Timothy Garton Ash is the author of Homelands: A Personal History of Europe and writes the newsletter History of the Present. His upcoming book, Europe in 7½ Chapters, will be published in October 2026.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Timothy Garton Ash discuss the crisis of Labour and rise of Reform, why Europeans are struggling to adapt to a new political, cultural, and technological age, and the future of the war in Ukraine.
Will you be in London on Sunday, September 6? I’ll be interviewing Francis Fukuyama about his life and thought to mark the publication of his memoir In the Realm of the Last Man at the Sekforde at 5pm. Find out more and book tickets here. Paying subscribers can access a code for free tickets here. —Yascha
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I thought we would do a little European tour with you. I didn’t tell you that we had hired you as a tour guide, but you are our historically and politically informed tour guide. We are going to do a little trip from the northwest of the continent to the southeast in rough geographical order. We will start with local elections in Britain. That does not sound particularly exciting.
The results are coming in as we speak, and they seem to herald a very significant political shift in British politics. What is your read on what is happening?
Timothy Garton Ash: The motto for my intellectual tour company is, of course, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” That goes on the brochure. These elections, which are both local but also Scottish and Welsh national elections, are absolutely fascinating. What they show you is that this country, which voted to leave Europe just about 10 years ago on the 23rd of June 2016, is now becoming ever more European in its politics.
Number one, by far the biggest winner in England is Reform UK, which is a classic hard-right populist nationalist party of the kind we basically did not have in British politics for decades, if not centuries. It is very like Fratelli d’Italia, or Rassemblement National in France, or Alternative for Deutschland. I sometimes like to call it Fratelli d’Ingleterra, the Brothers of England. They are sweeping the board, taking votes both from Labour and the Conservatives.
Finding number two, it is also becoming very European: tremendous fragmentation. This used to be the country of the two-party system: Labour and Conservatives, His or Her Majesty’s Government, and His or Her Majesty’s Opposition. Now we have a five-party system in England; and if you take in the nationalists in Scotland and Wales, both of whom are doing very well, you have a seven-party system.
Thirdly, as in Catalonia and the Basque Country, the discontents that flow into a populist vote also flow into votes for separatists, nationalists, or regional parties. The Scottish National Party does spectacularly well in Scotland and, for the first time ever, Plaid Cymru seems to be doing pretty well in Wales. Welcome to Britain, a very typically European country.
Mounk: We are in this strange situation where the Conservatives have been discredited by a long and very chaotic stretch in government. A whole bunch of different prime ministers struggled to deliver on Brexit in the way they promised. They now have a rather impressive new leader in the form of Kemi Badenoch, who has been improving in the polls a little bit in the last months. However, that last decade-plus of chaotic government is really hanging around her neck like a millstone.
We have a Labour Party, the other big traditional party in that two-party system you invoked, that was elected on a huge parliamentary landslide in the general elections about two years ago, but not with a huge share of the vote. Already at that point, part of the reason for its landslide victory was the fragmentation of the political system, but they managed to concentrate enough of that vote on themselves to have this huge parliamentary majority.
They came in with a leader, Keir Starmer, who is a little bit of a chameleon. He was a loyal adjutant to Jeremy Corbyn when the Labour Party was extremely far left. He managed to win the leadership of the Labour Party by being somewhat acceptable to different wings of the party. Then he became very moderate as the leader of the Labour Party and clearly expelled the Corbyn wing from the party, but he never really seemed to have a positive program. The British public has soured on him very quickly once he got into office.
So perhaps the first question is, why is it that Labour has fallen from grace quite so quickly? And why is it that the Conservatives have not been able to pick up the slack of an unpopular incumbent political party, as might be expected in a top two-party system that still has a hold over the country?
Garton Ash: Remember that Labour’s “landslide” victory was, to a significant degree, because the right was split between the Conservatives and Reform UK. Actually, the Labour share of the vote was slightly down from the previous election, so it was not a landslide in that sense.
Secondly, it turns out that Keir Starmer is not a very good politician. He has made a series of often foolish mistakes and an endless series of u-turns. These involve apparently trivial matters, like appointing Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to Washington. Then, more material from the Epstein files is released, and it turns out that Mandelson was deeply compromised and even sharing inside information from the Cabinet table. That in itself seems trivial, but there has been a whole series of those incidents.
Above all, what are they doing with power? What are they doing with this enormous parliamentary majority? It is totally unclear to everyone where they are going. That is partly because it is difficult to work out where a post-Brexit Britain goes when it is being abandoned by its “best friend,” the United States, and has very little money left in the kitty. With soaring public debt, deficits, and an overburdened welfare state, it is difficult to work out what you would do in those circumstances; but whatever it is you might do, they are not doing it.
Mounk: What about the Conservatives? Why is it that they have not been able to pick up the slack? Is it just the fact that they have been in government for ten-plus years and people are sick of them, and not enough time has passed for them to be able to represent themselves? Is it that Kemi Badenoch is not effective as a leader, or that she has not figured out a way forward for a center-right party?
