying. Canada’s lesser-known one is “Peace, Order, and Good Government”. At the heart of Canada is a spirit that embraces governance as long as it is for the common good. We have an election here at the end of this month. It will be, as usual, a battle between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. The latter would have won the election handily had it been called in the autumn (as it should have been) while the deeply disliked Trudeau was in power and Trump had not yet started a trade war with America’s longest-running trade partner. But now to be Conservative in Canada is aligned, incorrectly, with American Trumpism. To be Liberal is to be, more or less correctly, a lib globalist. The American political landscape has so overshadowed our politics and culture that their terms have become ours; their division of political policy our own — you’re either Right or Left — just as our “Canadian culture” is in so many ways the same as theirs: doughnuts and hot dogs.

But Canada has a unique history of political values that have neither formed themselves as a negation of American values or a colonization by them. To be a Red Tory is to be both fiscally conservative and collectivist; it is to hold socialist policies that look to the community’s good, while often holding onto conservative social values. Unlike America’s focus on individual liberty, Canadian Red Toryism focuses on the collective. The Canadian Wheat Board was such an institution: a single government-run trade platform where farmers marketed their grain. It effectively dissolved in 2012 in favor of open market globalization, which has been devastating to family farms but good for corporate ones. (The majority of Canadian farmers opposed its dissolution; my father, a Ukrainian immigrant farmer, was one of them. Corporate farms, however, lobbied strongly for “market freedom” as opposed to collective capitalism. They won.) I wonder if now, in the face of high tariffs in our American market, it might be time to bring Canadian collectivism back to our grain market. Few things would make me prouder to be Canadian. Western farmers, like our truckers, are remarkably unified. Ottawa might want to remember this.

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But probably I’m being naïve. It feels increasingly like a remnant of the past to imagine a government that is both collectivist and conservative, like a trace of old wiring in a house that no longer serves any purpose. But it could still happen. I am no economist, but I love this country of mine and, as the wife of an American, have more insight than I might otherwise have had to the differences between our two nations. Of course we will never, ever become annexed to the USA — for one thing, the Americans couldn’t handle Quebecers for a day, let alone conciliate them for well over a century.

But the history of Canada is to keep traces of the past intact. That is why we still have a king — God save him. We have always been loyalists. This might now mean being loyal to our unique Canadian collectivism. Socialist, but not wokeist. Fiscally conservative, but not anti-taxation or anti-government. Neither on the Right nor the Left, but maybe somewhere beneath these divisions, closer to the land. The old Canada of the mid-20th century might feel no longer relevant to the functioning of the modern globalist markets, but then again, the modern globalist market seems to be crashing down before our eyes. Canadian Red Toryism need not be an artifact of the past. Just as old houses can be restored, Canadian Red Toryism may become again a vital force in a functioning modern state, for the current of collectivism still flows through our country. In a time of diminishing exports, a uniquely Canadian socialism might still be a viable commodity to the people of Canada.

You’d think this professor would feel an even greater need to ground his claim in real evidence this election year, given that Trump did better with black and Latino and other non-white voters than any Republican presidential candidate in recent memory. But apparently not. When another panelist suggested that inflation better explained why Trump was elected, Professor Glaude was both derisive and adamant. The idea that Trump won because of inflation — historically a cause of trouble for incumbent parties — was nuts. The scientifically obvious answer was whiteness, threatened as it is these days by racially ambiguous children on Cheerios boxes.

Glaude’s claim seemed both obviously wrong and symptomatic of the extreme insularity of progressive elites, who talk in abstractions like “whiteness” as they consult each other, even as those abstractions look like delusions to the less sophisticated people who merely consult things in the real world. He aired his apparent delusion for these regular people, who mocked and scorned him on social media.

This is the second election in a row where a professor at an elite American university provoked scorn and mockery by using “whiteness” to explain things that non-white people had done. Writing in The Washington Post after the 2020 election, New York University professor Cristina Beltrán characterised increasing pro-Trump sentiment among blacks and especially Latinos as expressing “multiracial whiteness”. This apparently self-contradictory phrase was widely mocked by readers, who turned “multiracial whiteness” into a meme that still circulates on social media today.

Through three elections I have refrained from becoming a Donald Trump supporter, but I have to admit that his massive presence in American politics has had some positive effects. For example, he seems to have inspired this healthy reshuffling in ethnic voting patterns that some are calling “racial depolarisation”. And this is giving academics like Glaude and Beltrán the opportunity to beclown themselves before the general public by looking at things that non-white people are doing and ascribing them, somehow, to “whiteness”. And, in doing this, they are helping to discredit the increasingly empty and useless concept of “whiteness”.

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“Whiteness” wasn’t always an empty and useless concept. The text that probably did more to push “Whiteness Studies” toward the academic mainstream was Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book How the Irish Became White. But Ignatiev’s study was very different from the work that came to characterise the academic preoccupation with whiteness, and it was infused with a very different set of political concerns. Ignatiev wasn’t a diversity bureaucrat or a professor of racial studies. He was a historian. But he didn’t get his PhD until he was in his forties. Before that he was a Pennsylvania steelworker and labour organiser.

For him, “whiteness” wasn’t an infinitely bendable abstraction that could be applied to anything a professor disapproves of. It referred to a specific historical process that Ignatiev illustrated with reference to a specific population. Ignatiev describes how, in the northern states of early 19th-century America, newly arrived Irish struggled to enter menial jobs and labour organisations. Over time, they succeeded, pushing free black workers out of many sectors, as native workers came to view the Irish as “white”. Through a complex process of assimilation and exclusion, native white workers’ hostility to free blacks intensified as they slowly embraced the Irish as fellow whites. The result for blacks in the supposedly free states was both economic and physical insecurity, as white workers refused to work with them and white mobs sometimes attacked them.

Whiteness in Ignatiev’s treatment is a historical, contingent phenomenon. It emerges in its importance over a particular span of time, as an effect of particular forces. It is subject, in other words, to the usual tides of historical change. The same general phenomenon Ignatiev describes certainly replicated itself later. Surely it has appeared at different times, with different populations, driven by different concrete interests, and these instances can be assembled into broader tendencies that one might identify as “whiteness”. For example, the assimilation and loyalty of immigrants who came to the US in large numbers from southern and eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was pursued by employers and civic leaders, and the immigrants themselves, through the assurance that they were not black. They were “white”. And this fact of “race” gave them a preferred claim to communal membership in their new nation, preferred, that is, over the black people already here. But these instances exist in historical time. The force of whiteness they illustrate is a historical thing.

Something happens to this “whiteness”, though, in the hands of politicised academics like Glaude and Beltrán, and influential writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates. It gets transformed from a contingent historical entity — a political force that emerges in time and changes with time, grows and weakens like the other contingent things of history — into a different sort of entity. It becomes metaphysical, a superordinate force that exists outside of history. Historical change is understood in terms of it. Historical change, especially in America, happens within, not to, the metaphysical contours of whiteness, in this understanding.

In other words, whiteness is transformed into a constant, like energy in the first law of thermodynamics. Its form can change — so that the behaviour of black people and Latino people can be labelled “whiteness” if one finds it discreditable enough — but its magnitude or quantity must stay the same. To say that whiteness is on the wane, that it exerts less influence now than it used to, is an anathema. Things might appear to change, but — deeper down, in their true essence — they don’t. They can’t. The iron law of the preservation of whiteness says they can’t. A political coalition adds an unprecedented number of black and Latino voters. Then the academic appears on the scene to characterise this new development with the same conceptual tool they applied to an earlier, very different set of facts, and the determination is: whiteness. It’s multiracial, but it’s whiteness. Whatever it is, if it’s distasteful enough to us in the “whiteness” business, it’s whiteness.

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates is probably the most famous, and the most rhetorically powerful and effective, purveyor of this understanding of whiteness. In his bestselling book, Between the World and Me, he quotes John C. Calhoun, the notorious pro-slavery ideologist and senator from South Carolina, who declared that the main division in society was not between rich and poor but between “white and black”. This fact, Calhoun wrote, assures a pleasing equality among whites, from the saddest vagrant and the poorest dirt farmer to the wealthiest planter. By virtue of their superiority as white people over black people, they “all belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equal”. This is indeed a ghoulish formulation of a diabolical arrangement, but it’s also pro-slavery ideologist John C. Calhoun propounding it, and it’s also, like, 1848. Can it be that this construction of white belonging upon black oppression has not somehow weakened or slackened in the intervening 176 years? No, it cannot be. That this arrangement defines America, Coates writes, “was true in 1776. It is true today.”

This understanding of whiteness as unabating but unspoken, omnipresent but hidden, is a boon to many race-studies academics, and to writers like Coates, who conduct social analysis via the methods of literary criticism. They look onto the visible surface of Americans’ speech and behaviour and magically discover that this roiled mess of ambiguous signs is transparently legible, and that, surprise, it confirms the Theory of Everything that has lodged itself in their heads. You might find the deeper meaning of a cranky woman yelling at Coates’s young son on a New York City escalator to be fairly elusive, suggestive of many possible readings including, it being New York City, that the woman was insane — because what mentally composed person yells at a five-year-old boy? But for Coates, as he relates it in his book, the meaning of this maddening event reveals itself clearly and simply in the fact that it happened in America, and that it’s maddening to him as a black man, and it involved a black boy and a white woman. It was, ergo those things, another predictable instance of white presumption as to “black bodies”.

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The whiteness paradigm is also a boon to diversity consultants who help businesses and organisations cow and train their employees by forcing them into mandatory struggle sessions, in which those employees are forced to confess the inescapable whiteness that turns them into half-thinking agents of racial domination. For these consultants, the idea that whiteness is unchangingly ubiquitous and always suppressed offers a delectable setup for their operational model. The conceit of suppression justifies their invasive procedures, and the conceit of ubiquitousness assures that the procedures will always uncover what they’re looking for.

It’s also a boon for people trained in schools of education, whom it empowers to discredit the difficult subjects they may not understand or be able to teach, because these subjects are produced by or infected with whiteness. And it justifies pedagogical methods that resemble those of the diversity consultants, in which the whiteness hidden inside children is brought to light and exorcised. For institutions, in other words, real power, power over the docile “bodies” of workers and children, flows out of the “whiteness” paradigm.

One urgent and interesting question is how devotees of this paradigm — smart writers and well-trained professors — can treat its central concept so dogmatically. How can they understand a phenomenon, bad and historically prominent as it’s been, as if it’s not just empirically persistent but metaphysically permanent? How can they treat something that is obviously historical as if it exists outside of history, a condition rather than an effect of historical change? How can things that Latinos and black people do be understood as new forms of whiteness?

The answer to these questions is “America”. The theorists and analysts of whiteness define America by, and identify it with, whiteness. Now it’s true, as I note above, that whiteness has been used by both industrial bosses and American politicians to build political communion upon racial difference. But, for these thinkers, understanding whiteness in these banal terms of empirical history fails to get at its centrality for the American project. Rather, for them, whiteness is “structurally necessary”. America would not exist, they believe, were it not for whiteness.

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Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it would. I can’t say for sure. But I get why you might want to think of it in these terms. I understand the philosophical appeal of treating certain interpretive frameworks that come from your brain as real structures in the world, and then treating those structures as having a higher reality, as existing in a different sort of historical time, than the everyday things they supposedly comprehend. I went to grad school. I understand how pleasing it is to walk around with a paradigm that explains everything, a theory of society that’s not meant to be tested, much less falsified, but merely confirmed. Something usually happens that will do this confirming for you, not because America is infected with this one bad thing in particular but because America is a huge and unruly country. It’s infected with everything. And I imagine this appeal is even greater for people with a personal axe to grind against this country, supposedly their country, which has treated them and theirs pretty badly over the last four centuries or so. But I also get why people believe in conspiracy theories, which aren’t much different. In other words, the whiteness paradigm represents a failure of scepticism, and a triumph of gullible pessimism.

I’m not saying the remedy is optimism. I’m not saying that America is necessarily, inevitably improving, that the ideal of the equality of all men enshrined in the Declaration of Independence is being better realised all the time thanks to its essential truth, or to America’s essential goodness. I’m saying that things change, in whatever moral direction. Things fall apart. Over time they’re replaced by new things. That a political arrangement described by John C. Calhoun 176 years ago has succumbed to historical entropy is almost certain, not necessarily because America is “better than that” now, though it probably is, but because it was 176 years ago.

Regular people seem more willing to acknowledge this than their supposed representatives in the intelligentsia. The writers and professors remain attached to certain prescribed ideas of political identification, and for obvious reasons. They’re the ones who prescribe those ideas. When Cristina Beltrán writes, “Multiracial whiteness promises Latino Trump supporters freedom from the politics of diversity and recognition,” she assumes there’s something perverse in this promise. This inclination can only be explained by a desire to “lay claim to the politics of aggression, exclusion and domination”. Professor Beltrán seems alarmingly ready to believe terrible things about her fellow Latinos, as long as Trump is in the picture. But maybe Trump’s importance is that, even with his crudeness and scapegoating, he treats them as something other than objects of symbolic pandering.

That is, a simpler, less invidious, less conspiratorial explanation than “whiteness”, or “multiracial whiteness”, might be that people in America’s minority and immigrant populations find it kind of depressing and taxing to be addressed as separate communities as a rule. Maybe they don’t want to have intellectuals telling them that a “politics of identity and recognition” is the only proper way for them to be citizens, that they must be treated as precious ethnic others, delicate and vulnerable. Maybe what they want to be, finally, is Americans, just Americans, not because America is so great, necessarily, but because America is where they live, and American is what they are.

Beyond this protest in the fields, though, what’s really striking about the Dundrum camp are the signs. There’s a Trumpist riff — “Make Dundrum Great Again” — but also splashes of offbeat humour. One poster borrows from Father Ted. “Careful Now!” it says. “Down with this sort of thing.” Another shows the late Richard Harris, in a still from a classic film, advising an interloper to be “a Good Yank and go Home!” The same banner includes two other notes. “Yes to Ukrainians, Golf Club, Gym Venue,” says one. “No to Racism and IPAS Centre,” proclaims the other.

This, then, is Irish populism on the eve of Friday’s election: idiosyncratic, humorous, keen to distinguish anti-migrant fears from straightforward racism. Just like the impromptu camp at Dundrum, meanwhile, this is a movement that’s basically from the grassroots, even as it contains a deep well of historical perspective. And if it’s unlikely to enjoy success in the short term, the bubbling rage at Dundrum is sure to secure concrete expression sooner or later, especially in a country with a robust tradition of political outsiders — and especially if the triumph of populism across the Atlantic destabilises Ireland still further.

For years, Ireland was the great political outlier. Let other countries have Brexit or Le Pen: Éire remained aloof. And if the latest polls are to be believed, populism won’t sweep the Dáil on Friday either. Fine Gael, headed by the incumbent Taoiseach Simon Harris, is currently at 19%. Fianna Fáil, Harris’s coalition partners, are on 21%, just one point ahead of the Sinn Féin opposition. Given, moreover, that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have already announced they’ll stick to their coalition agreement, the political centre will likely hold for now.

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But if the headline results on Friday are likely to indicate business as usual — Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil have been permanent fixtures of Irish government for 100 years — the status quo is hardly stable. That’s clear enough from media coverage in the run-up to the election, with many reports focused on the nation’s simmering discontent, healthy government finances and solid economic growth of 2% notwithstanding. You get the same sense listening to the Irish themselves: according to the European Social Survey, the average Irish voter rates their satisfaction with their country’s democracy at a mere 5.9 out of 10.

How can this unhappiness be explained? One obvious factor is immigration: of both economic migrants and refugees seeking asylum. Having been a net exporter of people for over 150 years, net migration into Ireland now stands at almost 75,000 per year, with a fifth of those now living in Ireland having been born elsewhere. In particular, there has been a notable rise in the number of people seeking asylum, with the rate jumping by 94% in the first six months of 2024 alone.

Worries over migration feed into broader concerns. The Irish economy is booming, after all, but the recent influx has put immense pressure on housing and other services. That’s clear enough somewhere like Dundrum: those 277 migrants are set to be introduced into a community of just 221. Quite aside from the sense that communities are changing, that’s leading to a chronic shortage of housing, with Ireland having the worst record in the EU for accommodation for young people. Dovetailed with shuttered village pubs and community and anger against the political class is tangible.

It’s clear, then, that all the ingredients for Irish populism are there and ready to brew. Yet as the polls so vividly suggest, a shock result remains unlikely: something that’s basically down to the unwillingness of mainstream politicians to move with the voters. For their part, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have generally been reluctant to accept the need for lower numbers. As recently as last December a government minister accused politicians of cloaking themselves in “victimhood” when they claimed that public debate around immigration was being suppressed.

Until recently, anyone looking to give the establishment a bloody nose might have looked to Sinn Féin, what with its heady mix of Irish nationalism and socialist economics. Yet while the party polled as high as 36% two years ago, it’s since fallen away dramatically. Immigration is once again the culprit here, with Sinn Féin’s progressive leaders increasingly out of step with the electorate. According to one poll from May, 63% of all Irish voters wanted a more restrictive immigration policy, a figure that rose to 70% among Sinn Féin supporters. The same poll found that younger, poorer and more urban voters were most worried about Irish migration levels. That’s exactly the demographics Sinn Féin most relies on — even as Sinn Féin leaders like Mary Lou McDonald have, until recently, been extremely reluctant to comment on immigration directly.

Discontent does have some outlets. With the big three parties unwilling to drastically change tack on immigration, some have turned to Aontú, which blends nationalism and conservatism in ways Sinn Féin can’t. Yet with Aontú polling at just 4%, it seems clear that resentful Irish voters are instead putting their hope in independents. Often disaffected members of the mainstream parties — like Mattie McGrath and Malachy Steenson — they’re altogether expected to scoop up some 20% of the vote: roughly the same as each of the three main parties. Included in this grouping is the so-called Independent Party. Like Aontú, it blends republican zeal with immigration scepticism, though has bent to Irish conditions by accepting EU membership.

If, moreover, they’re unlikely to make a breakthrough this time round, the independents do have the electoral system on their side. Because of its proportional nature, the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system used in Dáil elections makes it easier for non-affiliated candidates to cause an upset. There are signs, moreover, that sticking it to the mainstream can bear fruit: though it was founded just last year, by a pair of former parliamentarians, the Independent Party already has 24 councillors and a single MEP.

Beyond the electoral calculations, though, the easiest way to measure the potency of Irish populism is through places like Dundrum. What’s happening in County Tipperary, after all, is being shadowed right across the country, with men and women taking the initiative themselves. That’s clearly enough in places like the Finglas area of Dublin, or else Cootehill in County Cavan, both sites of anti-migration protests.

Dundrum is also representative from an ideological standpoint. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a people who long suffered racism from the British, many would-be Irish populists are eager to reject accusations of discrimination themselves. “Skin colour is not the point, and it’s deliberately disingenuous to claim otherwise,” explains one user on a popular political Facebook group, in a striking echo of the “No to Racism” sign at Dundrum. “Talking about ‘white supremacy’ in a country that has suffered as much as Ireland has from ‘white’ people is a particularly sly form of gaslighting.”

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And if that hints vividly at how the tragedies of Irish history shape the country’s populism, there are other examples too. Like at Dundrum, for instance, protests and social media posts are replete with references to “plantation” — explicitly linking the resettlement of refugees to the colonisation of Ireland by English and Scottish settlers in the 16th and 17th centuries. The past echoes elsewhere too: that Richard Harris poster at Dundrum references a rant about the Great Famine. Offbeat humour, too, is something shared between the camp at Dundrum and its cousins elsewhere. At one recent anti-migration rally, one attendee dressed up as St. Patrick.

Beyond history or humour, though, the success of Trumpish populism in Ireland might ultimately depend on the man himself. Though a poll earlier this year found Irish voters preferred Biden to win, the success of Trump in confounding expectations yet again shows that apparent stasis can be overcome in unexpected ways.

Then there’s the question of the President-elect’s economic policies. Right now, more than one in every €8 the Irish government makes comes from corporation tax paid by American multinationals. Last year, meanwhile, Ireland exported €54 billion of goods to the US. That’s 2.5 times the value of exports to the UK, even as Ireland’s trade surplus with the US currently stands at a record €35 billion. Trump’s return poses a serious threat to all this: as well as levying tariffs, he plans to cut corporation tax, just as Dublin plans to raise it.

Given Trump’s erratic style, it’s unclear if he’ll actually follow through with his plans. But if he does, he’ll pose huge risks to the economic model underpinning Ireland’s recent prosperity. That, it goes without saying, could be a boon to the incipient populists — at Dundrum and beyond.

Given America’s long history of divinely inspired electioneering, a field ploughed by everyone from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush, that’s striking enough. But when you consider that America remains a thoroughly religious country — at least by Western standards — the disappearance of God from the stump really is remarkable. 

Yet amid rising speculation that America’s Christian flame is finally dying, it’s wrong to say the 2024 cycle has been free of spirituality. For if personal appeals to organised religion have been notable by their absence, this election is as metaphysical as ever. Whether in Harris’s subtle nods to secular spirituality, or else Trump’s manichaean cosmology of good and evil, the divine still matters. It’s just that the sandals-and-beard Christ is being elbowed aside by something stranger and darker, with consequences that could yet transform America’s political culture.

Religion has been part of US elections for decades. As far back as 1976, Jimmy Carter’s victory was partly attributed to his religious openness, with his Southern Baptist roots proving attractive to voters. Four years later, Ronald Reagan prayed during his acceptance speech. By the turn of the millennium, Dubya declared that Christ was his favourite political philosopher: because he “changed my heart”. For his part, Barack Obama was fond of invoking his own conversion experience, while Joe Biden, who once considered entering the priesthood, has made frequent reference to his Catholicism. 

Cut to the 2024 election, however, and testimonies of faith have mostly vanished. Consider Donald Trump. Despite enjoying near-Messianic status among some supporters, not to mention selling Bibles with his name on them, the Republican hopeful isn’t a regular churchgoer and has little to say about his personal convictions. He has, to be fair, claimed his faith “took on new meaning” after he narrowly avoided assassination in July. Overall, though, the issue doesn’t seem to be front of mind. At a recent forum for faith voters in Georgia, Trump made just one allusion to his own beliefs, preferring instead to focus on the perils of illegal immigration.

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Kamala Harris, for her part, grew up attending both a black Baptist church and a Hindu temple. With a Jewish husband and stepchildren, she’s been touted as the candidate for a multifaith, multiracial America. Yet if she’s made occasional references to personal religiosity, it’s not a significant part of her campaigning, an omission that’s been seized upon by her opponents. As J.D. Vance sniped: “There is something really bizarre with Kamala Harris’ anti-Christian rhetoric and anti-Christian approach to public policy.”

Americans have heard the message loud and clear. In a poll conducted in September, just 12% of voters said the word “religious” describes either Trump or Harris “extremely” or “very” well. 

So why might Trump and Harris have taken this Jesus-light approach? Part of the answer, presumably, is the much-touted decline of Christianity. As documented in the latest Pew Research Center survey, 28% of Americans are now classed as “nones” — meaning they’re religiously unaffiliated. This is up from 16% in 2007, and just 5% in 1972. Concurrently, the proportion of Christians has tumbled, from 90% in the Seventies to 78% in 2007 to less than two-thirds today.

According to the Pew Research Center’s projections, the numbers of Christians and “nones” could be roughly equal by 2070, each comprising around a third to a half of the US population. 

This demographic shift is inarguable, and Harris especially will have been paying attention. All those “nones” are a diverse cohort, comprising atheists, agnostics, loosely spiritual types, and a big group identifying as “nothing in particular”. They span everyone from the anti-religious to the apathetic, and while most believe in a higher power, nearly half maintain that religion does more harm than good.

They are also more inclined to vote for Harris: 70% of this group skew Democrat, including 84% of atheists. While they are far from a unified voting bloc, and are indeed less likely to vote than the general population, they equally include a very vocal group of Left-leaning secular activists. If Harris were to overdo the religious rhetoric, in short, she’d stand to alienate a significant chunk of her voter base. 

Of course, it isn’t as simple as saying that secularists vote blue and the godly go red. As well as courting the non-religious vote, Harris will be looking to maintain her support among black Protestants, 84% of whom lean Democrat. Many Jews, Muslims and Hispanic Catholics tend to look Left too.

Yet appealing to these groups doesn’t necessarily require Harris to talk up her faith. Rather, she’s made efforts to portray herself as a defender of minorities and a champion of abstract social justice. As the Democratic nominee vaguely put it, she “was raised to believe in a loving God, to believe that your faith is a verb”. It’s a position unlikely to ruffle her supporters, be they black Baptists or strident atheists. 

A case in point: Emanuel Jones, a Georgia state senator, has spoken approvingly of the presidential candidate’s unwillingness to mix politics and God. “I think she does a really good job of keeping them separate,” he said in October. “She did that today, and we all should.” 

On the face of it, Trump’s apparent irreligion is more mystifying. This is a man, after all, who is looking to court some of the most overtly religious voters in America. A whopping 85% of white evangelicals lean Republican, along with the lion’s share of white Christians generally. 

And though white evangelicals are less powerful than they were, now comprising less than one in seven Americans, they nonetheless are expected to wield outsize influence on the election. For one thing, this cohort is far more likely to vote than most. For another thing, they could play a decisive role in swing states like Georgia.

Trump can’t afford to lose these voters. But with two previous cycles under his belt, he doesn’t seem too worried about that. To put it differently, then, he may not talk about his faith because he doesn’t need to. Evangelical loyalty is assured already: even given Trump’s less-than-stellar personal behaviour, many white evangelicals now view him as synonymous with traditional Christian values. 

For sure, some are single-issue voters, who will hold their noses and vote Republican based on the abortion question alone. Others, though, are wedded to the idea that Trump is God’s flawed but “anointed” instrument on earth. As media personality Lance Wallnau put it rather ominously last year, “the hand of God is on him and he cannot be stopped”. 

Beyond that, though, it’s unclear how appeals to Christianity might fly with another group of voters, a group that’s garnered cultural clout while defying traditional classifications. 

It’s here that “conspirituality“ — a muddle of far-Right conspiracy theory and alternative spirituality — gathers steam. Think anti-vaxxer yoga teachers at one end of the spectrum, and Capitol-storming white supremacists at the other, with MAGA cheerleaders like Alex Jones hollering away in the middle. Many in this bracket would previously have aligned with RFK Jr, who identifies as Catholic but has made no secret of his conspiratorial persuasions. Around half of RFK Jr’s supporters are now thought to have pivoted to Trump, with only a quarter switching to Harris.

It’s hard to say how these voters might define themselves from a religious perspective. On the one hand, movements like Q-Anon have been painted as an offshoot of evangelical Christianity, with white evangelicals overrepresented among their supporters. On the other, many conspiracists have New Age-accented beliefs, while others use pagan signifiers. Who could forget the Viking shaman at the Capitol?

The academic Tobias Cremer argues that what we’re seeing is the emergence of a new, post-religious Right, consisting of “disenchanted working-class voters who combine secular values with cultural nativism and authoritarian tendencies”. This group may borrow the symbols of Christianity — for instance parading Christian crosses at their marches — but don’t necessarily believe Christ died for our sins. 

If Trump is interested in cornering this group, then, it may be smart to avoid traditional religious rhetoric. Not that these voters are insensitive to spirituality. For even if their Bibles are gathering dust, many continue to see politics as a meeting ground for cosmic forces, a clash not just between one set of values and another, but between the very powers of good and evil. 

QAnon message boards have always been full of apocalyptic grandiosity, notably claiming that those in Washington “worship the devil”. For the insurrectionists at the Capitol, what was at stake transcended politics: they believed they were waging war against the Deep State in a battle they called “The Storm”.

At the more absurd end of the spectrum is Kek, an ancient Egyptian chaos god who spawned an internet religion. He became a semi-ironic icon for the alt-Right, who used his image not only to troll liberals, but also make a serious point about their desire to overturn the global order.

Then, during the pandemic, these same far-Right fearmongers found some unlikely allies in the wellness community. Charles Eisenstein, a New Age thinker who became a campaign advisor for RFK Jr, identified a “locus of evil in Covid policy and the totalitarian impulse beneath it”. At the same time, the one-time liberal darling Naomi Wolf described the Covid health measures as “pure elemental evil” — adding that they caused her to believe in the “principalities and power” of darkness. 

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Trump and his supporters are constantly alluding to this kind of spiritual warfare: a move that may appeal to white evangelicals and conspiratorially secularists alike. When they describe the Democratic party as “evil” — or else attribute Trump’s criminal charges to a demonic plot — they are tapping into a black-and-white psychology that goes far beyond a specific religious viewpoint. 

It should be noted that alternative spirituality isn’t merely a Right-wing phenomenon. A counterexample on the Left is the self-help author Marianne Williamson, who ran for the Democratic party nomination in 2020 and 2024. Her low polling numbers, however, suggest that something about her spirituality-infused spiel didn’t resonate. It remains to be seen whether other New Age candidates can break through, and what kind of narrative they’d need to persuade this highly educated voter base. In the immediate term, certainly, Williamson’s message of peace, love and vaccine hesitancy proved a little too kooky.

What we can be more sure about is that, as America’s ideological landscape continues to fracture, we haven’t seen the last of alternative spiritualities. What might this mean for politics? Once those “nones” equal America’s Christians — a situation that’s already close at hand in Britain — might we see what was once unthinkable: the first openly atheist presidential candidate? Or perhaps we should expect the first nominee to have founded an internet religion? Or one who endorses the curative powers of ayahuasca? Performs witchcraft? Follows an AI deity?

Short of securing the intercession of Kek, the future is impossible to predict. But whatever happens, politicians will always be tasked with finding the lowest common denominator among the voting public. Whether that’s the battle of good versus evil, or wan homilies about letting your beliefs inform your actions, they need a unifying message. With belief systems splintering ever more dramatically, it’ll take a very savvy politician to talk from the pulpit with skill. In the meantime, it’s business as usual: gaffes, clangers and baby-holding too.

Little wonder, then, that last week’s parliamentary elections have turned into a global event. As predicted by the polls, Georgian Dream won by a wide margin, securing over 53% of the vote. The four major opposition coalitions together managed less than 40%. There is no reason to believe that the vote was fixed: despite raising some concerns about pressure on voters, biased media coverage and an environment of political polarisation, independent observers found no evidence of electoral fraud, let alone of Russian interference.

Yet that doesn’t fit the geopolitical mood. Desperate to finally shut Russia out from its near abroad, there seems to be no line Western politicians and their allies in Georgia are unwilling to cross to achieve their geopolitical aims — including ignoring basic liberal principles and even overturning the will of the people wholesale. Dovetailed with ominously similar moves across the Black Sea in Moldova, meanwhile, and Tbilisi may not be the last capital to suffer.

Even if Georgia’s elections were almost certainly free and fair, the opposition has refused to accept defeat. They’ve accused the government of “stealing” the election as part of a “Russian special operation”. By Monday, thousands of pro-EU demonstrators had rallied outside the Georgian parliament. For its part, the opposition can count on a powerful ally within the Georgian state: the country’s staunchly pro-Western president Salome Zourabichvili.

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Born in Paris, she’s spent most of her life working as a French diplomat, including as the country’s ambassador to Georgia. Yet despite only becoming a Georgian citizen in 2004, Zourabichvili was nonetheless confident that victory belonged to the opposition. “I do not accept this election,” she said. “It cannot be accepted, accepting it would be accepting Russia into this country, the acceptance of Georgia’s subordination to Russia.” Even more remarkably, Zourabichvili claimed that whether Russian interference could actually be proved didn’t matter. What was important, she said, was “what the Georgian population knows, feels and sees”.

If the roles were reversed, Western governments would rightly laugh off such claims as unhinged. Instead, they’re echoing her claims: Joe Biden expressed “alarm” at the election, while Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, and Charles Michel, president of the European Council, have both called for a probe into alleged irregularities.

Senior parliamentarians across the bloc have made similar noises. They’ve claimed that “these elections were neither free nor fair”, arguing that “the European Union cannot recognise the result” and demanding “personal sanctions” against government officials. Displaying a zero-sum mentality, typical of this new Cold War, they added “this election was about Europe or isolation, democracy or authoritarianism, freedom or Russification”, implying that Georgia was headed in the wrong direction. For his part, Boris Johnson has suggested that Georgian democracy was “stolen by Putin’s puppet government in Tbilisi”.

It’s hard to overstate how irresponsible these claims are. Consider, after all, what happened the last time Western governments forced a country geographically, politically and culturally split between Russia and the West to make a binary civilisational choice between the two. That was Ukraine — and look at the blood-stained consequences there. First: a Western-supported coup against a democratically elected government. Then: civil strife in the Donbas and outright war with Russia.

This is precisely the outcome that Irakli Kobakhidze and his Georgian Dream party are trying to avoid. The prime minister rejects the West’s “pro-Russian” labels, arguing instead that he’s just being pragmatic. Given his homeland’s history, size and geography, Kobakhidze says it makes no sense for Georgia to fully move into the Western sphere of influence, let alone sever ties with Russia altogether, or even worse adopt a confrontational attitude towards the latter. Indeed, the government has stressed the importance of having “normal, peaceful relations” with Russia.

Georgia has good reasons to play it safe. Economic data shows that increased tourism and trade with Russia, alongside strengthened ties with China, have played an important role in boosting the economy, which grew by 7.5% last year. Perhaps most crucially, though, his party’s imperative is avoiding war — that is, becoming a second front in Nato’s proxy war against Russia.

Claiming that Kobakhidze is merely a pro-Russian stooge simply reflects the West’s disconnect from reality, or outright bad faith. Though the war in Ukraine has certainly opened a rift between Georgian Dream and Brussels, the party has equally been clear that it’s eager for integration with Europe. This is certainly more than rhetorical: the party enshrined pursuing EU and Nato membership in the Georgian constitution, and submitted an application for EU membership in 2022. All Kobakhidze has requested in return is that Brussels plays “by Georgian rules” as Tbilisi journeys towards the promised land in Belgium.

In short, then, Georgian Dream’s geoeconomic platform can be summed up as follows: focusing on economic growth and preserving internal stability by maintaining friendly political and economic relations with both the West and Russia, and the wider non-Western bloc, while avoiding being drawn into external conflicts. Taken together, then, Kobakhidze’s hard-nosed approach can plausibly be compared to another Western bête noire: Hungary. No wonder Orbán was the first EU leader to travel to Tbilisi and congratulate Georgian Dream on its victory. “Nobody wants their own country to be destroyed and involved in war”, the Hungarian leader said. “Therefore, we understand the Georgian people’s decision to choose in favour of freedom.”

To quote Orbán, many Georgians seem happy not letting their country become a “second Ukraine” — while also pursuing a “multipolar” agenda elsewhere, notably partnering with China to build a strategic port on the Black Sea. Unfortunately, it seems like the West has other plans. Indeed, Washington and its allies seem to be applying the same playbook to Georgia as they did to Ukraine. Just as in the lead-up to the 2014 coup in Kyiv, they’re first denying the legitimacy of the elected government, accusing it of being a Russian pawn. From there, they’re using Western-funded “NGOs” to mobilise the pro-EU minority against the government, while also pushing for sanctions. If the government still doesn’t yield to the pressure, they’ll try to move to the next phase: unrest in parliament and on the streets; a hoped-for police crackdown; and ultimately the toppling of the government and the appearance of a friendly pro-Western alternative.

Certainly, influential Western foreign policy think tanks are already predicting exactly this scenario. In a recent article, the Atlantic Council argued that “Georgia’s 2024 parliamentary election has entered its ‘Maidan’ phase” — and that Western governments must “support the Georgian people in both the immediate period ahead and the longer term”. The Nato establishment’s aims couldn’t be clearer.

Yet in the event, fomenting a Ukraine-style “coup” in Georgia may prove challenging. That’s partly because most Georgians are determined to avoid this outcome, and partly because Kobakhidze has been “coup-proofing” the country for some time. In May, for instance, the government passed the “Transparency of Foreign Influence” law, mandating that any NGO receiving 20% or more of its funding from outside sources must register as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power”. The EU and US accused the bill of being a sign of Georgia’s “democratic backsliding” and “Russification” — and even imposed sanctions. Protests followed, some of which were joined by Western politicians, only fuelling the country’s political polarisation.

Yet as the Georgian government rightly points out, variations of its so-called “foreign agent” act already exist across the West. No less striking, there’s plenty of evidence that NGOs do play a nefarious role in the country’s politics: it’s just that they pursue pro-Western agendas. For one thing, there are the raw numbers. Though reliable data is hard to find — itself part of the problem — there are roughly 30,000 NGOs in Georgia. That’s a huge number for a country of less than four million people. Then there’s the question of funding. Most of Georgia’s charities are financed by the US, EU and other “philanthropic” institutions, notably George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.

And while these varied organisations officially focus on innocuous topics such as democracy and human rights, it’s no secret that Western governments use them to push their own interests, up to and including regime change. Western-funded NGOs, for example, played a key role in fostering several “colour revolutions” in the early 2000s. That mostly involved non-violent protests, swiftly leading to pro-Western changes of government: especially in post-Soviet states like Ukraine (2004-5), Kyrgyzstan (2005) and even Georgia itself (2003).

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It’s telling in this regard that Victoria Nuland, the former US diplomat who played a key role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine, has just joined the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED): one of the key players in the NGO-isation of US foreign policy. No wonder Bidzina Ivanishvili, one of the main founders of Georgian Dream, recently described the NGO class as a “pseudo-elite” nurtured by foreigners, and one basically embarrassed by its own country. It’s surely revealing too that Georgian opposition politicians are often interviewed with EU, US and Nato flags in the background.

It’s clear, in short, that the moral panic over Georgia’s “foreign agent” law had little to do with democracy. Rather, as the historian Bryan Gigantino puts it, Western countries fear the rule would strip them of “important leverage” in the country’s domestic and foreign policy. Samantha Power, head of USAID, essentially admitted as much when she said that the law “gravely threatens Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic future”.

This is perhaps the most hypocritical aspect of the Western narrative about somewhere like Georgia. Whatever Russia’s “foreign influence” — and it surely exists — the West’s is far greater. More to the point, it’s perfectly natural for a country like Georgia, straddling the border between Europe and Asia, to exploit the ongoing “multipolarisation” of global politics and boost its own autonomy. Given the West’s own tumbling influence, meanwhile, ham-fisted attempts to forcefully disrupt this process will only push Georgians even closer into the arms of Russia and China.

And while Tbilisi’s future remains undecided, this is far from just Georgia’s problem. After all, something similar is now happening in Moldova. There, too, recent elections revealed a deeply divided electorate. No less important is the role of Western and Western-funded NGOs in that country. For example, various deputies of the pro-Western ruling party, and even the current president of Moldova, have previously participated in Soros Foundations programmes. Combined with the potential for similar trouble elsewhere in the post-Soviet sphere, and it’s clear that the Georgian Dream could yet become a nightmare right across the region.

Yet 16 years later, there’s no doubt that the Russo-Georgian War marked the start of a new era in Russia’s relationship with its near abroad, culminating in the invasion of Ukraine and the shadow conflict with the West that followed. Now, after all, Georgia has once again become the epicentre of this new Cold War. It’s just that this time, Russia and its proxies are using ballot boxes rather than tanks to capture the Georgian state.

Ahead of the country’s pivotal parliamentary elections on 26 October, Georgian liberals were cautiously optimistic. For the first time in years, the country’s fractured opposition stood a chance of ousting the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party from power. Initially favourable exit polls only confirmed their hope. But soon enough, their excitement was dashed. Despite pursuing a highly divisive policy agenda — including the passage of an infamous foreign agent law in May, dovetailed by more recent laws limiting LGBT activity — Georgian Dream secured a stunning 54% of the vote.

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The same evening, opposition parties appeared on national TV, denouncing the vote as illegitimate. Among other things, they cited electoral fraud, violence, and intimidation. Videos of a Georgian Dream loyalist stuffing ballots into a box went viral across Georgian media, as did clips of government supporters attacking election observers. Independent statistical analysis corroborated many of their claims. Over the following days, meanwhile, the country’s opposition-aligned president called for protests against the results of the election, accusing Russia of orchestrating Georgian Dream’s victory. The four main opposition parties also pledged to boycott Parliament, effectively incapacitating the Georgian Dream government.

Though investigations into the vote continue, the battle lines have already been drawn. So far, only Russia, Hungary, China, Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan have recognised the result. On the other hand, the US, the EU, and various European governments have denounced the voting irregularities and expressed “alarm” at the electoral process. Already, Sweden has cut ties with the Georgian government over its democratic backsliding.

With few signs the opposition will back down, comparisons have already been made between Tbilisi and Kyiv’s Euromaidan revolution of 2014. Certainly, the showdown in Georgia could yet prove just as consequential: not just for the small mountain nation but for the whole post-Soviet space. Like Ukraine a decade ago, after all, Georgia has become ground zero for confrontation between Russia and the West.

And while the slaughter in the Ukraine may be the shadow conflict’s most dramatic expression, it’s in Georgia where Russia’s ability to dominate its neighbours is being tested most vividly. “Russia will say that ‘we win like always.’ But Russia will lose this battle against Ukraine and Georgia,” says Luka, a 21-year-old student at an opposition-led protest on Monday. “We will fight until we die.”

Certainly, the stakes for young Georgians couldn’t be higher. For those eager to finally join the European Union — according to one poll from last year, that’s almost 90% of the population — the fight is existential. If Georgian Dream’s victory holds, the country’s EU ambitions are dead. Democratic politics more generally is fighting for survival too: Georgian Dream has pledged to outlaw the majority of opposition parties, likening Saturday’s vote to the Nuremberg Trials.

Given this polarised atmosphere, there are only a few ways the crisis could end, especially when both the West and Russia have so much to lose. Having staked their reputation on challenging the election results, opposition parties are unlikely to accept a Georgian Dream government. If the opposition maintains its boycott of Parliament, and the president continues to refuse to approve the new government, Georgian Dream will be unable to hold parliamentary sessions without two-thirds of elected members being present. That, in turn, would make Georgian Dream — and by extension Russian — unable to legally govern.

In such a situation, Georgian Dream could conceivably choose to buck the law and sidestep the opposition entirely, leading to a constitutional crisis and putting Georgia on an even more perilous collision course with the EU and the US. Brussels and Washington, for their part, are already looking to expand their sanctions against the party.

On the other hand, Georgia could head for a political stand-off in which neither Georgian Dream nor the pro-Western opposition budge. That would doubtless lead to political paralysis: which Russia would be sure to exploit. Already, officials in Moscow have stated that they’re prepared to intervene on Georgian Dream’s behalf if the situation called for it. Nor is this bullishness very surprising. As I explained back in May, Georgia’s position by the Black Sea, along both trade routes and energy pipelines, makes it strategically vital to both Russia and Nato.

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Beyond Georgia itself, meanwhile, a Russian victory here would have repercussions much further afield. Consider Armenia, which has been slipping away from Moscow for years, but which is nonetheless dependent on Georgia for transit. To put it differently, Russian domination of Georgia could force Yerevan to move back towards Moscow’s orbit too. The fall of Georgia could equally demoralise anti-Kremlin movements in places like Moldova and even Kazakhstan.

There are other reasons for Russia to force the issue in Georgia too. The war in Ukraine may be going reasonably well — but fighting a full-scale war is nonetheless risky, costly and domestically destabilising. On the other hand, electoral trickery of the sort Moscow’s trying in Georgia is relatively straightforward, and indeed has been part of its playbook for years. The point, clear enough from Baku to Almaty, is this: if Russia gets away with state capture in Tbilisi, it can do the same anywhere.