Is it part of a broader trend? We used to talk about the slow death of social democracy in the 2000s and early 2010s, but it turned out that the slow death of social democracy was just a precursor to the slow death of the old catch-all parties. Christian Democrats and Conservatives across Europe and other countries are now declining in the way that social democrats were, and the Tories are just one instance of that.
Garton Ash: I incline toward the second explanation because that is what we are seeing across Europe. One could even go more broadly than Europe. What was peculiar, not just to Britain but to Europe post-1945, was liberal conservatism, called Christian Democracy on the continent. Now, as we see everywhere, the barrier between that and hard-right nationalist populism is breaking down. If anything, the voters are going off to the hard-right populists, so I would favor that structural explanation.
On top of that comes 14 years of Tory misrule. People have not forgotten that from 2010 to 2024, we had a Conservative government which implemented stark austerity. For many people, even Conservative remain voters, they took the country out of the EU, and everyone can now see that was a terrible mistake.
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Then there is a slightly sensitive issue, which is that on the right, and particularly for populists, immigration is the key issue. Immigration is not just immigration; it is about deeper cultural changes in the country. People feel they do not recognize their country anymore. If you have voters like that who are, say, elderly, white, and middle class, you have a leader who is extremely impressive in her own way, Kemi Badenoch, but who actually grew up in Nigeria and did not know she was a British citizen until the age of 14. She is up against Nigel Farage, the bluff, pint-of-beer-quaffing man from the 19th hole in the golf club. That is an uncomfortable subject to point to, but I do think that for an elderly electorate—and the Tories have an elderly electorate—that is a significant part of the explanation.
Mounk: If I am remembering correctly, Kemi Badenoch was born in the United Kingdom, then grew up mostly in Nigeria until she was a teenager and came to Britain. Unlike Kamala Harris, who claimed to have worked in McDonald’s, but I think there was never any very strong evidence that she had, she did indeed work in McDonald’s and work her way up in a very impressive way. I met her once when I was giving a presentation in Parliament when she was a backbench MP and I had never heard of her. She came and asked a number of somewhat aggressive but very perceptive questions. I remember being very impressed with her at the time and have been following her rise with interest since. There are many things I disagree with her on, but from that first meeting, I thought that she was a very impressive person.
I am a little skeptical about the role that race plays in this for the following reason. I had a debate with a good friend who knows British politics well when there was the leadership election for the Conservative Party. The way it works is that the Members of Parliament narrow the field down to two candidates, and then there is a choice among the membership of the Conservative Party. The membership of the Conservative Party skews old, very conservative, and somewhat away from London. I thought that Kemi Badenoch would win that election quite clearly. My friend was making the same argument that you just made, which is to say, those old Tory Party members are very conservative and quite wedded to an old vision of England. Are they really going to pick somebody like Kemi Badenoch over Robert Jenrick, a white guy who went to university at the same time as me in Cambridge?
Kemi Badenoch won that election very clearly. In that case, it seems we have quite strong evidence that this was not so strong an obstacle to her. It seems to me more broadly that when you look at even right-wing populist movements, people are very open to voting for ethnic minority candidates that they feel represent their views and that actually reassure them that immigrants to the country are able to stand up for the values of their homeland as they see them. Kemi Badenoch, of course, is not averse to a little bit of culture warring. She does very loudly represent what people on the right of politics would think of as traditional English values.
To me, it is not obvious. Surely there are going to be some people who are not going to vote for her because she is Black, because they are out-and-out racist. There are also going to be a lot of people who actually find that very appealing, who say that she is able to make a very full-throated, persuasive case for those values precisely because she is not the stereotype of the person who might make those claims. Why do you think that she was able to win the membership vote in the Conservative Party so strongly? Is that a very different electorate? What is the difference?
Garton Ash: First of all, I really do not want to put too much weight on this particular factor. I think the other two factors are significantly more important. Secondly, I was very impressed when they went for Kemi Badenoch. A party which had the first Jewish prime minister in British history, Benjamin Disraeli, the first female prime minister in Margaret Thatcher, and now they go for a woman of color. Very impressive.
The fact is that an awful lot of Conservative voters have gone to Reform UK. The man you mentioned, Robert Jenrick, who was effectively the runner-up and a leading figure in the Conservative Party, is now a leading figure in Reform UK, along with several other former Conservative ministers.
Let us put to one side the question of race, which in Britain means something slightly different than in the United States and for Kemi Badenoch. The fact is that at the drop of a hat, not just voters but also ministers and senior politicians from the Conservative Party are going off to Reform UK.
Mounk: As a side note, Robert Jenrick was at university with me studying history as well and nobody can remember him, which is a very strange thing.
Garton Ash: It is said—although I am not sure if this is a reliable authority, but according to the columnist Matthew Parris—that he is the only person to have lost an election in which he was the only candidate.