While, in short, the Euromaidan revolution was the first attempt to reverse Russian domination of its near abroad, Georgia has now become another kind of test case: is it possible that Putin’s expansionism can be defeated through peaceful means alone? And while the fight in Tbilisi is only just beginning, and Western powers are so far holding back, escalation is inevitable — Georgia, and all it represents, is far too important to abandon.

The 2024 presidential race is one that will be decided at the margins. Democrats hope the Voting is Sacred mantra will produce a reprise of the 2020 Native American vote. Four years ago, a surge in Navajo and Hopi turnout proved the difference in Biden’s 10,000 vote victory in Arizona. In the Midwest, Menominee and Ojibwe voters proved decisive in Wisconsin, a contest ultimately decided by just 20,000 ballots. 

Yet if Voting is Sacred is a national effort aimed at the broad indigenous public, they in fact represent a kaleidoscope of lifestyles. All told, there are some 9.7 million Native Americans and Alaskans, scattered across some 573 federally recognised groups. Like John, some have built their homes in the country. Yet from Anchorage to Phoenix, 70% live in cities. Like John, meanwhile, about a quarter live on reservations or tribal trust lands, while the rest make their way independently. 

Given this spread, at any rate, native priorities are as varied as anywhere else in America, from casinos in New York to buffalo rights in Montana. Beyond that, Native Americans differ in one more vital respect: their power. A century on from the law that finally gave them citizenship, they’re now of course equal before the law. But if the Navajo can leverage their swing-state location, and tribes elsewhere have grown adept at encouraging strategic voting to achieve their goals, men like Ross John seem condemned by geography.

Native Americans, after all, are not just any other interest group. Expelled from much of their ancestral lands, tribal groups possess sovereignty and rights guaranteed by federal treaties. Yet as a dispersed people, they lack concentrated electoral power. And if Voting is Sacred is a strategy to give the indigenous vote some heft, in presidential politics at least, centuries of broken promises mean many aren’t sure politics can help.

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Ross John has lived his whole life in far southwestern New York. Amid the Alleghenies’ towering sugar maples, and the crumbling barns with their flecks of red paint, he’s one of 8,000 Seneca here, scattered across a pair of non-contiguous communities. In John’s Cattaraugus Reservation, the poverty rate is 65%. At the neighbouring Allegany Reservation, it’s 33%, but that’s still markedly higher than many nearby towns.

In nearby Salamanca, a ramshackle New York town of 6,000, just off the Southern Tier Expressway, a high-rise casino dominates the landscape. Salamanca offers legal pot, shabby gas stations for tax-free gas and cigarettes — and gambling. A dingy tourist trap with random signage in the Seneca language, it’s become a symbol of native struggles.

No wonder John threw himself into politics, serving 14 years on the tribal council. Yet despite seeing tribal sovereignty as the alpha and omega of local politics — by treaty, the Seneca is an independent nation distinct from the US — John was ultimately disappointed by his time in office. The basic problem, he explains, was the disdain of outsiders. “I wasn’t very successful at changing tribal politics,” he says. “There are just too many federal guidelines.” 

John Kane, a Mohawk who lives in Seneca territory, has similar complaints. “The Seneca pay 50% of their gaming revenue [to New York] to buy exclusivity that they don’t need,” laments the host of the Resistance Radio show. Problems started back in 2002, when the Seneca opened the first of three New York state casinos, all owned by Native Americans. To do this, Albany forced an agreement that has the Seneca pay the state one-quarter of all slot machine revenues. The Seneca, for their part, pay all operating expenses out of their share, which translates to a 50/50 split in profits with the state.

All told, the Seneca paid $1.4 billion to New York State between 2002-17. But Kane wonders what the tribe got in return. In 2002, the same year that the tribe opened their casino, the state constitution banned all gambling. In 2013, voters amended it to allow Las Vegas-style gaming. So $1.4 billion paid for an “exclusivity” that was already barred by law but is now allowed. Explaining all this, Kane sighs: “You can’t make this shit up.” In 2017, the Seneca quit their payments. To this day, the tribe and state remain locked in a legal battle. Unlike John, Kane doesn’t renounce his citizenship, but he’s nonetheless cynical about the Voting is Sacred movement. “The idea that we are a determinative voting bloc is blown out of proportion,” he says. “We just want to be left alone.”

Not everyone is so jaded. Unlike Kane, Tracie Garfield embraces Voting is Sacred. The Fort Peck Tribe member lives in Montana, where 6% of voting-age citizens are Native American. In 2006 and 2012, the native vote helped the Senate Democrat, Jon Tester, to narrow victories. For 2024, the communications director for her state’s Western Native Voice campaign has been running voter registration drives right across Montana. 

This time round, though, Garfield sees lots of voter fatigue. “I don’t see a lot of excitement.” What she senses in Montana is a national issue. Only 66% of voting-age Native Americans are even registered, a problem with deep roots. Native Americans were denied the right to cast their ballots until 1924, when Congress finally passed the Indian Citizenship Act. Even then, several Western states held out until the Fifties. 

As Garfield puts it: “We have to start from scratch, since most Natives are only in the second generation of voting.” That dovetails with other challenges. In Big Sky Country, a trip to the polling station can be a 100-mile round trip. And even once they arrive at the county seat, Garfield warns that would-be voters sometimes feel intimidated being the only native in town. 

Though the situation isn’t hopeless. One solution, Garfield suggests, is to turn voting into a tradition, like community bingo or a family dinner, something she believes will help Native Americans become enthused by politics. “As a tribal people,” she says, “we respect our elders. If we get families to vote together then that is our goal.”  

Yet more than the tangle of history, or the lure of custom, you get the sense that native electoral enthusiasm can ultimately be understood as a function of political heft. If, after all, John and the Seneca are understandably pessimistic in New York, a Democratic stronghold that anyway cleansed most of its indigenous population in the early 19th century, tribes further west have far more sway. 

Montana, with its 6% tribal bloc, is one thing. But that’s nothing compared to Oklahoma, where Native Americans comprise 13.4% of the population, and where low turnout generally bolsters their collective influence still further. “I am optimistic,” says Ben Barnes, Chief of the Shawnee in the Sooner State. “Native Americans can really make a dent. If we turnout, we can make a difference.” 

More to the point, numerical muscle seems to translate to real-world excitement. In conjunction with the United Indian Nations of Oklahoma group, Barnes has promoted a new turnout initiative. Known as Warrior Up to Vote, it’s already registered hundreds of new native voters right across the state.

And if that speaks, yet again, to the wildly diverse opportunities for Native Americans across the country, something similar might be said of what indigenous voters actually want. Liberals often imagine that the Native American vote is staunchly Democratic. But a 2021 report shows that indigenous voters lean Left by just 11%. That’s echoed by schisms elsewhere. As Garfield emphasises, Montana alone has 12 recognised tribes, each with distinct priorities. The Crow, for instance, exploit their coal and oil reserves, while neighbouring Blackfeet push environmental protections for their “buffalo brothers”.

Demographic discrepancies also affect how Native Americans make their voices heard. In swing states such as Wisconsin, the Ojibwe can appeal to national politicians when state and local authorities ignore them. In 2020, the Ojibwe, who were hit hard by Covid, voted for Biden to keep reservation health restrictions intact. Presidential candidates sometimes even come to them: in September, Donald Trump promised to formally recognise the Lumbee, a tribe in the crucial battleground of North Carolina. 

Interest from the big guns is harder to muster in Oklahoma, a one-party state where Trump has little to gain by playing nice. Yet the demographic power of natives in the Sooner State still matters — it’s just that leaders like Barnes need to be more subtle about exploiting their influence.

One tactic involves educating legislators on native concerns, especially that all-important issue of tribal sovereignty. “I find that in Oklahoma not every legislator or senator understands,” Barnes explains. “We have to vote for a Republican or Democrat that understands Indians are sovereign.” Another option is simply backing native candidates: Markwayne Mullin, Oklahoma’s junior senator, is both a fervent Trump supporter and a Cherokee.

“Don’t vote R, don’t vote D, vote I for Indian,” is how Barnes evocatively describes this approach — and certainly it’s one that’s bearing fruit. On Capitol Hill in Washington, the head of the House Appropriations Committee is Tom Cole, a conservative Oklahoma congressman. More importantly, he’s also an enrolled member of the Chickasaw nation, one with an intimate knowledge of Native American affairs. “How great is it,” Barnes says, “that we don’t have to explain why funding is necessary?” 

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This comprehensive plan has borne fruit: Cole is now sponsoring a landmark bill to investigate the horrors of Indian Boarding Schools. Not that Barnes and other Native Americans are exclusively putting their hopes on one side of the House. Cole also liaises closely on tribal concerns with Sharice Davids, a liberal Ho-Chunk congresswoman from Kansas. Barnes, for his part, is full of praise for this political odd couple. “How refreshing is that?” 

Despite these regional successes, and notwithstanding the gaggle of federal treaties impinging on indigenous groups, Barnes still argues that elections in “the tribal races” are most important for voters like him. It’s a point echoed elsewhere. For Cynthia LaMere, the former vice-chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and member of the Yankton-Sioux, elections at the community level, in the reservation or tribal trust, are just more “tangible”. Considering the bewildering range of native concerns, that’s surely unsurprising, especially when the lowest rung of electoral politics is the arena where schools are run and casinos managed.

But where does that leave people like Ross John, flailing between an aggressive and sceptical state government on the one hand — and indifferent Congressional legislators on the other? For Stephen Knott, that strikes at the heart of the issue. As the emeritus professor at the US Naval War College says, Newt Gingrich “nationalised” every congressional race in the land way back in 1994. But if the media now obsesses endlessly about the antics on Capitol Hill, 536 federal officeholders still pale compared to the 500,000 elected officials nationwide. “It is a schizophrenic arrangement,” John admits of his native Seneca. “And we have to live with it.”

Great question. What, for that matter, did the wannabe killer, Ryan Routh think of the impending match-up on Monday Night Football? What were his thoughts on electric vehicles, school choice, weight loss drugs and parenting? 

More prestigious outlets hardly showed more attachment to what remains of proper American journalism. The New York Times seemed more caught up in proudly displaying the fact that it had interviewed Routh a year earlier about his experiences trying to recruit fighters in Ukraine. By the time darkness had fallen, on the very day Trump was, maybe, almost killed, you had to make your way through the coverage of the Emmy Awards, to find any mention of the assassination attempt. 

By mid-week, focus had shifted from the man on the golf course to who was to blame for America’s political violence, or in this case near-violence. Trump and his supporters, relieved to change the subject from their canard about pet-devouring immigrants, blamed the Other Side for super-charged rhetoric demonising Trump as an existential threat to democracy. The Democrats, for their part, were themselves relieved to turn off the short-lived spigot of crocodile tears over the violence. Instead, they blamed the former president and his supporters for bringing assassins upon themselves with their own super-charged rhetoric. Both sides’ arguments were accurate, as far as it goes. But in a saner society, such arguments, on both sides, would have been grotesquely beside the point. 

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Ever bored and restless, the conversation about what seemed to be an attempt to assassinate Trump evolved yet further. In baseball, a pitcher will sometimes hit a batter intentionally, or pretend to. When the opposing team takes the field in turn, their pitcher will then hit an opposing batter in retaliation, with the spectators holding their breath in anticipation. And sure enough, here was Elon Musk, real-life Chauncey Gardiner, and a moral imbecile of world-historical dimensions, tweeting out shortly after the incident at the golf course: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala”. At present, whatever happened to Trump on Sunday now straddles the spheres of politics, culture, sports and entertainment in general. It has been spread so thin over the national atmosphere that no one I know, on various levels of society, is even talking about it.

So much has been written about how our commercialised and commodifying societies have assimilated and normalised mores that used to épater les bourgeois. The combined transgressiveness of Kafka, Celine, Mann, Gide, Lawrence, Henry Miller and Genet do not even approach the transgressiveness of teachers, doctors and politicians enabling children who, in the perplexity of innocence, wish to swap out their genitals for those of the opposite sex. In America, if it makes a profit, or anyway if it virtuously conceals the lust for material profit, it is allowed. 

The rate at which political violence, in deed or word, has been comfortably taken in stride would, at another historical moment, have been shocking. From the moment Trump was elected in 2016, violent rhetoric and acts on both sides gradually moved from controversy, to social media fodder, to simple background noise. Comedian Kathy Griffin holding a mock-up of Trump’s severed bloody head resulted in outrage, official investigations and sold-out gigs wherever she went. After publicly saying he’d like to “punch Donald Trump in the face,” Robert De Niro declared “Fuck Trump” at the 2018 Tony Awards. Meanwhile, in 2017, Trump appeared to be defending the white supremacist demonstrators in Charlottesville as, at least, not neo-Nazis.

But then, way back in 2004, Nicholson Baker published a novel musing about the possibility of assassinating George W. Bush. But then, De Niro himself had starred in Taxi Driver, in which the violence of a murderous vigilante is, by the end of the movie, depicted as morally superior to the sanctimonious soul-murders committed by an average America politician. By the time Will Smith bitch-slapped Chris Rock on stage at the Oscar ceremony, in 2022, you had to ask yourself whether the actor was simply bringing decades of Hollywood values to their logical conclusion, or whether he was acting under the influence of American politics; which is influenced by American popular culture; which is influenced by American politics. The tortuous complexity of American life really makes you wish you could find who was responsible for the whole mess and punch them right in the nose. 

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As anything goes in culture, people become numb to the lack of inhibition around them. Say what you will about the maddening dispensations that sometimes have resulted from the popularisation of trauma psychology, but there is now a collective emotional numbness that is one of the salient symptoms of trauma. On the one hand, anything goes. On the other hand, no one protests that anything goes. Which opens the door to more erstwhile prohibited behaviour. Which causes more emotional numbness. And on and on.

And the bitter irony is that the so-called “political violence” being mechanically bemoaned by both sides is as nothing compared with the violence tearing civil society apart. It is almost obscene to express outrage over political violence when America suffers more mass shootings, and more school shootings, than any country on earth. In such a situation, political violence surely is an inevitability.

Yet  the term “political violence” is probably a mischaracterisation of the two assassination attempts, though Routh never actually made an attempt. Routh is clearly a profoundly troubled man. From what is known, so too was Thomas Matthew Crooks, who fired at Trump during the latter’s Pennsylvania rally. Neither has had a coherent ideological motive attributed to him. Ideology matters. If Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated by some insane Austrian and not a politically motivated Serb, the First World War might never have happened. Modern America, then, is not suffering from political violence. Rather, America is suffering violence that is occurring in the political realm, violence committed by members of the country’s increasing legions of people disconnected from reality. Politics is, by definition, an arena of pathological egotism and self-love. It only follows that madness is to politics what flies are to the dregs of human intestines.

Decades ago, I was taken by a Spanish friend to a dark restaurant in Madrid that served only two dishes, one type of fish and and one type of steak, and where two waiters stood a polite distance from the table the entire night. My friend had brought another man, whom he did not introduce. Not long into the meal, this second man laid a paper napkin in front of him and took a pen from his pocket. He diagrammed, with painstaking precision, noting the position of the car and the position of the explosive devices, and the route that Carrera Blanco, Franco’s successor, had taken that fateful day Basque terrorists blew him out of his car, thus saving Spain for democracy. Then he suspended the napkin over an ashtray, held a lighter under it, and dropped the shriveling flames into oblivion.

The Basques who assassinated Blanco had not cared a whit about democracy in Spain; they cared about their cause. But when I think of political assassinations, I think of that sort of planning, and of a commitment that is both ideological and personal. I also think of the fine and noble figures assassinated in America during the Sixties. Here is another brute fact: Trump may be a pathological liar, but the straight shooters are all on the Right. If Pennsylvania and the golf course prove anything, along with Elon Musk, it’s that Trump has less and less to fear from what now passes in America for political violence. 

In one sense, the road where Starmer grew up — Tanhouse Road — bathes contentedly in this tranquil Surrey slumber. It is a pleasant land preserved like some vision of Danny the Champion of the World by the socialism of Clement Attlee. There is a stream at one end and a pub at the other, as well as a local “gypsy camp” crouching on the hill behind.

It was here that I found myself earlier this week, traipsing around in the heat of the British summer, trying to understand the agonised soul of Tory England as it contemplated its own annihilation. Trapped between the barbarian tribes of Reform, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, it is unsure whether to wave the white flag or to launch a final quiet fight for salvation at the ballot box on Thursday.

And yet, today, you don’t have to walk far from Starmer’s old front door to be shaken from this daydream. The Haycutter, the pub at the end of Starmer’s old road, is a case in point. Though the name nods to the area’s not-so-distant past — the land behind Tanhouse Road, once owned by the Starmers and used as a Donkey Sanctuary, is still used for haymaking by a local farmer — The Haycutter is no drinking hole for farm hands, if it ever was. Instead, it is a place of derivative country chic, all gins and faded wood, Asahi on tap and the obligatory burrata and truffle fries for “starters and nibbles”.

It was here that I found a group of retired women, florally Tory and on the rosé. I mentioned that Starmer had grown up just a few doors down. “Well he should’ve known better, then,” quipped one with an authoritative grin. At the mention of Tony Blair, the same lady hissed. All were dismayed at the state of the country and the idea of a Labour government, but greeted the prospect of Reform becoming the opposition with horror. And yet, they have still not made up their minds who to vote for. “There definitely needs to be a change,” said one. “But frankly there’s no one to change to.” If Sunak had lost these ladies of Surrey, the game was surely up. But had he?

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Travelling through the North Downs and into the Kentish Weald beyond — a land now teeming with vineyards rather than hops (for shame) — I encountered this same message of agonised indecision again and again. Even on Tanhouse Road, one woman stopped me as I went poking around looking for clues for the life Starmer once led, and told a similar story: she was unsure who to vote for, and desperately disappointed that, at that moment, no-one had come knocking on her door to persuade her. And she once knew and liked the Starmer family.

For many, it seems, the election has barely even begun to penetrate their lives. There seems to be a hesitation about what to do about it — a bewildered apathy. Most I spoke to wanted the Government squashed, but beyond that were unsure. And this feeling seems to be felt particularly strongly by women.

For Rishi Sunak, however, it is these quietly fuming Tory women of the shires who may now decide the difference between respectable defeat and total humiliation. That at least is the conclusion of a number of Tory pollsters and candidates staring into the abyss.

The pollster Andrew Cooper, for example, who grew up in Surrey and went to school with Starmer before going on to advise David Cameron, told me that these hesitating women were the last great hope for the Conservatives: the new “shy Tories”, as he put it. “Having lived through the 1992-97 period when the polls were wrong because of what became known as the shy Tories,” he said, “I think all of the conditions are there — that we may have shy Tories again.”

And the figures certainly seem to back up his analysis. Even with just a few days to go, a poll shared with UnHerd shows that some 16% of those who voted Conservative in 2019 still don’t know who to vote for. Of these undecideds two-thirds are women. And of these, 70% are over 50, 80% voted Conservative at the last four elections — and the vast majority voted Leave in the EU referendum. They are also disproportionately concentrated in the south of England, with 44% living in the shires around London, while hardly any actually live in the capital itself. Of these women, just 10% say they have ever been tempted to vote Labour and even fewer have thought about backing the Lib Dems. And yet they are still apparently undecided.

So, why the “shyness”? Certainly, the women in the pub could not be described that way. One explanation is simple: like much of the rest of the country, they don’t like the Government — and, even more to the point, they don’t like Rishi Sunak. According to Cooper’s polling of 1,000 one-time Tories, only 5% thought Sunak was strong and only 4% thought he “shared my values.”

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For the Conservative campaign, this leaves Sunak in a particularly difficult situation. For these undecided shy Tories, they simply do not want to hear anything about why the Government deserves another chance — because they don’t think it does. “The only thing you can say to them,” Cooper said, “was ‘look, we’re going to lose anyway, and people like you do not want a Labour government with a huge majority, and the only way to avoid that is, is hold your nose and vote Tory again’.”

He points out that, contrary to some arguments that there is nothing Sunak could have done to turn around the Tory party’s fortunes, there has been a steady decline in the proportion of 2019 Conservative voters saying they intend to vote Tory again at the next election. Before “Partygate”, the proportion sticking with the Tories had dropped to 84%. By the height of that crisis, the proportion had dropped significantly into the mid-60s, before falling into the low 50s after Truss’s mini-budget. Since Sunak took over, however, the proportion of 2019 Tory voters who say they will vote Conservative again has plummeted to 44%. “And that’s on Sunak,” as Cooper put it to me.

But as the election draws to its conclusion, how many of these “shy” Tories will actually hold their noses to save the party? One Tory candidate in the Blue Wall told me the women he had spoken to “don’t want their friends to know they are voting Conservative”. Their husbands were grumpier, he added, and more likely to vote Reform. Another Tory candidate from the Home Counties told me she had certainly noticed women were more undecided in her canvassing: “Definitely.” But why? “They worry about public services [but] they’re not inspired by Keir — they’ve been too equivocal about women’s rights.” From a Tory perspective, J.K. Rowling’s attack on the Labour party last week could not have been better timed.

And yet, there has been little change in the polls. Indeed, there is no guarantee these women and their grumpy husbands will actually turn out to save the Conservatives. In fact, the reality could even be worse. In Tunbridge Wells, half an hour or so away from Hurst Green, I met one elderly couple who, at first, seemed to neatly match Cooper’s analysis of 2019 Tory voters. Yet, in this case it was the husband who was still, reluctantly, planning to vote Tory while the wife was still so furious she had not made up her mind. She might even turn up and spoil her ballot by drawing “a pretty picture” in protest. The shy Tories of 2024 might actually be a mirage — they’re just angry ones.

What is so remarkable about this election is that, just five years on, from Johnson’s triumph in 2019, we are contemplating not only the Conservative Party losing control of the Red Wall in the north, but also swathes of the Blue Wall which has for so long stood around London. Is this a part of a permanent change in British politics, the suburbs spreading into the former Conservative heartlands just as urban sprawl of the big Democratic cities of the United States is turning once-safe Republican states like Georgia and Virginia purple?

In private, I was told that Starmer’s campaign director Morgan McSweeney has been warning people that it would be wrong to draw any long term forecasts from the results this Thursday because of the volatile nature of modern politics. The reason for this is that, during the Eighties and Nineties, the vast majority of people always voted for the same party. People tended to have a clear sense of which party protected their interests, making it harder to persuade people to switch. As a result, relatively small swings were required to win elections. In 1979, for example, Margaret Thatcher won with a swing of around 5%. Today, the polls are suggesting Labour could win with a swing four times greater than this. The number of voters each party can count on has shrunk dramatically.

Underneath it all, then, is a new volatility spawned by the confusion voters now feel about which party represents people like them. Are the Tories for the rich or the “left behind”? Are they for the establishment or the Red Wall? And what of Labour? Are they for the forgotten small-town folk or the urban liberals? In Surrey and the Kentish Weald people seemed confused. Among the ladies of the Haycutter, one half-joked about how “common” it was that one of her neighbours was displaying a Vote Labour sign in their front garden. Yet, among the great middle-class sea of urban professionals spreading out from the cities of England, the sentiment is now entirely the other way around. Voting Left is a display of middle class distinction; only the old and the suspect vote otherwise — the sort who still drink in pubs that do not offer burrata.

According to the latest MRP polls, this sea of liberal voters is on course to wash away the last Tory tribes of old England. The great irony, however, is that this wave of Starmerite red may finally wash up on the high ground of Starmer’s conservative Hurst Green. Unless, of course, the angry women of the old world decide, reluctantly, that they must do their duty to save their tribe.

This is the new political reality in Europe. Macron immediately announced a snap legislative election, to be held in a mere three weeks’ time. His high-risk electoral gamble was called barely an hour after polling stations closed, at 9:00pm Sunday night, when the size of the Jordan Bardella-led National Rally list’s victory became clear. The Rassemblement had come first in 93% of France’s 36,000 villages, towns and cities, adding up to a third of the national vote from 38 separate lists.

Macron called in, besides half a dozen of his Cabinet heavyweights, the speakers of both National Assembly and Senate, who are required to record the dissolution of the House. Le Président (who since Charles de Gaulle is elected separately) had planned his decision secretly, taking into his confidence only four people: his former spin doctor, now the vice-president of Publicis, France’s largest ad agency; Pierre Charon, an old-style Sarkozyste senator; Richard Ferrand, the first Macroniste Speaker of the National Assembly, a former Socialist; and a former journalist turned speechwriter and Brigitte Macron’s closest adviser, Bruno Roger-Petit. No member of this informal war council was known to the electorate, unless they have a passion for the workings of power in Paris; and none was likely to contradict him. The dissimulation, the mercurial decision, the small court of the ultrafaithful: all of this was typical of Macron’s style.

Less predictable were their reactions: possibly for the first time since his 2017 election, he was told to his face he was wrong. Both PM Gabriel Attal, named only five months before, and the current National Asssembly Speaker, Yaël Braun-Pivet were shocked and angry. In what universe did Macron think he had any chance of winning a legislative election? Attal, already fallen from grace at Court in recent weeks, now shouted at his boss that he was “irresponsible”. (“They didn’t come to blows, but it was close”, a witness said.)

Braun-Pivet, a former barrister and the only one of Macron’s women appointees to have grown into her job (Macron has always had a woman problem: his close circle is entirely male, save for his wife Brigitte; his female hires were either nonentities, or odd enough that they became unthreatening) argued he had said he would remain in office after what was, after all, a non-national, vote, and that not sticking it out would harm his Cabinet and his party. Others, including Home Secretary Gérald Darmanin, who had expected to spend half the summer overseeing the security challenges of the Paris 2024 Olympics, concurred: it would be a disaster.

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Macron, faced with the mice that roared, was unfazed. As in the past seven years of his rule, he wasn’t asking for their advice, merely telling them. He then went on TV, dressed like a provincial undertaker, saying that a new vote would be more “democratic”, and gave the dates for the two rounds.

“Je prends mon risque,” he repeated. This is an odd, favourite expression of his that belongs to the roulette table or the poker game: the fate of the nation reduced to a high-stakes personal gamble.

What soon became obvious was the speed trap he had set for everyone. Electoral law dictates a strict timetable for when the candidates for all 577 constituencies must be identified, each with the name of a political party or alliance. In this instance, everything had to be sorted on Thursday night, in a fractured landscape where the need to come to an agreement  forced together incompatible political partners. Those were concluded, and platforms published in time to be sent to every single voter in the country — looking like forced marriages, with party programmes that read like prenups.

So far, so Succession. The Left-wing Alliance, improbably calling itself the New Popular Front, in reference to the 1936 Léon Blum Cabinet, brings together people who have weekly chanted “From the River to The Sea” (and sometimes “Death to Jews”), with that rump of the old-style Socialist Party that lit up the Paris City Hall and the Eiffel Tower with the Israeli flag after 7 October. Raphaël Glucksmann, son of Nouveau Philosophe André, whose Place Publique mini-party had pulled his Socialist associates out of near-extinction to poll 14.8%, five points above the hard-Left Mélenchonista faction and a mere half-point from the Macron list on the promise that he was offering a social democrat alternative to the extremes, swallowed his principles and agreed to join the NPF.

On Friday morning, after a sleepless night, the self-same Nouveau Front Populaire pulled out of their collective hat the most Left-wing platform since the old days of the French Communist Party, far more radical than François Mitterrand’s in 1981. It includes nationalising utilities, cancelling pensions reform (bringing back retirement at 60), the return of the wealth tax, increasing inheritance tax (which already reaches 45% above £1.5m for direct descendants, and above £22,000 for everyone else), a cap on maximum inheritance (this is part of a chapter headlined “Abolishing the privileges of billionaires”), a “distance tax” on imports, an exit tax (to anyone leaving the country), and many, many, many more taxes. The Green Deal is “bettered”, with the option of a “popular referendum” on nuclear power (somewhat bewildering since they also promise to lower all heating bills immediately). Macron’s Immigration law would be cancelled, new immigrants would receive a “better welcome”, on and on: when the 12-page programme started circulating, several journalists checked that it was real and not a piece of clever National Rally propaganda.

This is probably the one piece of good news for the conservative Républicains, who, unlike the Left, have shown a dramatic lack of discipline. They are split between the party president, who wants an alliance with the National Rally, and the rest of the grandees, who don’t — and have no chance of gaining any seat without allying themselves with Emmanuel Macron, the most unpopular politician in France right now. (Their voters are fairly evenly split.) Macron himself has told his shell-shocked Cabinet the current mess will bring voters back to him.

The entire post-politics premise of Macronisme has been trashed: the “en même temps” (“at the same time”) mantra that first got him elected seven years ago, a 39-year-old in a hurry, proclaiming that there was no longer a Left or a Right, only modern young technocrats reinventing shiny ways of dealing with our world.

Like Julius Caesar’s Gaul, France is divided in three parts: a generous Left often tempted by revolution, a Right split between timidity and  national-radicalism ,and a centre that historically has been all things to all voters, from rump Christian Democracy to social reformism. All were in many way impacted by Gaullism, the post-WWII cross-class political oddity that in many ways is the closest to original French populism.

Kicked out of power in 1946, Charles de Gaulle built his own party as he had the Résistance in exile: a common purpose was enough. Ever since it returned to power twelve years later, it retained some of its populist roots, increasingly diluted. The last of its iterations is Les Républicains, as it renamed itself under Nicolas Sarkozy. Les Reps haven’t been doing well since Sarko lost after a single term to the Socialist François Hollande in 2012. In the 2022 presidential election, their candidate, the Paris Region president, Valérie Pécresse, won 4.75% of the vote, disastrous news because campaign expenses are only refunded above 5%. This nearly ruined the party, sparking endless acrimony.

The most recent Républicain primaries saw the victory of the Nice MP Eric Ciotti, a sharp-tongue Right-winger in keeping with the Provence-Côte d’Azur mood (it’s the region most RN MPs come from, and where Eric Zemmour got the most presidential votes.) Les Reps’ Euro elections candidate polled 7.25% last Sunday. Ciotti, on his own, made his calls, met with Bardella and Marine; and announced on Tuesday that Les Reps would build alliances with the National Rally, breaching a taboo that had kept the traditional Right rigidly apart from anything run by someone called Le Pen.

All hell broke loose. Most party grandees, past and present, thundered that Ciotti should have consulted them, and a hastily convened political bureau was called to expel him from the party, as contradictory to its fundamental values. “Half the membership approves. This gives me all the legitimacy I need,” declared Ciotti, channelling his inner Bonaparte. The incensed grandees had to meet in a nearby café, because Ciotti, bunkering down at headquarters, had locked the doors. He countered that the politburo meeting hadn’t been called according to statutes, and was, therefore, invalid; he started drafting candidates for 80 constituencies, 20 of which, he told hopeful candidates, were winnable because in their negotiation the Rally had agreed not to run candidates against the Reps ones. “He’s got the membership register, the Twitter account, the logo and the chequebook,” one of the potential candidates told me. “The others are nowhere.”

A Paris court was last night deliberating on the legality of this. And, meanwhile, having vowed they never would, the Républicains grandees have now drawn up lists of constituencies with Macronista incumbents they will not dispute, in a non-aggression pact that benefits the President far more than it helps them.

Le Pen and Bardella are over the moon. The Ciotti bonanza, which helps them in two or three dozen constituencies, also enabled them to kill off Eric Zemmour and his competing mini-party, Reconquête!, whose 5% voters could spoil several contests. There were strongly-felt and immensely personal reasons at play here. Le Pen saw her political inheritance, the Rally, which she had painstakingly reshaped to serve her presidential bid, attacked by an arrogant upstart who’d managed to win over her own niece, Marion Maréchal.

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From the moment he founded Reconquête!, Zemmour, a talented journalist, whose books on France’s unique destiny and the dangers of unchecked immigration have sold several million copies, decided he could transmute his viewers and readership into a political destiny. As he threw his hat into the arena in the last presidential contest, it seemed to be working. From the summer of 2021, long Trump-like queues awaited him at every stop of a “book tour” as he signed his doorstoppers and talked politics, with his trademark lopsided smile, sense of irony and demotic friendliness. A young and effective social media team blitzed all channels, a former organiser from Sarkozy’s victorious 2007 campaign was hired, and Zemmour’s poll numbers rocketed — at one stage he was predicted to win 21% of the vote in the first round.

All this was punctured by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 202w. Zemmour who only speaks (elegant) French suddenly looked like a one-issue man in a dangerous and complex world. He made the mistake, asked about welcoming Ukrainian refugees, to answer that they should remain in Ukraine’s neighbouring countries rather than come to France. This sounded mean-spirited and ungenerous. (He has admitted in a recent book that he’d got it wrong, but had tried to remain consistent with his immigration line.) His numbers dropped like a stone, and he finally polled at 7% in the first round, immediately encouraging his voters to cast their ballot for Marine Le Pen in the second round “without haggling”.

Long before he became a politician, Zemmour consistently advocated what Eric Ciotti is now attempting to create, l’Union des Droites, an alliance between all parties on the right. He expected his generous declaration to be welcomed by Marine Le Pen. It wasn’t. She had taken note of every slight, every jest, every disparaging mention when he was polling far ahead of her. “We are going to great-replace Marine!”, he joked, using the expression coined by the writer Renaud Camus, who believes there is a dastardly plot to replace indigenous European populations with new immigrants.

Zemmour was delighted to have snagged Maréchal, who after early political successes left the Front rather than be ordered about by her aunt. Articulate, combative, more intellectual, Maréchal, a fluent English and Italian speaker led the Reconquête list last Sunday, and polled a little above 5%, earning her party five EuroMPs.

By that time, Zemmour was no longer interested in any agreement with the Rally — but Marion, a realist, was. When Zemmour promised to run Reconquête spoiler candidates against RN ones, she opened her own negotiations with Bardella and her delighted aunt.

On Tuesday, Marion announced an alliance in front of the slack-jawed Zemmour during a TV interview — and that she was taking three of her newly-elected Euro MPs as war booty over to the Rally. Zemmour promptly expelled her and her acolytes from Reconquête!, and has since called her a “world champion on treason”. Unelected to any office — he wasn’t standing in the Euro-elections, his partner and adviser Sarah Knafo, a 31-year-old ENA graduate, was; she will be the only Reconquête! MEP in Brussels  — Zemmour cuts a lonely figure at Party HQ on rue Jean Goujon less than a mile from the Elysée. He is the first obvious loser of France’s Macron-crafted political earthquake, but he certainly won’t be the last.

Watching over this toxic brew, with his puppets rushing about as in a silent movie sped up to 30 frames per second, impervious to all criticism, is Emmanuel Macron, the Destroyer Of Worlds, convinced that he can pull a personal miracle out of the chaos. He believes the acceleration he has invoked will force everyone to make fatal mistakes. He has no sense of debt to any of the old politicians he dragged into his net, or to the young ones, such as his last PM, Gabriel Attal, built up as “the best of his generation”, now an encumbrance. It has only ever been about himself, anyway. And should he lose this gamble, with a Le Pen or Mélenchon majority on the evening of 7 July, he has already hinted that he will resign, rather than living through a “cohabitation” like his predecessors, François Mitterrand or Jacques Chirac, forced to slog it though with a hostile National Assembly and PM. He has quietly consulted the Constitutional Council: he can’t stand again immediately, but in five years’ time, he’ll only be 51. Tomorrow belongs to him.

Afterwards, Starmer and an even smaller coterie speak over the phone to make sure everyone is on the same page. Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner, Bridget Philipson, David Lammy, Jonathan Reynolds and Wes Streeting are briefed — the core of the most working class cabinet to run Britain since at least the Seventies, and not coincidentally the first to target private schools as its signature policy. Class remains the great, unspoken frame of this election: the knight of the realm with a chip on his shoulder against the second generation child of immigrant doctors fighting a losing battle against the sense that he is simply too rich to understand modern Britain. The UK is not the classless land that Blair prophesised, but that is about as close to British egalitarianism as you can get.

By 9am, all the major decisions at Labour HQ are settled. The rest of the day is implementation. Come 11pm, many of the same figures are still there, preparing to head home for another fitful night’s sleep — only to do it all again the next day. This, then, is the grinding routine of a general election campaign, an unrelenting six-week sprint for power. When I asked one Labour aide how he was feeling this week, he simply replied: “Fucked.” They rarely see their families. McSweeney’s wife is hundreds of miles away, fighting for a seat near Glasgow. Starmer’s children are in school.

But so far, the effort seems to be paying off. Almost all polls put the party on course for a landslide that would make Tony Blair’s majority in 1997 look marginal,  even if Labour is now only on 37%, less than Jeremy Corbyn won in 2017, and neck and neck with the SNP in Scotland. Still, this is the brutal efficiency of first past the post. Such is the projected scale of victory, in fact, that the Conservative Party has even started warning about a potential supermajority, while some analysts have suggested that there is an actual chance that the Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey could become leader of the opposition.

Starmer’s critics say the campaign might be hard work, but it doesn’t seem to be doing much — offering voters little, in the hope that hatred of the Tories will be enough. But such a defensive strategy exposes Labour to the charge that it does not have a plan for government, allowing the Conservatives to fill in the blanks over the final few weeks of the campaign — particularly by hyping up the prospect of tax rises to come. This, according to senior Tories, will certainly be their strategy.

Though the manifesto was criticised for saying nothing new, some analysts argued that it gave Starmer a mandate for a “quietly bold” agenda on climate, with more onshore and offshore wind, solar and an end to gas and oil. There is some truth to this, though in reality much of it only builds on what is already under way under the Conservatives. Others tried to argue that the Labour manifesto was potentially as radical as Labour’s in 1945. This is a harder sell. In the depths of post-war austerity and indebtedness, Clement Attlee built the NHS. Today, Starmer is maintaining Tory spending plans.

Yet, to those close to Starmer, the obvious counter is quite simple: look at the polls. The idea at the heart of Labour’s campaign, as it was explained to me, is to establish in the public mind that this six-week period is not something distinct that must be “won”, requiring new tactics and policies and style, but is the culmination of a four-year campaign to persuade the public that they can do better in government than the Tories. A cynic might point out this is not exactly a hard sell. Still, to unveil a whole series of policies — or to even pull one or two “rabbits out of the hat” — would only undermine that overall strategy.

The whole point of Labour’s campaign, as implied by their manifesto, is that the Tories are in a state of constant chaos and so, they believe, their best strategy is to show the exact opposite. “Stability is change”, as Rachel Reeves puts it. Besides, look what happened to Theresa May in 2017 when, as Labour sees it, she took her victory for granted and threw it all away with an ill-thought-through policy designed to be bold: the “dementia tax”. Labour’s unspectacular manifesto launch revealed Starmer’s iron determination to avoid this fate.

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Farage's army is on the march

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Starmer has also displayed an iron determination to manage the revolt on his party’s Left, from politicians such as Diane Abbott and Faiza Shaheen, the rising Corbynista pin-up who hoped to stand for the party in Chingford only to discover at the last minute that she had been blocked for a series of tweets.

There is a visceral hostility felt towards Starmer from this wing of his party. I experienced some of it first-hand at the South Chingford Congregational Church Hall, where I listened as Shaheen’s campaign manager, Mick Moore, whipped up the crowd by raging against the “robots” who have taken over the Labour party and bullied his candidate out of standing for the party. Shaheen, herself, then stood up to fulminate against Labour’s safety-first incrementalism. “For them, politics is about changing the language a little bit and just getting enough to win power,” she declared. “They expect us to blindly tick the red or blue box and it disgusts me.”

Shaheen’s supporters were even angrier. “The Labour party has been hijacked by a gang of liars and crooks,” declared one we met outside. Another, Jeremy Corbyn’s former aide and close ally, Andrew Murray — who now works for the Morning Star — told me Shaheen had been taken out in a “factional drive-by shooting” which would come back to haunt the leadership. “It is an act of gross stupidity.”

With under three weeks to go, however, the Labour campaign could be described as many things, but not stupid. The Tories are continuing to slump after a campaign characterised by some of the most abject prime ministerial blunders imaginable. Meanwhile, the revelation that one of Sunak’s closest parliamentary aides placed a bet on an early election just days before his boss stepped out into the rain in Downing Street has revealed the fatal loss of discipline and seriousness within the party. The Tories simply no longer look like a serious party of government.

Labour MPs, meanwhile, who have grown used to losing elections, can hardly believe it. One told me he remained convinced the Tory vote would rally, but only because he felt that was what should happen. And then came Sunak’s D-Day disaster, provoking “absolute visceral anger”, according to this Labour member of the shadow cabinet. By the end of the week, this same figure told me, almost disbelievingly, there was still no sign of the Tory rally. And yet still he waits, convinced it is coming. It has to — surely?

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In contrast, Starmer has shown some new confidence this week. One arch Labour sceptic told me his performance on the Sky News leaders debate on Wednesday, followed by his handling of the manifesto launch, had been a pleasant surprise. The Labour Party’s internal focus groups, conducted by Deborah Mattinson during the debate, were genuinely good, reviving the campaign’s flagging organisers. There is now a genuine belief — perhaps for the first time — that the polls might actually be real; that they might be on the verge of something extraordinary.

While also showing the first signs of confidence, Starmer also showed the first signs of tetchiness during this week’s Sky News “debate” — and once again the issue was class. Starmer’s flash of anger came after the audience groaned when he mentioned — again — that his dad was a tool maker. The Labour leader afterwards explained that he felt protective of his father who had been embarrassed about being a factory worker. Starmer, I’m told, still feels this acutely, and is more animated by questions of class disrespect than anything else. The fact he grew up in a small town in Surrey — Oxted — where the rich and poor lived and studied side by side means that he feels these small class snobberies acutely in a way, perhaps, that those in straightforwardly working-class places did not.

While I do think Starmer overreacted — the audience was not laughing at his dad, but groaning at his repeated mention of him being a tool maker — the important point here is the authenticity of his anger. His reaction revealed a degree of class-consciousness so deeply ingrained in his character, it will necessarily shape the incoming Labour government. It is, as I have written, what shaped his rejection of Blairism. It is why he has persisted with the tax raid on private school fees when he was happy to cast much else aside. And it is what animates him about the green energy revolution: the prize of a re-industrialisation that few experts believe will ever materialise. The toolmaker’s son has his eyes on the prize, driven along by the quiet rage of the slights of his childhood. Class is back in British politics.

Four decades on, and those mighty currents have turned, this time against a Conservative Prime Minister. He has been left powerless against them.

There’s a key difference between now and the Seventies, though. Back in 1975, when Thatcher became leader of her party, she wasn’t just moving with the tide; she was generating ideological currents of her own. Amid the economic and industrial chaos of the decade, she highlighted the failings of the corporate state under both Labour and Conservative governments — and came up with her own alternative vision from the radical Right. The state was not working so she would liberate the people from the state. This was the essence of her introductory message to the Conservatives’ 1979 election manifesto.

But in stark contrast with 1979, those whom the tides should favour — Starmer and his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves — dare not seek to define themselves ideologically against their opponents. Instead, they see the main dividing line in this election as being “stability versus chaos”: the most safely apolitical pitch it is possible to make. Who, after all, would vote for instability? And in the same breath, they reassure that “stability is change”, which is a promise of everything and nothing.

All things considered, it is an extremely limited pitch given our current political and economic climate. Current orthodoxies and assumptions shared across the political spectrum are almost the reverse of those that prevailed in the late Seventies. The financial crash, pandemic and soaring energy prices have transformed the state from villain into a far more benevolent actor — one to which voters and institutions increasingly turned. Amid such an ideological rebalancing, it is hard for Thatcher’s disciples such as Rishi Sunak to flourish. The current PM is not useless, but like Callaghan, his convictions are increasingly outdated.

Looking back, our recent Tory politicians have sensed the turning of the tide. On becoming Prime Minister, in 2016, Theresa May declared that it was “time to recognise the good the state can do”. Thatcher would have rather swam the Channel than make such a proclamation. May also spoke of the need to intervene in markets and sought a new industrial strategy. Her successor, Boris Johnson, claimed to be a “Rooseveltian”, a big spender like the US president. A confused Keynesian, Johnson initiated “Levelling up”, was an enthusiast for HS2 as an engine of economic growth, and increased National Insurance to pay for his vaguely defined plan for social care. During her fleeting tenure, the “small state” advocate, Liz Truss, hosed a fortune on subsidising fuel bills. Even Sunak, the self-declared Thatcherite, instinctively well to the Right of May and Johnson, was forced to raise taxes to prevent public services from collapsing altogether, and has since committed to spending more on defence, proposed a return to National Service and become an inadvertent advocate of a more active state. Currents have been nudging all our recent Prime Ministers to the Left.

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Nigel Farage, in spite of himself, is swimming in the same direction. His obsessive focus on migration has forced him to become an inadvertent Bennite, who in the early Eighties argued in favour of import controls to boost the wages of British workers. Since announcing he was standing as an MP, Farage has acknowledged that his plans for curbing immigration would create labour shortages, adding defiantly that this was good news for British employees who would enjoy higher wages. The populist Right-winger, full of incoherent contradictions, leaps to the Left.

This is the background against which Starmer and Reeves will make their modest appeal. If the polls are right, they will win big, but only secure the narrowest of mandates. Their model is the New Labour victory in 1997, when, for all Tony Blair’s charisma and vision of “a young Britain… a Britain reborn”, he only really dared pose a safely technocratic division: “competence versus incompetence”.

The underlying ideological dividing lines in 1997 also seem eerily familiar now. According to New Labour there was to be no longer a debate about high spending and low spending, but between “productive spending and unproductive spending”. We were told to forget about “high versus low taxation” — all that mattered was “fair versus unfair taxation”.

When Reeves became shadow chancellor, one of her first conversations was with Gordon Brown. The former Iron Chancellor told her that, above all else, she must ensure that every pledge is fully costed and that she must exert an iron discipline on the shadow cabinet not to utter a word that implies a spending rise. She has followed his advice to the letter, with a little Brownite sprinkle of tiny but popular tax rises and a commitment to seemingly formidable fiscal rules.

But there the New Labour similarities fade. Starmer’s background — the son of a toolmaker who could not always pay the bills — leads him to back a package of employment rights that Blair and Brown would not have touched, as they hailed the UK’s flexible labour markets. It’s the same with his nod to public ownership with the proposed national energy company and the railways — neither of which Labour in 1997 would have touched. Starmer’s unyielding commitment to international law also means he opposed the Rwanda scheme without qualification, which New Labour would have cautiously kicked into the long grass with a “review” into whether or not the experiment was working. On the whole, “Starmerism” such as it is, can be simply explained as a ferociously competitive will to win by following timidly those who have won before, stiffened with a few strongly held convictions born of his upbringing and life outside politics.

In 1991, the former chancellor, Nigel Lawson, observed “the party that wins the battle of ideas wins elections. The Conservatives are still winning the battle of ideas and will win the next election.” At the time of the speech Labour was well ahead in the polls. And less than a year later, the Conservatives won a fourth successive term.

In 1992, the assumptions and orthodoxies were almost the reverse of now. Since Thatcher’s privatisations were seen as triumphant, John Major doubled down and privatised the railways. He also kept a tight lid on spending, hailed tax cuts and warned against “tax bombshells”. When Labour leader Neil Kinnock tried to argue that the state could be an agent of “freedom”, he might as well have been speaking Latin.

This was the backdrop as Blair and Brown made their cautious moves towards victory in 1997. In interviews, the main test was whether they were as deadly serious as they claimed to be about sticking to Tory spending plans and in their faith in privatisations. The approach was captured in an exchange between Blair and the wary centre-left shadow cabinet member, Claire Short, before the 1997 election. The Labour leader said to her: “Don’t worry Claire… we will be more radical in government.” To which Short replied “You mean even more Right-wing”.

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At the launch of Labour’s manifesto that year, Evan Davis observed that the message was: “Everything in this mansion is rotten. We plan to change the ashtrays.” This year, as Sue Gray’s leaked shit-list details, upon election the new administration will face the potential collapse of Thames Water, public-sector pay negotiations, overcrowding in prisons, universities going bust, NHS funding shortfalls and failing local councils. I’m not sure any incumbent administration has ever faced such an incipient crisis.

Voters are in despair about the cost of living, the state of the country and the destructive hopelessness of the ruling party over the past 14 years. But Starmer and his advisers, leading the polls so decisively, are so obsessed about “not being Jeremy Corbyn” that they opt for a minimal programme and a technocratic analysis of what has gone wrong. They have gone for the new ashtrays option.

But new ashtrays aren’t going to cut it. The mansion is going to need to be gutted and rebuilt. As Paul Johnson from the Institute for Fiscal Studies has insisted, taxes will have to rise — and Reeves is an assiduous follower of Johnson’s words.

A Starmer government, then, will move to the Left not because they have hidden plans to do so. They do not. They will move to the Left because they will have no choice but to do so. There is a sea change and there is nothing they can do about it. In the same way that May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak discovered, when the tide turns, and there’s a sea change, there is nothing much you can do about it.

Yet what will transpire will not be, in any meaningful sense, an electoral contest. Narendra Modi, India’s ruler since 2014, will trounce his rivals for a third time. And if the cards appear stacked in his favour, it’s because he owns the pack. Cobbled together at the eleventh hour, the hapless, heteroclite alliance ranged against him, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance — INDIA for short — has had to suspend campaigning for want of funds; its bank accounts have been frozen by Modi’s government ostensibly on account of tax evasion.

Smaller parties, too, don’t stand a chance. Arvind Kejriwal, locally in power in devolved Delhi, has recently joined some of his party mates in prison. Kickbacks on liquor contracts are alleged, though everyone sees the ruse for what it is: a means to destroy the Common Man’s Party, which has for long been a burr in the ruling BJP’s saddle.

What of popular protest? Revolting farmers calling for higher procurement prices for wheat and rice, both Indian staples, learned their lesson in a hard school last month, when police and paramilitary forces were set on them. During the pandemic, the tractor classes had dealt a major blow to Modi, who was forced to climb down on agrarian reform — allowing big business to enter the wholesale market — in the face of a Delhi blockade. This time around, however, Delhi’s ruler gave no quarter. Farmers beat a hasty retreat as drones rained smoke bombs and tear gas upon them. On pain of fines and even imprisonment, social media apparatchiks were arm-twisted into blocking accounts critical of Modi and suppressing reports about the protests. To Elon Musk’s credit, though, X went public about government intimidation where previously Twitter had quietly gone along.

As for the press and television, the less said the better. The latest World Press Freedom Index, published by Reporters Without Borders, ranks India below Afghanistan and Libya; in a list of 180 countries, India comes in at 161st place. This in a land that, at the height of the Cold War, was arguably the freest between Berlin and Sakhalin. These days, however, a single critical piece of reporting is sufficient to warrant the taxman’s — or the policeman’s — knock on the door, as the BBC discovered last year.

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Nearing 10 years in power, Modi hasn’t held a single press conference. His favourite Bollygarchs, Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, both cronies of old, have a stranglehold on the legacy media. Ambani controls 70 outlets, which have a combined viewership and readership of 800 million. Meanwhile, the last independent network of sorts, NDTV, fell in 2022 to Adani, whose chartered plane Modi used on the campaign trail. Since the Prime Minister’s election, Adani has serendipitously scooped up all manner of contracts from airports to seaports, petroleum to edible oil.

As with the press, so with the judiciary. Time and again, the Supreme Court has proven itself as little more than the current ruler’s rubber stamp, ruling in Delhi’s favour over the construction of the Ram Temple atop the ruins of the razed Babri Mosque; over the suspension of rights in the disputed northern enclave of Jammu and Kashmir, whose residents were denied internet and phone access for 18 months; over Aadhar, a comprehensive China-style biometric database designed to be used, inevitably, as a mass surveillance tool.

Last month came a belated display of juridical independence: the Supreme Court scrapped electoral bonds — backhanders by another name — which in recent years had become the main source of campaign finance. Too late. The BJP has already raked in £600 million from them, as against the Congress Party’s £140 million. No surprise there. The donors — in the main mining and construction magnates tangled in red tape — naturally preferred the incumbents to their opponents.

The Congress, it is true, doesn’t inspire much confidence. That it ruled virtually uninterrupted from independence in 1947 to Modi’s election in 2014 — 54 of those 67 years — was in itself a little miracle, thanks in no small part to its historical role in displacing colonial rule, and the distorting effects of the Westminster system that guaranteed it supernumerary representation in parliament. Still, each passing decade registered growing disaffection with Congress misrule: bovine growth rates in the Fifties; wars in the Sixties; dictatorship in the Seventies; pogroms in the Eighties; corruption in the Nineties and 2000s.

By 2014, the Congress had run out of steam. Worse, it was hoist with its own petard. Decades of cosseting Hindu nationalists in its ranks had paradoxically mainstreamed their outré ideology. Similarly, just as the first-past-the-post system had worked to its advantage from the Fifties on, it now benefitted the BJP. In 2014, with 31% of the vote, Modi commanded 52% of parliament. Conversely, with its 19% vote share, the Congress boasted a mere 8% of lawmakers.

Now, it seems, we’re in for a repeat performance. Polls predict a BJP sweep. Modi’s coalition is set to win three quarters of the seats. If playing dirty works for Modi, he has been helped along by his duff opposition. Led in name only by the Congress president, Mallikarjun Kharge, a cipher by all accounts, the face of INDIA in fact is Rahul Gandhi, fourth-generation nepo baby and loser of the last two elections, now awaiting his third drubbing. Watching him on the hustings is a painful experience. He comes across as insufferably smug — also humourless, guileless and entirely lacking in irony. Modi, by contrast, laces his speeches with sarcasm, revelling in the double entendre and bon mot. Substantively, Gandhi’s pitch consists of no more than a vague rehearsal of multicultural shibboleths. Stylistically, he affects the élan of a cut-price Modi: scraggly beard, staccato delivery, superfluous appeals to piety.

All the same, too much should not be made of these personal defects, or indeed of Modi’s strengths. For there is a third dimension enabling India’s slide into dictatorship (or, at any rate, “electoral autocracy”, the more precise expression favoured by political scientists): the Indian masses. The fact remains, though it is unfashionable to point it out, that the people never really took to this democracy business. But one can hardly blame them. As the economist Pranab Bardhan has argued in a superbly lucid analysis, democracy was imposed from on high by competing Indian elites, none of whom were strong enough to rule single-handedly. Indian democracy was, above all, a gentlemen’s agreement. Liberty, equality, and fraternity had nothing to do with it.

Properly speaking, the people themselves have had a say only in a handful of elections — the two following the dictatorship of the Seventies, and the six between 1989 and 2004. Before that, India was essentially a one-party state, a state of affairs to which the country has now once again returned. Then as now, structural reasons — political violence; business backing; media clientelism; mass defection — conspire against a free and fair vote.

The upshot has been political ossification. In the grey expanse of ramshackle slums, where scavenging counts as gainful employment, politicians’ promises are understandably received with cynicism, even incredulity. Decades have gone by since independence, and India has nothing by way of a national health service to show for it. State schooling remains a shambles. A recent study found that less than a third of 10-year-olds could handle basic maths. Only 84 million — 6% of Indians — make more than $10 a day.

Yet, at a popular level, inequities provoke little resentment. For vertical deference counts for more than horizontal solidarity. The average Indian looks up to his betters, and shares no fellow feeling with his equals. To the latter sentiment is attached the rank odour of Marxism — by turns foreign, unnatural and even a little sinister. G.K. Chesterton held that “the oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.” Nowhere is this truer than in India.

Here, in a nutshell, is how the caste system is sustained, every stratum content with its station. Against this backdrop, elections degenerate into computational games played out in panelled boardrooms, with parties vying for the support of “caste leaders”, who, in exchange for public sinecures, deliver votes en bloc. Democracy proper, needless to say, can hardly thrive in cultural conditions where individuality is at such a discount.

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Indeed, no observer of the Indian scene can fail to note the oppressive conformity — ideological; cultural; sartorial — of the place, of an order with few world-historical equivalents outside the Muslim world. From haircuts to home décor, one is hard-pressed to detect even a hint of deviancy. Outside elite ghettoes, public displays of heterosexual, let alone homosexual, affection are as rare as alien sightings. Women remain practically absent from the workplace; the female participation rate hovers around the 28% mark.

Pop culture offers no respite. Barring the odd tour de force such as the Amazon show Pataal Lok, a coruscating, chiaroscuro masterpiece that pulls no punches in depicting the dregs of Delhi, film and television rarely deviate from the usual formula: slapstick snoozefests interspersed with mechanical dancing and nationalist propaganda; think Adam Sandler meets Jane Fonda with hints of Leni Riefenstahl. The premise, invariably, is boy meets girl, something which is all too rare in the real world. Marriages — few of which are open (quelle horreur), mixed (caste taboos apply), or liable to termination (1% of Indian marriages end in divorce, as against 42% in Britain) — are customarily brokered by parental fiat.

Intellectually speaking, what was once a luminous world of letters is now a backwater. Time was when — as late as the Nineties — the hottest name was Vikram Seth, a terrific prose stylist unafraid to tackle the darker recesses of Indian culture. His heirs, if they can be called that, are Chetan Bhagat and Amish Tripathi, both subliterate dispensers of postcard schlock. Tellingly, their celebrity rests not on their vapid writing but their vigorous cheerleading for Modi.

The review and opinion pages, likewise, used to be a punchier affair. There was a real joy to be had leafing through the latest number of Seminar, Quest, Swarajya, even the Economic Weekly. The latter nowadays throws its writers under the bus, pulling pieces to placate offended industrialists. The leading dailies, for their part, simply toe the party line. Real investigative reporting is left to the dissident press — the likes of Caravan, Scroll, and The Wire, which eke out a tenuous existence amid spurious lawsuits and tax raids. Anti-caste academics and activists are routinely carted off to jail on trumped-up charges of conspiracy.

All of this evidently enjoys popular approval. With polls showing that 85% of Indians express a preference for autocratic or military rule, one can only conclude that the vast majority of Indians don’t exactly swear by democracy. On the eve of what promises to be a sham election, with opposition leaders in prison and party funds frozen, it seems they have finally got what they wanted.

The decision to run an election when the outcome is certain may seem baffling. But we should see Russia’s election not as one in which voters have choices for leadership, but a singular choice: between aligning oneself with Putin’s Russian nation, which is locked in perpetual war, and aligning oneself with the nation’s enemies. State operatives have made this choice clear. As journalist Roman Golovanov put it in a Telegram post later shared by propagandist-in-chief Vladimir Solovyev, “the only important thing” in the electoral results “is Russia’s victory”. Whether Golovanov had in mind an abstract political victory or a literal military victory was left deliberately unclear.

In a country like Russia, the electoral ritual is vital to affirm public support for militarism. According to the state’s propaganda, the Russian Federation is purportedly surrounded by enemies, from Westerners to Ukrainians, fascists, and a supposed international LGTBQ alliance that has been legally deemed an “extremist” group. Every one of these enemies seeks to destroy Russia — and anybody who opposes Putin, who is synonymous with Russia, must therefore be on the side of the anti-Russians.

This year’s get-out-the-vote campaign — always important in Russia, where citizens are notoriously uninterested in directly engaging with political life, and as late as November 2023 only around half of the country was aware a presidential election was even in the offing — has therefore centred on the purported benefits of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Propagandists have spread photographs and videos of frontline troops taking advantage of early voting, declaring that turnout has (of course) been “close to 100%”. Residents in occupied territories — which Russia has declared to be a part of its own territory — are revealed to be voting with gusto, thus displaying their fealty to the state. One elderly lady in occupied Zaporizhzhia almost cried with joy as she fills out her early ballot, exclaiming “thank God for the chance to vote for the President of Russia!” For Moscow, the election is a chance to show off a newer, bigger, and bolder Russia — a Russia created through war.

In typical Kremlin style, every positive narrative is accompanied by the reminder that disaster is never far off. As the election nears, the state’s propagandists have summoned up the phantom spectre of foreign interference to rally Russians in opposition to a purported threat from the West. Earlier this week, Russia’s SVR spy agency publicly accused the USA — a country that Russians have overwhelmingly negative views about — of planning to interfere in the election by hacking the new electronic voting system.

At least some users on social media took the bait. Followers of one large pro-government Telegram channel, for instance, responded to the news with enthusiasm: “I wasn’t going to bother voting but now I definitely will!”; “Now I’ll show those Yankee fuckers and go vote… for Putin.” Voting becomes a symbolic act that bonds citizens in their opposition to Russia’s enemies. Choosing anyone but Putin is unthinkable. Participating in and talking about the election gives ordinary civilians a means to imagine themselves locked in a war with the West.

The state is not just reaching out to its traditional voter base with this loudhailer messaging. It’s also barraging the young and the disenchanted with visions of a future that is at once alluringly modern and dangerously militaristic. At the World Youth Festival, a state-run event that took place near Krasnodar in early March, thousands of young people — chiefly from Russia, with some delegates from friendly countries in the Global South — were treated to a glamorous and immaculately branded multi-day carnival of concerts, games, panel discussions, and celebrity talks. A special panel was dedicated to explaining the importance and fairness of the Russian electoral system.

The festival’s star was Vladimir Putin, who spoke on the nature of elections for his audience: “A politician,” he went on to explain, “thinks about the next election, while a statesman” — Putin has himself in mind — “thinks about the next generation”. In between platitudes about equality, justice, and the future, he urged the young to participate in political life, but only if they do so through the lens of war and militarism: “Even in the most difficult of times, at the turning points of Russia’s history, the hardest times, there were always a lot of volunteers, including during the Great Patriotic War.” Here, Putin’s message was clear: young people have a choice of engaging in social activity such as voting, waging war and fighting or, by rejecting the “statesman” that Putin is, making themselves the enemy of the next generation.

Despite this urgency, the 2024 election has been perhaps the most subdued in Russia’s recent history. There have been none of the usual flag-waving, immaculately choreographed stadium rallies in support of Putin in Moscow — perhaps out of fear of Ukrainian drone attacks, which caused the cancellation of Victory Day celebrations in 2023, or perhaps because the regime feels so secure it no longer sees the need to stage such lavish events.

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Regardless, there is no opposition movement to challenge Putin. A brief tilt at the election by Boris Nadezhdin, an anti-war candidate, was quashed by the authorities before it made any serious headway. Nadezhdin’s 20-year career as a moderate politician in an increasingly extreme political landscape made him a palatable alternative for many Russians, who took immense personal risks to help him gather more than 100,000 nomination signatures and join the presidential race. Even though Nadezhdin hardly presented a real challenge to the Putinist order, the state was still unwilling to allow even moderate discontent to coalesce, and promptly used the electoral commission to assert that the candidate’s nomination list contained “irregularities” that disqualified him. Anti-Putin Russians might have hoped the death of Alexei Navalny would prove a catalyst for protests, but those hopes rapidly fizzled out as moderate numbers attended the leader’s funeral then went back to their homes. Now, the regime is cracking down on both Navalny and Nadezhdin’s supporters through judicial and violent means.

The result is that, this week, Russians will open their ballots and make a choice between Putin and three candidates who broadly support the Kremlin. As usual in Russia’s presidential elections, the alternatives are bit-part players with little name recognition and little to differentiate their vision of the future from the status quo. The expected runner-up, Leonid Slutsky, is an ultranationalist, long-time Duma deputy and Putin ally who has claimed that captured Ukrainian troops should be executed. The communist candidate, Nikolay Kharitonov, doesn’t even pretend to challenge the incumbent: Putin “is responsible for his own work, so why would I criticise him?”

After the polls close, the state will rapidly name Putin the winner. The president will declare victory and claim that the nation has once more chosen not just its leader but its identity as a warring power. He will claim that, in engaging in this process, Russians have engaged in a vital act of defence against a cabal of Western nations that seek to destroy it. And he will suggest that Russia’s future is bolder, brighter, and more united as a result. Even after two years of a disastrous war, Putin remains firmly in charge of Russia — and Russia remains firmly in support of the president’s vision of an increasingly militaristic future.

There is a grain of truth in this. If the current Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wins, he will probably only be able to form a government with the backing of EH Bildu — a Basque separatist party that welcomes former terrorists from the now defunct but once dangerous ETA into its ranks. However, if the opposition People’s Party (PP) of Alberto Núñez Feijóo wins, it will need the support of Vox — a hard-Right party that attracts national conservatives and authoritarians. Some of its supporters remain in thrall to the thuggish military dictator Francisco Franco.

Bildu and Vox each claim to be devoted democrats, but most Spaniards strongly dislike both — and with good reason. Vox leader Santiago Abascal has called Sánchez’s government “the worst in 80 years”, suggesting that he prefers Franco’s violently repressive autocracy. His party hopes to repeal abortion and euthanasia laws, end measures to ensure gender equality and combat domestic violence, and re-centralise power to Madrid.

The reputation of EH Bildu leader Arnaldo Otegi is even less flattering. The ETA veteran has only semi-apologised for the group’s murder of 853 people between 1968 and 2011. Having vowed to “alleviate” the suffering of the victims’ relatives in 2021, he then humiliated them by putting forward 44 former convicts at local elections in May 2023. These included seven candidates condemned for murder or for directly assisting murder.

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While Spain’s mainstream parties would rather avoid such unseemly bedfellows, it seems they will have little choice: the People’s Party will likely win the most votes but fall short of an absolute majority. In that case, it will have no option but to turn to Vox. The party has no other potential allies: its dismissive stance on devolution and independence referenda has alienated nationalists from the Basque Country and Catalonia, who might otherwise have been sympathetic to its Christian Democrat agenda. Indeed, ever since Catalan separatists tried to secede unilaterally in 2017, the split between unionists and centralists has often dominated politics just as much as traditional Left-Right alignments.

If Feijóo’s PP and Vox fail to win a majority of seats, then Sánchez — whose party has long followed a conciliatory policy of devolution without independence — will form a minority coalition government with far-Left Sumar (a tweaked version of current coalition ally Unidas Podemos) backed by all the nationalist and separatist parties. That includes five or so deputies from EH Bildu. Nevertheless, although the polls are still too tight to call a winner, a People’s Party-Vox coalition is still the most probable outcome.

The election campaign has become all about the kingmakers. “Take the vote of Txapote!” (an infamous ETA chief currently jailed for several murders) is a favourite PP slogan targeting Sánchez’s Socialists. “Vote against the pact of hate!” shouts a massive scaffolding banner in Madrid’s famously gay Chueca district, claiming a PP-Vox coalition would shred women’s rights and fuel homophobia.

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What frantic political slogans fail to acknowledge is that whichever side wins, Spain is not about to be sucked into a whirlwind of insanely radical government. EH Bildu and Vox may make headlines, but in reality they have very little influence. Support for Vox has in fact shrunk to below 13%, from 15% in 2019 elections. EH Bildu, meanwhile, represents fewer than 1.5% of Spaniards. By comparison, the People’s Party and the Socialists are large, resilient and moderate parties — European-style Christian or Social Democrats who have run all of Spain’s governments for four decades. Some think the most logical coalition would actually be between them, creating a German-style “grand coalition”. Of course, entrenched bad blood makes that impossible, but minority allies are unlikely to force larger parties to adopt truly radical policies.

The reasons for this lie in the strength of Spain’s 1978 constitution, designed three years after Franco’s death to prevent a return to radicalism. Any significant change requires a two-third parliamentary majority, which can only be found by combining the votes of both People’s Party and the Socialists. As a result, there have only been two amendments in the last 45 years, both to please the European Union. (In comparison, France’s Fifth Republic has amended its 1958 constitution 24 times, and Germany’s Basic Law has had 62 changes since 1949.)

The constitution proved its worth in 2017, when Catalan regional leader Carles Puigdemont made his unilateral declaration of independence. The Constitutional Court proclaimed Puigdemont’s so-called referendum — which most Catalans boycotted — illegal, and the main secessionists were jailed or fled into exile. Since then, the separatist balloon has deflated. EH Bildu faces a similar problem, with support for Basque independence, which has never grown above 50%, waning in the face of a constitution that declares the “indissoluble unity” of the Spanish nation.

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Yet those on the far-Right who imagine the constitution is their friend are equally misguided. Even if Vox gets into power, it will struggle to pass many of its more radical policies. Its call to recentralise Spain’s 17 semi-autonomous regional governments would require rewriting a constitution that enshrines the “right to autonomy” of the country’s regions. Elsewhere, as the constitutional scholar Ana Carmona Contreras points out, other Vox proposals such as striking out the abortion law or banning separatist parties are similarly made impracticable under the constitution.

In the face of inevitable failure, Vox will likely devote its energy to culture warfare instead. Expect chest-thumping about Spanish history — especially the conquistadores in the Americas and other “deeds and feats of our national heroes” — as well as attempts to revive the flagging fortunes of professional bull-fighting with public money. (Its manifesto also takes a dig at “New Bauhaus” architecture, a dislike uncomfortably close to that of Adolf Hitler.) Otherwise, Vox’s influence will be reduced to encouraging a People’s Party government to uphold its economic principles: cutting taxes and shrinking the state.

In other words, Vox is destined to share the fate of far-Left party Podemos, whose role in Sánchez’s outgoing coalition shows how slight the impact of small, radical partners can be. Podemos’s headline reform to employment law, and its support for minimum wage hikes, hardly challenge the standard aims of social democracy.

The main policy mistake Podemos will be remembered for wasn’t intended to be radical. Its clumsily written 2022 rape law allowed some sex offenders to leave jail early. It was, however, a well-meant response to a horrific gang rape during the San Fermin fiestas in Pamplona in 2016 — but it left a loophole open to be exploited. “Sánchez put hundreds of monsters back on the streets,” a Vox campaign poster shouts. That may be true, but there is little radical about the law itself.

Much like Podemos, Vox will struggle to push through its radical agenda. Those watching this weekend’s election for signs of a neo-fascist revival are therefore likely to be disappointed. Unlike much of Europe, Spain’s revolutionary days are over; few European countries offer as much political stability as Spain has over the past four decades. Vox may try to whitewash Franco, but Spaniards learned much from an era of civil war and dictatorship. They won’t be going back.

Turkey won praise for quickly assembling container cities to accommodate the Syrian refugees who streamed across the border in the early years of the civil war. And you can be sure that Erdoğan, a near-absolute ruler even before the state of emergency he proclaimed on Tuesday, will exert himself to get the homeless housed as soon as possible. Politically, the hazards lie in the past. Every collapsed building is a reminder of the corruption associated with a construction industry whose leading players are known more for their government connections than their adherence to safety norms. Alluding to hypothecated taxes that the government introduced after earlier earthquakes, and which are designed, among other things, to make buildings earthquake-resistant, Kılıçdaroğlu asked: “So where is that money? Gone! They fed it to the gangs!”

The tragedy will cast a long and bitter shadow over the presidential election that is due on May 14. For the government, disaster management is an election campaign by another name. And Erdoğan loves elections. Since 2002, he and his Justice and Development Party, or AKP, have won six Turkish general elections, one presidential election and three referendums. That he doesn’t fight clean or fair can make one forget that he’s probably the world’s most successful electoral politician, and certainly among the most instinctive, a populist who’s rarely happier than when whipping up a crowd of flag-waving supporters, ridiculing his opponents or addressing in terms of proprietorial familiarity those pious Turkish nationalists who make up the biggest section of the country’s electorate.

Erdoğan’s worst shock at the polls came in 2019, when the AKP lost control of two key mayoralties: Istanbul, to a new star of the secular-leaning Republican People’s Party, Ekrem İmamoğlu, and Ankara. Erdoğan responded to defeat in Istanbul, which he considers his fief, by insisting on a rerun, which İmamoğlu won by a bigger margin. But last December a pliant judge sentenced the mayor to two and a half years in prison for calling election officials “idiots”, and banned him from politics — thus blocking his path to a run against Erdoğan in May.

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Opinion polls suggest that not only İmamoğlu, who remains in office pending appeal, but also other opposition politicians, could beat Erdoğan — which makes sense when you consider that inflation is at 64% and the economic miracle Turkey enjoyed until 2015 has given way to pain, much of it self-inflicted. (The reason why Turkish inflation is the second highest in the G20 is that Erdoğan has an ideological aversion to raising interest rates; his Central Bank — “his” being the operative word — has cut the benchmark rate by 10 percentage points since September 2021, just as other central banks raised theirs.) But when, shortly before the earthquake, I asked a politically astute Turkish friend — someone I have known since the late Nineties, when I was a resident reporter covering, among other things, the rise of a promising young Istanbul mayor called Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — whether the president really can be beaten, she replied with an unhesitating “no”.

After two decades in which he has survived coup attempts by secularists and rival Islamists and bombing campaigns by Islamic State and Kurdish militants, Erdoğan’s staying power can appear uncanny and preordained. Bekir Ağırdır, a columnist, wrote recently that news that the six opposition parties that have formed an alliance against the AKP are already “sharing out jobs and power” betrays a delusional complacency that only “strengthens the conviction that [the election] can’t be won”. Another commentator noted that the media in Russia, Turkey’s most important ally, is predicting a shoe-in for Putin’s chum across the water, “the indispensable Erdoğan”.

Since 2016, when Putin, in contrast with the West, backed Erdoğan unconditionally as he suppressed a coup attempt by rival Islamists, the Turkish president has met his Russian counterpart more than any other leader. Uneasy bedfellows the two countries may be, with interests that don’t always coincide in Syria, the Caucasus and, most recently, Ukraine, but the relationship isn’t really about Turkey and Russia; it’s about two strong men who share a desire to boss the neighbourhood but have sharper differences with the West than they do with each other.

One might marvel that even now, after Erdoğan has captured the judiciary, locked up tens of thousands of opponents, throttled the internet and herded the approved media into pens of abject obedience, all the while relieving his own party of anything resembling a mind of its own, Turkey has an opposition at all. But the country contains big minorities — Kurds, liberals and a heterodox sect called the Alevis — who hate his Sunni Turkish majoritarianism and that, in the Kurds’ case, have taken up arms against it. If these constituencies pull together, and there is sufficient attrition from the government side, an electoral shock may still be possible. In the three national elections and one referendum that have been staged in Turkey over the past six years, the number of votes received by the opposition has oscillated between 22.5 and 24 million, while Erdoğan and his allies have received between 24 and 27 million.

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The opposition is disunited. Kılıçdaroğlu of the Republican People’s Party is a dogged but uninspiring Alevi. Its other main component is a Right-leaning party containing Turkish nationalists. But the Turkish nationalists refuse to admit the country’s main Kurdish party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party, regarding Kurdish nationalist politicians as the polite face of armed separatism. And yet Kurdish votes will be crucial if power is to change hands on 14 May. Four months shy of the election — and with the Peoples’ Democratic Party facing a possible ban for its links to Kurdish militants — it isn’t clear which candidate or candidates from the opposition alliance will stand and who might be acceptable to the Kurds.

Erdoğan devoted his first 10 years in power to trying to improve human rights, liberalise the economy and make peace with the Kurds, all under the approving eye of the US and the EU, with which Turkey opened accession talks in 2005. He also expelled Turkey’s meddlesome generals from politics and embarked on a creeping Islamisation of the state. He presented a smiling alternative to the authoritarian secular state when I met him, in his capacity as mayor of Istanbul, in the spring of 1997, offering me delicious early strawberries on the terrace of an Ottoman folly he had restored and assuring me of the purity of his democratic convictions. Six years later, after a spell in jail for quoting from a controversial poem, he came to power nationally with the support not only of a large chunk of the electorate but also of the West, which regarded Erdoğan’s brand of pious but apparently pluralistic conservatism, and the spectacle of a Muslim Nato member knocking on the door of the EU, as the world’s best chance of avoiding a clash of civilisations.

Then came the 2010s — the decade of the Syrian civil war, the collapse of the Kurdish peace process and rising tensions with the EU, which, it was now clear, had no intention of letting Turkey in — and his programme degenerated into an unstable collage of transactions, vendettas and exhibitions of military potency. Democracy and human rights were discarded even if Erdoğan still needs the shot in the arm of periodic elections, contests which, short of stuffing ballot boxes, he has used every means available to win. There is no longer anything in the way of overarching design save a mission to keep his job and resist the circling enemies that are determined to drag Turkey down from her rightful position of global influence.

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Two decades of power does odd things. The same Erdoğan who once vowed to topple the “godless” Bashar al-Assad, and whose army occupies swathes of northern Syria, now wants normalisation with his southern neighbour. The philanthropist who let in 3.6 million Syrian refugees in the name of Islamic solidarity has done a volte face and vows to send them home. Erdoğan the doctrinaire Muslim welcomes millions of hard-drinking European tourists; the EU he takes such pleasure from deriding happens to be the country’s biggest trading partner and source of foreign investment. Putin’s pal also supplies drones to Zelensky. And every incoherence in policy is justified by invoking the goal of a strong, respected Turkey, capable of rebutting her many foes. You can be sure that, when the time comes to assess his government’s performance in dealing with the fall-out from the earthquake, Erdoğan won’t dwell on the Western countries that have rushed to Turkey’s aid.

Before the earthquake, in an address to the nation from his palace in Ankara, the President warned that the country’s enemies would never accept a Turkey “whose infrastructure is healthy, whose political will is its own, whose military and technological capabilities are rising”. Fortunately, he went on, “we have proved to the world in the struggle we have waged… that we can protect our independence and our future without regard to the impositions, desires and strictures of anyone else”. After a brisk overview of various recent ground-breakings, ribbon-cuttings and medal-pinnings he had attended, and not forgetting his latest chat with Mr Putin, he gave an enthusiastic account of the opening of a new high-speed metro line linking Istanbul and the airport, after which, pausing for effect, he said, “they don’t even have this in Paris”. This elicited dutiful titters among the cabinet ministers in the hall. Pressing home his advantage, the president concluded, “the Paris metro has a leaky roof”.

Having dealt with one European has-been, his tone hardened when he spoke of the public burning of a Quran by a well-known Islamophobe in Stockholm, on 21 January, as an “ugly act” which, since it took place outside the Turkish embassy and under the protection of the Swedish police, was “not only a religious issue, but also a national one”. Expanding his theme to include the current spat with Sweden and Finland over their accession to Nato, which he has promised to veto if they do not extradite scores of Kurdish “terrorists”, Erdoğan announced that “those who encourage or close their eyes” to the Quran’s desecration should “expect not the slightest indulgence from us on the subject of their application to join Nato… if you love the terrorists and Islamophobes so much (his voice rising to a familiar crescendo) why not entrust the security of your nation to them!” Calming down a bit, Erdogan went on to give details of his economic genius. The ministers crossed and uncrossed their legs. It wasn’t the performance of a man who expects to be moving out of his home, which cost $600 million, is four times the size of Buckingham Palace, and is alleged to have gold loo seats, later this summer.

But locals have long known that Democrats were due for a collapse. With his victory over perennial loser Charlie Crist, DeSantis transformed Miami from a cultural outpost to a diverse Republican haven heading into the 2024 Presidential election. It’s a fascinating turn for a city that has traditionally been considered more Latin American than American — one that highlights the ongoing political realignment stateside.

Miami has been trending red since 2016, when Trump made initial inroads with Hispanics, but last Tuesday’s “red wave” was a surprise. Most observers expected a modest DeSantis victory or a narrow defeat. But I was certain that DeSantis was poised for a big win. Miami has been steadily shifting rightward for years, and the city’s incompetent Democratic operatives have made matters worse by countering with woke talking points and a fake panic about “disinformation” in Spanish-language media.

The seeds of this shift were planted by the Orange Man himself. With his talk of “bad hombres” at the border and “making America great again”, Trump immediately connected with a sizeable number of working-class Hispanic Miamians, many of whom had previously been apolitical. In these early days, the county’s Right-wing crew was mostly a mix of youngish Miami bros and rabid Cuban anticommunists, who made their presence felt in the caravans that commandeered the streets and worsened already awful Miami traffic in the lead up to the 2016 election.

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This was a boisterous and fun crowd, enamored by the gaudier aspects of the Trumpian aesthetic, and it was not strictly Cuban. It was an intersectional crew of Hispanic dudes, and as the country was engulfed in flames in the summer of 2020, ladies began to join in on the fun. The Right-wing Latina was born. The caravans and boat parades leading up to 2020 were no doubt the best-looking, and most surgically enhanced, political events in American history — complete with one of the all-time great campaign songs. The city’s vibes were red hot. In 2020, Trump lost Miami-Dade County by only seven points, after losing it by 29 four years earlier. Miami was primed to go red, and soon.

As Miami began to shift Right, local progressive outfits, such as Cubanos Pa’lante, and Democratic Hispanic politicians, such as former US representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, doubled down on Latinx-style wokism and the “disinformation” gambit. Hispanic Miami, hypersexualised and constitutionally politically incorrect, is by its very nature an anti-woke city, but progressive Miami Democrats, captured and funded by the woke white Democratic establishment, cannot confront this reality head on. “Latinx” progressives, unable to deviate from the Democratic funding apparatus, could not speak up and say what they knew to be true: that the weird gender and racial obsessions of white progressives alienate working- and middle-class Hispanics.

Many Hispanics, as has been noted ad nauseum as the Rightward shift continues, are “socially conservative”. In Miami, however, such “social conservatism” often means a simple belief that men are men and women are women. The elevation of the trans woman as the embodiment of Democratic femininity was never going to play here — or with Hispanics anywhere.

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Some progressives have tried to explain the Rightward shift of Hispanics by pointing to the supposed “whiteness” of certain Latino demographics. According to woke dogma, Hispanics, especially Cuban Americans, think of themselves as white and are increasingly starting to vote that way. But this is a dodge, conveniently deflecting attention away from the fact that Democratic messaging is full of progressive extremism that appeals to the party’s elite base while alienating everyone else.

The truth is that progressives must focus on wokeness because confronting the reality of what many Hispanics believe on issues like the border, race, and gender would infuriate the elite white women who run the Democratic and media apparatus. This disconnect between the elite party brokers and working-class people of colour is most obvious in Miami, a city that prides itself on its intransigence. Due to their inability to speak honestly, Democrats ceded the most important issues for the city’s voters — crime, immigration, the economy — to Donald Trump and, later, Ron DeSantis.

If you hang around with working-class Hispanics in Miami, you’ll hear some of the most strident immigration policies imaginable: “We gotta close the border, bro. There’re too many people here already.” This isn’t a white dude from Omaha saying this, but a Hispanic guy who probably knows half a dozen people who crossed over illegally. This hardline talk has nothing to do with “whiteness” or Trumpism, but with the realities of living in a city where immigration is a constant. It’s no coincidence that Mexican-Americans living along the Southern border also flipped toward the GOP in 2020. As long as working-class reality is ignored in favor of woke talking points, a truth vacuum will be created.

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Into that truth vacuum walked DeSantis, who adopted and then refined the more popular aspects of the Trumpian brand. “Florida,” DeSantis says, “is where woke goes to die.” Like Trump, DeSantis understands that culture war issues can be winners for conservatives. Unlike Trump, he has proved that he has the focus and discipline to follow through on his rhetoric and win the ensuing battles. He went after critical race theory and gender ideology in public schools, banned medical transitions for minors, picked a fight with Disney over the company’s alleged political meddling, and passed the Stop WOKE Act, which has endeared him to traditional working-class Hispanics. According to NBC News exit polls, DeSantis not only won a supermajority of Cuban Americans but a majority of Puerto Ricans and half of other Latinos.

Of course, Hispanics aren’t the whole story here. Miami-Dade flipped in part because of their Rightward shift, but the influx of blue state lockdown refugees certainly didn’t hurt. DeSantis kept schools and businesses open, proclaimed “the free state of Florida,” and the rest is history. Tech bros flooded into Miami, as did regular Americans looking for freedom in what has traditionally been the most non-American big city in the country.

DeSantis’ strength on cultural issues, coupled with his pro-business and pro-freedom agenda, shows that big-tent Republicanism is still possible, so long as the man leading the charge is capable and competent. The expected national red wave didn’t happen, but if Republicans are smart, they’ll follow the Florida model employed by DeSantis, which will draw both working-class Hispanics and anti-woke, pro-America elites. The Trumpian approach was always going to attract the more rambunctious elements of the Republican base, but DeSantis has proven that his measured, workmanlike approach will retain the working-class types — Hispanic and otherwise — while attracting lapsed Democrats and traditional Republicans.

Miami Democrats will have to change course if they hope to retain the city, but their longstanding inability to deviate from woke talking points will make that extremely difficult. They must break from, or convince, the Democratic Party apparatus that Hispanics — the largest minority demographic in the country — are more traditionally American than they suspected.

The Rally, the wisdom went, still operated like a family clan, even though Marine had fired her own father, the Front National’s founder, after he made one anti-Semitic joke too many. It looked to the past while Zemmour looked to the future, bringing together Marine’s own niece Marion Maréchal and former Sarkozystas from the hard fringes of Les Républicains, the Centre-Right party descended from the Gaullist movement. Le Pen was a spent name in French politics.

Fast forward to this week, however, the last before the first round of the Presidential election on Sunday, and Marine Le Pen is polling at 23% against Emmanuel Macron’s 26%. She is up two points and he’s down four in ten days — and, incredibly, the same poll credits her with 48.5% against Macron’s 51.5% for the 24 April run-off.

“This is well within the margin of error. There are configurations in which she could win,” says the political analyst Stéphane Rozès, who has advised every French President since Mitterrand. Bruno Jeanbart, the vice president of Opinionway, another pollster, concurs. “It’s harder to predict the run-off, mostly because voters don’t yet know how they will decide in reaction to the first-round results. But it’s no longer impossible.”

What explains Marine Le Pen’s extraordinary comeback from the political graveyard? Her platform hasn’t essentially changed: she still wants to reduce all immigration into France by 75%, and to create a legal discrimination between French nationals and foreign residents in their access to public jobs, benefits, and even private sector jobs. But she has softened it. Not only does she no longer advocate France’s exit from the EU, she has given up on leaving the Euro.

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She wants to abolish Jus Solis, birthright citizenship, to deny naturalisation to the children of foreign parents born in France, but has given up on banning double nationality. She no longer wants a return to the death penalty, which she advocated as late as 2012. As for gay marriage, voted through during the François Hollande presidency, she prudently suggests “a three-year moratorium”, which means in effect it’s no longer in question. (In all fairness, Marine Le Pen has always been a social liberal; old Front hands used to bemoan her “gay Mafia” of advisers a decade ago.) And while she recommended leaving Nato before the Ukraine-Russian war, she has since rowed this back to merely pulling out France from Nato’s integrated command.

So far, so Souverainiste — and often hard to differentiate from the historic wing of the Gaullist party that defined itself in opposition to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty.

In 2017, Le Pen, a barrister by trade, had miserably crashed and burned during her single debate with Macron between the two rounds. She came unprepared, got names and figures wrong, even had to look at her notes mid-sentence. Facing her, Macron, a former top mandarin at the Ministry of Finance, reeled off his facts and talking points with the condescending smile of a younger man who’s passed all of his exams with flying colours. (He actually didn’t: intimates say his own lasting personal trauma was flunking twice the entry to the elite literary École Normale Supérieure.) Macron, the newcomer, didn’t necessarily come across as sympathique, but he looked a lot more competent than Le Pen. When she realised how badly she’d done, she reportedly spent two days locked at home in a funk before limping back to campaign for the last days.

She always knew she would run again: what else, after all, can someone called Le Pen do? She had been advised, sometimes haphazardly, by a motley group of some 80 senior civil servants, CEOs, Énarques, lawyers and former SpAds who took to calling themselves Les Horaces, from early Roman history, and disagreed as much among themselves as they did with the party faithful. When she started preparing her 2022 campaign, she halved the number of Horaces. She brought in new faces and tightened discipline under her 36-year-old chief of staff, Renaud Labaye, a former Army officer who attended HEC Business school before joining the Ministry of Finance. They are the ones who worked on her current manifesto — as well as drilled her for the probable rerun of the pre-runoff debate, which Le Pen has sworn to herself she will win this time.

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Last week Le Monde ran a three-page analysis that tried to “decode” Le Pen’s platform to demonstrate that she was still, in effect, a fascist threat. Its main proof was her promise, if she’s elected, to organise an early referendum on an immigration and national identity bill; a bill passed in this way legally needs not be examined by the Constitutional Council. The constitutional lawyer Dominique Rousseau was quoted calling it “un coup d’état” — even though the recourse to referenda was introduced by Charles de Gaulle in his Fifth Republic Constitution in 1958 (it was used twice by Le Général, and seven times since).

Similarly, her projected measures “against Islamist ideology” differ less from those adopted by Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande or Macron (in his recent Bill against Separatism, for instance) than from Zemmour’s blanket claim that “it’s Islam, not just Islamism, that’s against the values of the Republic”. (He tried to walk back on this last week, telling 100,000 Parisian supporters that he had no problem with “assimilated Islam in France”.) Even Valérie Pécresse sounded harder during her ill-fated Paris rally a month ago: “It’s time to stop denying the link between terrorism and immigration.”

“Accusations [like Le Monde’s] help Marine Le Pen more than they hurt her,” says Jean-Yves Camus, France’s leading expert on domestic and international far-Right movements. “Rightly or wrongly, people compare her style — seemingly reasonable, becalmed — to Eric Zemmour’s; as well as her lack of ego to most of her competitors. She owned up to mistakes. She admitted that her niece Marion’s defection had hurt her, explaining she’d largely brought her up as a child. She has become humanised.”

Camus compares Le Pen’s platform to the Italian academic Emilio Gentile’s ten-point list characterising a fascist movement. These include the doctrine of taking power by force, having a paramilitary arm, aspiring to a monopoly of power, territorial ambitions, and more. “Simply put, the RN isn’t a fascist party,” Camus says.

Of all this year’s women candidates — the centre-Right Valérie Pécresse, the Socialist Anne Hidalgo, the Trotskyite Nathalie Arthaud, and Le Pen — it is the latter who has made the fewest formal feminist statements. And yet Le Pen, 53, is the one most perceived by public opinion surveys as having womanly, even motherly traits. These include being an avowed cat lady: she has passed a breeder licence to be able to mate her Bengals; once weaned, she gives the kittens away “to good homes” among her friends. It’s telling that besides her political Instagram account, which has 223,000 followers and 916 posts, she has a private locked one, to which she’s only admitted 166 followers, but where she’s posted 3,759 photos of her feline tribe, and none of herself.

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All of which makes her, on paper at least, a complementary figure to Zemmour — if they got along, that is. He appeals to more affluent and educated voters, to urbanites, and to the Southern départements of Languedoc-Roussillon and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur; but he fails with women (61% of his avowed voters are men). Le Pen’s strongholds, in contrast, are in France’s rust belt in the North and North-East, in any area of la France Périphérique, those small towns where businesses, public services and jobs have disappeared, and with women (55% to 45% men). He rouses his large audiences with old-fashioned flings of nationalist rhetoric; she comforts the members of her smaller gatherings and doesn’t shy from sharing her troubles with them.

Both have been unpardonably soft on Vladimir Putin — Zemmour because he has no foreign policy experience and relied on advisers whose rabid anti-Americanism fed their Russophilia; Le Pen because her party’s coffers are perennially empty and she twice had to beg for loans from Russian-owned banks based in Budapest, having been denied credit by virtue-signalling French banks. Ukraine harmed him much more than her, as he stuck to his positions for a long week, initially refusing the idea of welcoming Ukrainian refugees in France; while she condemned the invasion after a couple of days, calling Russia “the aggressor” and welcoming refugees.

Cunningly crafted or simply reflecting Le Pen’s real nature — but probably a bit of both — her new image gives her a unique strength in these days of defiance against professional politicians: she looks both sincere and somewhat reassuring. Every expert, starting with her own father, said she would lose out by trying to rebuild the renamed National Rally as a less aggressive force — her own expression was “detoxifying” it. Yet the advent of Zemmour was evidently a boon: as an abrasive candidate appealing to an energised base, but turning off less radicalised voters who nonetheless reject the traditional politicians on offer, he in effect completed her political “detox”.

But most of all, Marine Le Pen has been helped by Emmanuel Macron. Discontented voters chose him five years ago to spite the other, older, hackneyed candidates — a populist reflex for a man who used populist means for decidedly non-populist policies. His victory was built on the cold-eyed destruction of traditional political parties Left and Right, and he never stopped to consider the effect on public life. He cherry-picked the most compatible and the most docile personalities from both the Socialists and the Républicains, gave them seats in the House and Cabinet, stringently barred them from having any kind of independent views, and declared himself as being neither Left nor Right.

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Like the spoiled child he has been for all 44 years of his charmed life, political and personal, Macron has never had to face consequences for his decisions; for him, turning the French Republic into an atomised wasteland of individuals matters not one bit. (He will be remembered as the Houellebecq President.) Under his presidency, France was shaken by popular revolts such as the Gilets Jaunes who felt no one was representing them in a country of weak unions and even weaker parties. His handling of the Covid crisis wasn’t much worse than that of any other government, but it was characterised by a range of baroque and contradictory measures, always presented as the réalité du moment, without ever acknowledging what had come before.

In recent weeks, possessed by his self-appointed mission as peacemaker in Ukraine, Macron felt safe enough to swerve campaigning altogether, loftily letting his spin doctors explain he was “held up” by more serious matters; he saw himself as the statesman, the others were mere candidates. His early attempts were certainly sincere and could have been useful, but he was slow in recognising the intractable nature of Vladimir Putin and the sheer scale of the most dangerous conflict on European soil since the end of the Second World War.

By April, voters felt it. He may yet save his job between now and 24 April — but if the French decide to vote for a middle-aged, not-so-scary cat lady, who seems to offer simple solutions to complicated problems, he will have only himself to blame.

In the 12 years of rule that have followed three landslide electoral victories, Viktor Orbán, now Europe’s longest-serving leader, has successfully reshaped Hungary in his own image: too successfully, in the eyes of both the weak and fractured opposition and of the EU mainstream.

Hungary is not the dictatorship Orbán’s more strident critics allege, but it departs from the stated norms of European liberal democracy in a number of ways. Under his leadership, the ruling Fidesz party has placed its thumb on the electoral scales, ensuring that while elections are free, the government enters them at an advantage. Opposition candidates are given significantly less airtime on state broadcasting networks than government figures, with the result that Fidesz narratives dominate the airwaves; the opposition claims that electoral boundaries have been redrawn to favour the government, a charge that Fidesz disputes; and a sophisticated politics of patronage has created a new conservative elite which owes its survival to Orbán’s continued rule. 

It is precisely these same innovations, which make Orbán’s Hungary anathema to Western liberals, that make the country so attractive to so many Western conservatives — particularly Anglo-Saxon ones. Where conservatives in Britain and America can win elections but find their governance impeded by a liberal powerbase in the media, NGOs and the judiciary (termed by conservative Hungarian intellectuals as an anti-democratic “juristocracy”), in Orbán’s Hungary the liberal intelligentsia’s political powerbase has been dismantled and replaced with a confident new conservative elite. A wealth of glossy conservative magazines, universities, think tanks and NGOs are the lavishly-funded product of Orbán’s Gramscian conservativism.

Rather than the vulgar 20th-century authoritarianism with which his more excitable critics charge him, Orbán’s dominance of Hungary’s politics is a subtler, more postmodern exercise. A product of George Soros’s attempt to nurture an elite governing class in Central Europe, the disaffected liberal reformer has adopted and inverted the same methods that produce liberal hegemony towards distinctly post-liberal ends. No wonder so many Western conservatives, who cannot translate electoral success to meaningful political power, find Orbán’s Hungary an object of both envy and inspiration. At Gólya, a far-Left cooperative and cultural space in a disused Budapest warehouse bedecked with PKK flags, I met the Marxist journalist and leftwing activist Csaba Tóth, who wryly described Orbán’s Hungary as “Rojava for western conservatives”, an idealised polity onto which they can project their political hopes and dreams.

“​​The point about Fidesz,” Tóth told me, “is that they’re against this liberal Deep State, NGO elite, whatever you want to call it. But they are mesmerised by it, and they are trying to replicate it along their own political lines. So they will have their own NGOs, their own think tanks, their own societies and international influence, modelled after this Atlanticist elite.” This creates a system, Tóth claims, where “I don’t think there is a level playing field now in elections. There’s kind of a controlled press in which there’s very little administrative measures against the opposition press, but on the other hand, pro-government media is very heavily rewarded, even from state funds… [This means] there is an economic and political power centre that is overwhelming and couldn’t really make another power centre come about.”

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Before her election as Hungary’s first female president last month, the then Fidesz Vice-President Katalin Novák suggested to me that Western European politics is itself undemocratic, as government policy is driven by a “very, very powerful NGO network, which drives this kind of ongoing aggression against those countries who would like to step out of line in migration and all these big liberal trends dominating European policy today”. In Hungary, due to the government’s use of direct referendums to enshrine policy (such as the question on LGBT education in schools, which is also on the ballot on Sunday’s election), Novák claims politics is more democratic in practice than the European mainstream: “I don’t think that in Western Europe politicians would dare to hold a referendum about migration.”

Struggling to make headway against this consolidated conservative system, six of Hungary’s opposition parties have united in a fractious and unwieldy coalition to unseat Orbán, under the titular leadership of Péter Márki-Zay, a gaffe-prone, small-town mayor and Catholic conservative. Dominated by social and economic liberals but encompassing parties as disparate as the social-democratic Socialist party on the one hand, and the until-recently fascist Jobbik party, which has put aside its black uniforms for a centre-right rebranding, on the other, the opposition are united in an awkward marriage of convenience by one goal only: to depose Orbán. And to do so, their campaign has settled on an unexpected lightning rod issue: the war in Ukraine.

There are few things that can focus a voter’s attention more than a bloody war in a neighbouring country, and Orbán’s long-standing policy of amicable relations with Putin’s Russia makes the issue more pointed here than anywhere else in Europe. At an opposition hustings event this week in Budapest’s Széll Kálmán square — until 2011 Moscow Square — where a crowd of perhaps 200 people had gathered to hear the opposition leaders’ speeches, I asked the neatly-suited, smoothly Atlanticist Márki-Zay how the Ukraine war was feeding into his election campaign.

“Many people just woke up that Orbán’s best friend is a war criminal who’s killing kids, who’s shooting at nuclear power plants,” Márki-Zay told me. “So of course, now Putin is responsible for the war in Ukraine and Orbán is responsible for supporting Putin. Orbán has been a traitor of Europe, has been a traitor of Nato and of course, a traitor of Hungary for 12 years.”

Hungary’s opposition has focused on attacking Orbán for his non-interventionist stance in the Ukraine war. While the Fidesz government has agreed to EU sanctions against Russia and sends humanitarian aid to Ukraine, as well as accepting hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, it refuses to deliver Ukraine weapons or to allow Hungary to be used as a transit point for weapons deliveries from other Nato countries. In return, Fidesz has accused the opposition of being reckless interventionists, eager to embroil Hungarians in a war whose outcome is uncertain, and to torpedo Hungarian living standards by shutting the country off from its energy supplier Russia.

“Unfortunately Orbán controls 90% of the media environment in Hungary,” Márki-Zay asserted, “so he is now attacking the opposition [saying] that we would send untrained kids to die in Ukraine in this war.” So would a Márki-Zay government intervene in Ukraine, I asked? “I will always support Nato’s position because we have to be a loyal member of Nato. We can only rely on defending Hungary with Nato troops in Hungary, which Orbán first denied and then allowed. And then he was also attacking us with allowing arms shipments to Ukraine and [then] Orbán decreed that they can cross Hungary,” he replied. “[He is] a pathetic liar, of course, Orbán, who’s always saying one thing today and changing his mind tomorrow. He was a communist, a liberal, a conservative — and now he’s building a fascist Putinist faction in the European Parliament.”

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Also at the event was Anna Júlia Donáth, a young MEP and leader of the liberal Momentum party, which failed to reach the 5% threshold for representation in Hungary’s last parliamentary election. A scion of a liberal political dynasty, former project manager for an NGO dealing with migrant rights, and member of an EU parliament committee concerned with LGBT issues, Donáth is a Fidesz opponent straight from central casting. I asked her how the Ukraine question was playing in the election campaign.

“It’s about the war of narratives,” she replied, “Orbán builds up a new narrative, which, of course, for us is like a 180-degree change from what he said 24 hours before. But in his communication machine, it works. Yes, indeed, right now, he is a peacemaker. Three weeks ago, he was the most pro-Putin person in Europe.”

Struggling to get the opposition’s message across in the election campaign, Donáth was not sanguine about her coalition’s chances. “Sometimes we really feel like we are fighting against a machine which is impossible to win against,” she told me. “Because they have everything, they don’t just use their own budget. They’re using the state budget for campaigning; this is ridiculous. You can’t win against them.” 

“Two thirds of the country,” she claimed, “are only receiving propaganda media, so they only get a reality built up by the government. And in that reality, they are the best and we are monsters. I can’t blame people for that. They don’t even want to ask questions anymore, because… the system has polarised society on such a level that we cannot even start talking to each other right now.” 

The pre-election polls which a month ago were uncomfortably tight for the government now show Orbán pulling away by a comfortable margin. When I was last in Hungary during the first days of the Ukraine war, government officials were privately downbeat about their prospect of victory, cautioning against over-confident assumptions of success. Four weeks of campaigning later, they are feeling far more positive. 

In an interview at the Scruton cafe at Budapest’s Matthias Corvinus Collegium — part of the flourishing ecosystem of elite conservative institutions created by Fidesz — Viktor Orbán’s strategic advisor Balász Orbán told me that the coming election was Hungary’s “most important ever since the transition period [from communism]” because “it’s about deciding between peace and war. It’s about deciding between peaceful cooperation or coexistence and ideological warfare… I think that the result will be obvious on Sunday, and then this whole turbulent period of time will go away.”

Do most Hungarians support the government’s anti-interventionist stance on Ukraine, I asked? “Yes, yes, yes,” he replied emphatically. “What I feel when I’m traveling all around the country, is that about the Ukrainian conflict, even those who are undecided voters, or who had some willingness to vote for the opposition, even those voting groups are saying that we support the government and government change is not a real option anymore.” Indeed, he added, “if you want to really understand why [the opposition] aren’t successful for like 10, 12 years, and why they’re going to lose the election, that’s the reason: because they think that everything is part of the political issue where they have to somehow get close and in line with the international mainstream liberal approach, but it goes against the majority of the Hungarians’ opinions, even those who are not in favour of Fidesz.”

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But even if staying out of the war appeals to Hungarian voters, Orbán’s position on Ukraine is isolating the government from its closest allies in the EU, with Poland’s president Andrzej Duda stating that it is “hard for me to understand the approach” of Orbán towards Ukraine, and warning that “this policy will be costly for Hungary, very costly”. Similarly, Czechia’s defence minister Jana Černochová posted on Twitter that “I am very sorry that cheap Russian oil is now more important to Hungarian politicians than Ukrainian blood.” Even a planned meeting this week of V4 foreign ministers in Budapest was cancelled at the last minute by Orbán’s erstwhile Central European allies in protest at the Hungarian government’s stance. 

For Hungary’s beleaguered opposition, the war in Ukraine must have seemed like a dramatic, emotive bolt from the blue that could turn the electoral tide in their favour. Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy has even singled out Hungary for criticism in a video address to EU leaders, though this intervention has been criticised in turn by Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó as an unwelcome attempt at “influencing the election results in Hungary.” Walking around Budapest, a liberal city in a conservative country, I saw election posters for Fidesz candidates defaced with the words “PUTIN KILLER”, and on the Buda side of the river, a display of emotionally powerful photographs of the carnage and destruction in Ukraine set up at a busy traffic intersection. 

But for the electorate as a whole, the war seems to have instead prompted a rallying effect around Orbán’s message of stability and security in a newly-dangerous region, with voters apparently heeding his message that a more actively pro-Ukrainian stance would be “getting involved in a war that is not our war, in which we have nothing to gain and everything to lose”. Barring a major upset, Sunday’s polls look set to deliver a historic fourth consecutive term of office for Orbán and the consolidation of Hungary’s fascinating — if controversial — experiment in enshrining conservative cultural and political hegemony. The Orbán model may not, as liberals fear and some conservatives dream, be applicable outside of Hungary’s own unique historic and political context, but it seems for now firmly secure in the heart of Europe.

Like many post-Soviet states, upon becoming independent in 1991, Ukraine faced a serious challenge of nation-building. Ukraine is a multinational, multireligious and multilingual country with little historical experience of independent statehood. Its major ethno-linguistic groups include Ukrainians in the west and Russians in the east. Many speak both languages and their histories and cultural practices are deeply intertwined.

An atavistic nationalism that bases political authority on supposed ancient traditions of ethnic-Ukrainians alone is neither consistent with reality, nor capable of uniting the whole Ukrainian people. The challenge of post-Soviet nation-building was, therefore, to craft a civic nationalism, based around a shared commitment to democratic self-government.

Sadly, Ukrainian elites failed in this task. Indeed, as Yuliya Yurchenko documents in her compelling but depressing book, Ukraine and the Empire of Capital, they were too busy plundering the remnants of the Soviet economy, with officials and their criminal-business networks transforming themselves into powerful, predatory oligarchs while the rest of their society fell into penury.

From 1990 to 2000, Ukraine’s GDP fell from $81.4bn to just $31.2bn. Hyperinflation, peaking at 10,155% in 1993, destroyed people’s living standards, creating long-term unemployment, especially among the young. The oligarchs had little to offer citizens, relying increasingly on fraud, corruption and intimidation to stay in power.

In this context, reformers — who took power after the 2004 “orange revolution” — looked to EU and Nato membership as a way to transform their society. This attempt to move “from Brezhnev to Brussels” occurred widely in post-communist Eastern Europe. In Ukraine, reformers hoped that EU rules would discipline or destroy the oligarchs and root out corruption by imposing free-market reforms.

But this was a very dangerous strategy. As Yurchenko observes, the EU-Ukraine Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) signed in 2008 would, if fully implemented, devastate small businesses and workers by exposing them to continental competition. Meanwhile, many oligarchs have found ways to exploit the opening of markets and limit measures that would damage their interests.

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Other oligarchs resisted liberalisation by rallying the people of eastern Ukraine into thinking that pro-Western elites were not heeding their interests. Donetsk, where many oligarchic businesses are based, has deeper economic, linguistic and cultural ties to Russia, and people there have often complained of being neglected and sneered at by the West, despite constituting a substantial share of Ukraine’s GDP and population.

The oligarchs began harnessing this resentment, fostering a growing east/west split in Ukrainian politics. The “East” — led by Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions — retook national power following the 2010 presidential election. Yanukovych’s subsequent persecution of his opponents drew the ire of Washington and Brussels, but this only reinforced his preference for stronger ties with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), reflecting the economic needs of his eastern base.

This growing internationalisation of Ukraine’s domestic struggles was perilous, given the geopolitical context. Russia had stridently opposed Nato’s eastward expansion since the Nineties. Gorbachev had asked Washington to disband Nato in exchange for the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, while Yeltsin had asked for a new, inclusive security architecture that incorporated Russia into Europe, only to be rebuffed. The latter later warned the West that a Cold War was giving way to a cold peace, with Nato expansion entailing “nothing but humiliation for Russia”.

When the West proceeded anyway, Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, made it clear that Moscow saw Nato expansion as directed at Russia. In April 2008, a Nato summit welcomed Georgia and Ukraine’s aspiration to join the alliance. Putin invaded Georgia a few months later, rather than see it join this anti-Russian bloc. Many analysts, from the Cold Warrior George Kennan to the realist professor John Mearsheimer, predicted disaster if Nato continued to expand towards Russia’s borders.

The same, to a lesser extent, applied to EU expansion. Putin described the DCFTA as a “big threat” to Russia, as it would allow EU exports to enter tariff-free, via Ukraine, and “choke” the Russian economy. EU officials insisted their cooperation with Ukraine was merely technical, refusing to recognise the geopolitical implications.

The 2014 “Euromaidan” crisis saw the culmination of this toxic fracturing of the Ukrainian nation. In 2013, President Yanukovych rejected the DCFTA, opting for closer ties with the EEU. This prompted widespread protests, which were egged on by senior EU and American politicians, despite the growing involvement of far-Right nationalists. Eventually, amid escalating unrest and violence, Yanukovych fled to Russia. But while his opponents in western Ukraine celebrated, his eastern supporters perceived a “fascist” coup against their democratically-elected president. The Ukrainian state’s authority collapsed in the east, allowing opportunistic pro-Russian separatists to seize power in many areas, while Russia reacted by invading Crimea.

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Instead of moving to reassure their fellow citizens and build an inclusive national project, Ukraine’s pro-Western faction instead doubled down. Under the new president, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko, the Government purged eastern politicians and officials from the state, sending many fleeing into exile, and banned Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions, intensifying the crisis of representation in the east. It also launched military offensives against the separatists, triggering further Russian intervention, producing heavy casualties and a grinding stalemate.

Neither Poroshenko, nor his successor, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, have implemented the Minsk accords agreed with Russia in 2014-15, which proposed to settle the conflict by granting autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk. Instead, the new government loudly sought full membership of Nato and the EU — measures that could only undermine Ukraine’s national sovereignty. Yet the EU has not — and will not — actually admit Ukraine, as it is still reeling from the divisions induced by the last round of enlargement into post-communist Eastern Europe and does not want to take responsibility for a war-torn country. But it was happy to pretend otherwise, flattering Ukrainian elites while pushing neoliberal reforms on them.

The Poroshenko government enacted the EU DCFTA, rapidly introducing structural reforms to comply with EU rules. Facing rising debt amid economic decline, the Ukrainian state became economically dependent on the EU and IMF. Foreigners were brought in to run three ministries and IMF advisors were embedded with the central bank, entailing further losses of sovereignty. Austerity, neoliberalism and further privatisation benefited well-positioned oligarchs but did nothing to alleviate mounting poverty.

Far from reaching out to Ukraine’s ethnic Russians, Kyiv has actively promoted a narrowly Ukrainian, anti-Russian form of nationalism, reflected in language policy, “de-communisation”, and the secession of the Ukrainian Orthodox church from its Russian “mother” church. As Yurchenko observes, instead of reconsolidating Ukraine, these measures only “further divided the broken nation”.

This failure of Ukrainian politicians to represent the whole nation has led both sides to turn to foreigners to bolster their domestic position. The pro-Russian faction appears backwards and corrupt, offering little to inspire and unite the country, and ultimately relies on Russian intervention to prevent Ukraine slipping from its grasp. But nor can the pro-Western faction command the consent of the whole nation. It was prepared to overthrow a democratically-elected president to get its own way, and has persistently sought to lock in its preferences against internal opposition by sacrificing Ukrainian national sovereignty to supranational organisations.

Russia’s role in this disaster is obvious. It is hardly surprising that Ukrainian nationalism has taken a sharply anti-Russian turn given the annexation of Crimea, Russian support for separatist fighters, and Putin’s open contempt for Ukrainian independence and sovereignty — let alone the recent invasion.

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But the West has also been reckless and irresponsible. Russia has made perfectly clear that it will not tolerate the expansion of the Western sphere of influence up to its borders. It wants at least a neutral buffer zone between itself and Nato, and ideally a friendly sphere of influence among its post-Soviet neighbours. We might wish this were not so, but it is a geopolitical fact. Russia’s willingness to use force to achieve its goals — at great reputational and economic cost — has been beyond doubt since 2008. To put this into perspective, we can imagine how the US might react if Canada sought to join a Russian-led military alliance — or merely recall Washington’s reaction when Cuba did so.

The West had two strategic options. Either it could acknowledge and accommodate Russian interests, or it could defy them, ushering Ukraine into Nato and deploying overwhelming military power to deter Russia from using force. Instead, it did neither. It allowed its Ukrainian allies falsely to believe that they could rely on the EU and Nato, yet did not nearly enough to deter Putin militarily. This has encouraged the Ukrainian government to prioritise integration with Russia’s enemies over rapprochement with its own citizens, while fanning Russian anxieties. Had Nato been clearer, Ukrainian elites might have come to their senses and pursued a less reckless course of action.

The only solution to this crisis, aside from war and devastation, is for Ukraine to become a neutral state, as Finland was during the Cold War. The sovereignty of the Ukrainian people — their capacity to work out their differences and collectively determine their life together in a peaceful and democratic manner — can only be enhanced if all sides renounce their external ties, and foreign powers cease meddling in Ukrainian politics.

To be truly sovereign, the Ukrainian state must be seen to represent the whole national population. The push towards Nato and EU membership — only intensified by Russia’s aggressive reaction — has fragmented the Ukrainian nation. It is hard to see how it can be reunited if this continues; bloody partition seems more likely.

Sovereignty does not imply total control over the state’s internal or external environment; it only entails self-rule, and this requires political realism. This was a source of some confusion in the Brexit debate. Many Thatcherite Eurosceptics foolishly believed that the UK could restore its sovereignty — its capacity to make laws and adopt policies inconsistent with EU rules — while retaining full access to the EU’s single market. The EU had no interest in agreeing such attractive terms; on the contrary, its interest lay in making Brexit as painful as possible.

Today, the Ukrainians clearly have no more “sovereign right” to join the EU or Nato than Brexit Britain had a “sovereign right” to full access to EU markets. Reflecting their own interests, these organisations will not admit Ukraine. This is the geopolitical reality that any truly sovereign Ukrainian government must reckon with.

Of course, Russia must withdraw from Ukraine. But the only way for the Ukrainian people to achieve national sovereignty is for all sides within Ukraine to cease internationalising their political conflict, and for foreign powers to cease their meddling. Neutrality offers the only context in which Ukraine can restore its territorial integrity and secure peace. It also provides the only context in which pro-Western forces will be forced to reckon with their pro-Russian counterparts, and find a more consensual way to exist.

The polls tell the story. Prime Ministers with a disapproval rating of 70% rarely last long. Nobody defies gravity forever. Margaret Thatcher didn’t; nor did Tony Blair, despite winning three elections. Johnson has won only one. And the next test is not far away. On 5 May voters across the country will go to the polls in the local elections. A terrible set of results, and more letters of no-confidence will surely flood in. For Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss and their rivals, the prize must seem so tantalisingly close…

And yet, and yet. Political history is littered with examples of potential leaders who struck too soon or waited too long, future England captains whose moment never came. Nobody remembers the R. A. Butler governments of the late Fifties and early Sixties, because they never happened. A decade later, Roy Jenkins sharpened the knife, raised it high about his head and prepared to plunge it deep into Harold Wilson’s back… but the blow never fell. And a decade after that, everybody knew Tony Benn was going to become Labour leader one day — but he never did.

The list goes on. Willie Whitelaw delayed and delayed, loyal to the last to the beleaguered Ted Heath, and then found himself overtaken by, of all things, a woman. Michael Heseltine timed his deadly attack on Margaret Thatcher to perfection, only to discover that many of his fellow Conservative MPs would never forgive him for it.

Kenneth Clarke won three separate parliamentary ballots in three different Tory leadership contests, yet never wore the crown. David Davis arrived at the Conservative conference as a runaway favourite with two busty women in T-shirts reading “It’s DD for me”, only to find that the party faithful preferred a smooth-talking shepherd’s-hut enthusiast instead. Even Boris Johnson’s first leadership bid exploded on the launch pad, sabotaged by his chief engineer.

And then there’s the most disastrous campaign of all, the Labour moderates’ risible attempt to unseat Jeremy Corbyn in the summer of 2016. “Angela is a star in the Labour firmament. She will be at my right hand throughout this contest and if I am successful, Angela will be alongside me as my right-hand woman.” The words of the future Labour leader Owen Smith, talking about his erstwhile rival Angela Eagle. That was just five-and-a-half years ago. Dame Angela is still there somewhere, lurking unnoticed on the backbenches. But poor Smith isn’t even an MP.

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It would be nice to claim there’s a clever formula for success, or to tease out some immutable “lessons from history”, but that would be disingenuous. There’s no formula. Indeed, the joy of political leadership campaigns is that nobody can quite predict the strange chemistry that makes a winner, the peculiar combination of luck and personality, the unforeseeable, unrepeatable point when man (or woman) meets moment.

Take Labour’s Roy Jenkins, the embodiment of metropolitan citizen-of-the-world liberalism, whose admirers often describe him as one of the best Prime Ministers Britain never had. In the spring of 1968, the only question was not if, but when. Following the humiliating devaluation of the pound a few months earlier, the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, seemed crippled beyond recovery. The public had tired of his endless slipperiness, and as a smart and urbane crisis Chancellor — Rishi Sunak parallel alert! — Jenkins seemed the only plausible successor.

On the Labour benches Jenkins commanded what he called “a dedicated group of commandos, waiting as it were with their faces blackened for the opportunity to launch a Dieppe raid against the forces of opportunism”. Their leaders reported that they had assembled an elaborate system of ‘dissident cells’ comprising more than a hundred supporters, as well as an ‘inner group’ who would co-ordinate the revolt. At a secret meeting on 17 June the chief plotters even produced a definitive list of some 120 potential rebels. All they needed was the signal to strike.

It never came. A couple of weeks later, Jenkins told them to hold off for the time being. The premiership was so close — but he “did not want to be implicated in actually launching an action”. A convicted assassin, he believed, would never wear the crown: “I will never be caught with a dagger in my hand unless it is already smoking with my enemy’s blood”.

So Jenkins waited, and waited… and the moment passed. Wilson stayed on at Number 10 and Labour lost the next election. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, Jenkins lost his sheen. He went from tomorrow’s man to yesterday’s, without ever having been today’s. By the time Wilson retired in the spring of 1976, Jenkins’s chance had vanished. He had fallen out with the party’s Left wing over Europe, but there was a palpable sense, too, that he lacked the killer instinct.

Later, in his memoirs, Jenkins fell back on the excuse that he had never been ambitious enough, a clever way of complimenting himself for his own failure. But some of his supporters told a different story. “Roy was too ambitious, not insufficiently ambitious,” wrote his friend David Marquand. “He never thought it was the right moment; he always thought it was too risky”. The stakes were too high; he was paralysed by the fear of missing out. I wonder if, one day, Sunak’s friends will tell a similar story?

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What of Jenkins’s insistence that the assassin never wins the ultimate prize? Well, there’s always the lesson of Heseltine in 1990. But such a flamboyant showman would have been deeply distrusted by many Tory MPs even if he’d never lifted a finger against Margaret Thatcher. And there are plenty of telling examples of political hitmen who made it all the way. Stanley Baldwin, instrumental in terminating Austen Chamberlain’s leadership in 1922, became Tory leader himself two years later. And Harold Macmillan succeeded Anthony Eden in 1957 precisely because many Tory MPs thought that by knifing Eden in the back, he had showed the cold, single-minded ruthlessness that Rab Butler lacked.

Then there’s the best-known political assassin of all, an object lesson in pitiless opportunism. Margaret Thatcher had spent the first four years of the Seventies nodding and smiling at Ted Heath’s policy U-turns. Not once had she whispered a word of dissent. And when, after the second general election of 1974, she announced that she was challenging him for the leadership, nobody seriously thought she would win.

The story goes that when, as a courtesy, Thatcher visited Heath to warn him of her intentions, he said coldly: “You’ll lose.” The Conservative parliamentary party, agreed his old rival Enoch Powell, “wouldn’t put up with those hats and that accent”. Even Mrs Thatcher’s family thought she was wasting her time. “You must be out of your mind,” remarked her husband Denis, not entirely supportively. “You haven’t got a hope.”

Yet as it turned out, Thatcher beat Heath by 130 votes to 119. (“A black day,” declared another of his old rivals, Reginald Maudling.) And now the strange magic of leadership contests took effect. With Heath gone, four new contenders, notably his lieutenant Willie Whitelaw, threw their hats into the ring. But it was too late; all the momentum lay with Thatcher. As the Telegraph remarked, it looked as if “a whole herd of fainthearts left it to a courageous and able woman to topple a formidable leader” and then “ganged up to deny her her just reward”. When the second ballot was held a week later, she stormed to victory. “My God!” exclaimed one Tory vice-chairman when the news came through. “The bitch has won!”

The other great canard about leadership elections is that you should keep an eye on the dark horse, with John Major’s victory in 1990 as Exhibit A. But was Major such a dark horse? He was, after all, Chancellor of the Exchequer, having just served a short stint as Foreign Secretary. It’s true that if the leadership election had been held a year or two earlier, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. But Major had timed his run to perfection, his victory a perfect example of how, in politics, you make your own luck. It would have been easy for him to waver in 1990: to bide his time and sit this one out. But he calculated, quite rightly, that he would never have a better chance. With cool, understated efficiency, he took it.

In reality, most dark horses never come remotely close to winning, and many soon relapse into utter obscurity. Who now recalls Peter Lilley’s leadership pitch in 1997? How many people look back on Michael Ancram as the great lost leader of 2001? Is there, perhaps, some parallel world in which Stephen Crabb faced Liam Fox in the final round of the Tory contest in 2016? Can there really be a universe where Mark Harper battled Esther McVey for the crown three years later?

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Yet all of these people, presumably, must have imagined the pieces slotting into place: their colleagues marvelling at their unexpected talents, the other contenders falling away, the momentum sweeping them towards that historic audience at Buckingham Palace. Alas, it almost never works out that way. If you enter the contest as an outsider, you’re probably doomed before you start, because most MPs like backing winners.

A good example is one of the most colourful dark horses in modern political history, the hard-drinking, grammar-school-smiting Labour intellectual Tony Crosland. When Wilson resigned in 1976, Crosland fancied his chances. He looked at his rivals. Jim Callaghan, the favourite: too old. Michael Foot: too Left-wing. Roy Jenkins: too Right-wing. Denis Healey: too arrogant. Tony Benn: too mad. And it all seemed so straightforward. One by one the others would blow up, and Crosland would come through the middle.

So the future Prime Minister summoned his protégé, Roy Hattersley, who would surely play a key role in the victorious campaign. They got straight down to business. The most important thing, Crosland said, was to get a “decent vote” in the first ballot, and build strength from there. “I take it you’ll vote for me.”

Silence. Then, at last, Hattersley confessed. He didn’t want to waste his vote, and had already promised to back Callaghan. Crosland couldn’t believe his ears. It was all falling apart, and the campaign had barely started. “You’ll not vote for me?” he said. “Then fuck off.”

Crosland finished dead last in the 1976 leadership election, with just 19 votes. And the winner? Callaghan, just as everybody had predicted. Dark horses aren’t dark horses by accident. Favourites are favourites for a reason.

So are there no lessons at all for Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss — or for Jeremy Hunt, Penny Mordaunt, Tom Tugendhat and the host of other putative dark horses? Well, here are a few thoughts. Most politicians only get one chance. Miss your moment, and it never comes again. Courage is usually more admirable — and more effective — than caution. If you do stand, don’t say anything stupid. Ideally, don’t say anything at all.

None of this is very helpful, I know — not least because there are so many obvious exceptions. So to finish, here’s one ironclad rule of leadership contests, which may not be what the current hopefuls want to hear.

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Really, honestly, it would be better to lose. Losers always have more fun. Just ask yourself: would Roy Jenkins have been able to enjoy quite so many agreeable three-course dinners if he’d been Prime Minister? Or would he rather have been defending the Government’s policy on salmonella? Would Denis Healey have been free to appear on TV with Roger Moore and Dame Edna Everage? Or would he rather have been at a meeting in Frankfurt with Helmut Kohl? Would Ken Clarke have been happier organising a junior ministerial appointment for John Bercow, or smoking his fifth cigar of the night in some West End jazz club?

For this is the great unspoken truth about leadership contests: it’s a competition to see who’s going to be the most despised person in the country in a couple of years’ time. Yes, you get to have your picture on the Downing Street stairs, just along from Gordon Brown and Theresa May. But as they would surely tell you, being Prime Minister is awful. Everything goes wrong, and everybody hates you. So instead of agonising about when to declare and what to say, just don’t do it. You’ll have a much happier life if you stay out, and the country will thank you for it.

Here endeth the lesson. Liz, Rishi: don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The latter had made his intention to become president rather clear: Draghi’s approval ratings as Prime Minister are falling, and likely to worsen as the country’s post-pandemic social and economic crisis unfolds and opposition to draconian Covid measures grows; he was, in effect, hoping to pass on that buck. Moreover, from the highest chair in the Italian state, he would have been able to oversee and steer any government for the next seven years.

Yet his odds faded as politicians failed to agree on a replacement prime minister with sufficient support or clout to see the government through to the end of the parliamentary term in 2023, thus raising the prospect of early elections — something hardly any MP wanted, for obvious pecuniary reasons. At that point, after a few failed attempts by the parties of the Right to gain support for a joint candidate, all the major parties (with the exception of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy) opted for plan B and overwhelmingly re-elected Mattarella.

He represents the best possible outcome for the Italian and Euro-Atlantic establishment, if not for Draghi himself: the Draghi government will remain in place until the next elections, with a staunch defender of the status quo in the role of president.

From the establishment’s perspective, it also represents a win-win scenario for 2023. If a Right-wing coalition fails to secure a majority, they will be forced to find an agreement with other parties on a new “government of national unity”, much like the current one — and Draghi would be the most obvious candidate to head it. At the same time, if they were to succeed in securing a majority, they would still need a president capable of “vouching” for a Right-wing government and safeguarding it against any backlashes from financial markets or the European institutions — and Draghi would, again, be the most obvious choice. In that case Mattarella could step down, citing old age (he’ll be 81 next year), and pass the ball the Draghi.

That said, another positive unintended consequence of the election — again, from the establishment’s perspective — is to have made the prospect of a Right-wing majority in 2023 even less probable. The Right-wing alliance — Meloni, Salvini and Berlusconi — is more fractured than ever, and some even wonder whether it still exists. Berlusconi is no doubt furious at the other parties for not supporting Forza Italia’s candidate, Maria Elisabetta Casellati, the President of the Senate, in the secret of the ballot box. Meanwhile, Meloni chastised Salvini’s decision to support Mattarella, tweeting “I can’t believe it”.

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Indeed, it was the Democratic Party (PD), the main sponsor of the Draghi-or-Mattarella ticket, which once again came out on top, confirming itself as the real power broker of Italian politics — the party “that never wins an election but is always in power”, as the joke goes. As for the Five Star Movement, which has gone from being an anti-establishment party to an establishment wannabe, it is heading for an internal showdown: Giuseppe Conte, former prime minister and leader of the party, failed to whip up support for the unlikely choice of Elisabetta Belloni, head of Italy’s secret service; meanwhile, Luigi Di Maio, the party’s true éminence grise, was working behind the scenes to reconfirm Mattarella.

Yet on a deeper level, Mattarella’s re-election represents a failure of the entire political system, a choice that confirms the fundamental powerlessness and futility of Italy’s political parties, and of parliament more generally, and their existential fear of anything that actually resembles true politics; that is, a situation where they are called to make actual high-stakes decisions. The pathological infantilism of Italy’s political class is the result of 20 years of external constraint — that is, of the country being essentially managed by outside forces, in particular the European Union.

Political parties are well aware of the fact that, even if they manage to secure a majority in parliament, they lack all the “normal” instruments of economic policy necessary to actually steer the economy in one direction or the other, since these have all been ceded to the EU. Over time, this has created an enfeebled political class, which wouldn’t have the guts to make high-stake decisions — à la Brexit, so to speak — even if if had the means to do so. All of which explains why, in times of crisis, Italy’s political parties tend to pass the buck to technocrats such as Draghi and to the technocratic apparatuses of the state — such as the presidency — by having the latter take responsibility for policies, usually decided at the supranational level, which the parties don’t want to take responsibility for (but for which they can’t conceive an alternative).

It’s a TINA mentality on steroids, which is shared by the “progressive” civil society from which most of the support for establishment figures such as Draghi and Mattarella comes from. We’re talking of a relatively well-off minority that is terrified of anything that seems to threaten what they perceive to be “normality” — be it the rabble-rousing economic populists of the post-crisis years, the Eurosceptics or, today, those critical of vaccine mandates. Paradoxically, progressives have become so terrified of change that they have effectively become the most conservative bloc of Italian society, and the greatest supporters of anything and anyone upholding the status quo.

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Mattarella, with his sleepy, reassuring gaze, is the living embodiment of this comforting “normality” — and indeed enjoys widespread popular support for this very reason. By the same token, his re-election perfectly epitomises the transformation of the president’s role in the past few decades, and even years, from guarantor of the constitution to guarantor of the EU’s treaties and rules.

In 2018, for instance, following an alliance between the Five Star Movement and the League, the two parties, as required by the Italian constitution, submitted their choice of government ministers to the president for approval. Yet their proposed economic minister, Paolo Savona, was vetoed by Mattarella due to his euro-critical stance, forcing the two parties to opt for the more status quo-friendly Giovanni Tria.

More recently, when Matteo Renzi pulled the plug on the Giuseppe Conte’s second government in January 2021, Mattarella refused to dissolve parliament and call for early elections, instead working behind-the-scenes to ensure Conte’s replacement by Draghi, much like Giorgio Napolitano had done with Monti a decade earlier.

And over the past year, Mattarella has gone out of his way to vocally defend practically every policy of the Draghi government, including the more legally and constitutionally shaky ones — such as the introduction of vaccine passes and a de facto vaccine mandate, as well as the maintenance of a semi-permanent state of emergency. If one thing is clear, it is that Mattarella’s re-election will further strengthen Draghi’s authoritarian and anti-democratic grip on the country — now redubbed “Draghistan” by his critics — as the prime minister knows perfectly well that Mattarella won’t raise any issues of constitutionality in regard to his policies.

The Draghi-Mattarella regime exemplifies in many ways a disturbing evolution in Italy’s long-standing reliance on technocrats: what Christopher J. Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti have dubbed technopopulism, which combines populist rhetoric to represent “the people” with technocratic claims to possess the necessary competence, experience and authority for translating its will into policy.

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Draghi, for example, recently painted himself as “a grandpa at the service of the state, with no particular aspiration” — that is, a common citizen who simply has the best interest of the nation at heart, a rather surreal claim coming from a former central banker who is considered by many to be “the most powerful person in Europe” and who is pursuing a very clear neoliberal political-economic agenda. In a similar vein, Mattarella stated that he had “other plans” but that he was willing to put his wishes aside and place himself once again at service of the nation, in what has been painted by the media as proof of the President’s supreme sense of selflessness, devotion and self-sacrifice.

This technopopulist mixture of technocracy and demagoguery is deeply worrying, and is at the root of Italy’s slide into autocracy — characterised by the centralisation of all major decisions in the hands of Draghi himself, the embarrassing level of government cheerleading by the media, and the silencing of any dissenting voices. That Twenties’ whiff just gets stronger and stronger every day. And with Mattarella in power, it doesn’t look like it will disappear soon.