Mounk: I can disconfirm that because the same thing happened when I was an undergraduate in my college. There was a women’s officer for the Students Union for which the electorate was exclusively women. The candidate who ran had electoral posters which were slightly ill-conceived in general, and perhaps particularly ill-conceived given that the electorate was exclusively female, which read: “Vote for me because I’m gorgeous.”
She lost to the option RON, which is short for Reopen Nominations. There is at least one other election I can remember in which that happened.
Garton Ash : Robert Generic is his nickname, and the point is that he is so transparently opportunistic and chameleon-like that it helps explain why he lost to Kemi Badenoch. That is by the by. I think these are secondary issues.
Now, just one further word on England specifically: let us remember that the Conservative Party is the most successful party in modern political history bar none. I would still not want to write it off. When the memory of 14 years of Tory misrule is a bit more remote and Reform UK starts getting some scandals, which it is bound to do, it may be a different story by the time of the general election, which has to happen before 2029.
Mounk: Speaking of Reform UK, tell us a little bit more about Nigel Farage and Reform UK. Earlier, you compared the party to Fratelli d’Italia, to the Rassemblement National, and to the Alternative for Deutschland. I increasingly think that we may need to make finer distinctions between different right-populist movements. I certainly think that Reform UK is a right-populist movement.
I see the resemblance in certain respects to Fratelli d’Italia, though Italy and Britain are very different countries. I also see the resemblance to someone like Marine Le Pen or even Jordan Bardella, who are clearly in the right-populist camp but have also distanced themselves from the post-fascist roots of what used to be the Front National and the figure of Marine’s father, Jean-Marie.
It does also seem to me as though there is a different wing of European right-wing populism which retains a deeper flirtation with the past and which is more deeply uncomfortable with any form of ethnic and religious diversity. I want to see to what extent you stand by the idea that Reform and the AfD in Germany are comparable, or to what extent it is helpful to think of those as really part of the same families of political parties.
Garton Ash: I think it is. It is certainly more like those classic continental populist hard-right parties than anything we have seen in mainstream British politics for a very long time. Such parties have been absolutely marginal in British politics. In that sense, it is more like them. Its major themes, like immigration, are very much the same, as is the mix of cultural conservatism and nationalism with more left-wing social and economic policy ideas, such as generous provision for welfare state pensions.
In its basic morphology, you are right that it is a more moderate or civilized version of some on that spectrum. It is very much more to the Meloni end of the spectrum than the Orbán or the East German AfD. That is undoubtedly the case.
An important point is that the effect of all this is not necessarily that we see a Nigel Farage Prime Minister, but that either we have a coalition of Conservatives and Reform UK—which is exactly what we are seeing all over Europe, the temptation for the center-right to go with the hard-right because there is no alternative—or we get a reform of our electoral system. If the only party that is doing well out of the electoral system seems to be Reform UK, and the former big parties—Labour and Conservatives, along with Lib Dems, Greens, and others—all go down to under 20%, then suddenly there might actually be a majority for the reform of the electoral system.
Mounk: That would be remarkable. Historically, in the United Kingdom, we had a two-party system between Liberals and Conservatives. The Liberals were supplanted by Labour. When Labour was weakened and far to the left in the late 1970s and 1980s, there was a rejuvenation of the liberal movement through the Liberal Democrats. The Labour Party and the Conservatives, as the two major political parties, were traditionally against electoral reform because “first-past-the-post” was most likely to give them periods of consolidated rule, as it continued to do until recently. It was the lone voice of the Liberal Democrats, along with scattered smaller parties, that wanted electoral reform.
It would be quite a turnabout for Labour, and possibly the Conservatives, to now vote for electoral reform. In the British system, which has very few checks and balances, Labour could just decide to do it; they have a parliamentary majority to put it in place. But it would be an extraordinary anticipatory capitulation, would it not? It would be a recognition that we have no chance of being re-elected or even of having a period in opposition for five or ten years before roaring back to be the governing party. We are giving up on the historic place that we had in the electoral system. Whether you can get the strategic initiative within the party and the willingness to bear that public humiliation is a very interesting question.
I want to cover the other part of the electoral transformation. We have talked about the weakness of Labour, the struggles of the Conservatives, and the rise of Reform. We are also seeing in many opinion polls, including those for the next general election, Labour running more or less head-to-head with the Green Party, which is led by Zack Polanski. In these local elections, another political force has gained significantly: Muslim independent candidates. These are basically sectarian candidates in largely Muslim parts of the United Kingdom running, in part, on issues regarding the Middle East and Israel, but also on deeply conservative social policies.
You have two trends. The first is a form of sectarianism of which we have started to see inklings in different European countries. In the Netherlands, which has a system of proportional representation and a low electoral threshold, you had the rise of the Denk Party, which is a kind of Erdoğan-esque, mostly Turkish-Dutch party. Secondly, the Greens look very similar to the La France Insoumise of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France. What the French sometimes call islamo-gauchisme is a strange mixture between a bourgeois, highly educated, urban environmentalist left and a deeply conservative, if not reactionary, Muslim identitarian movement under the flag of one political party.
How do you assess the threat that the Green Party poses to the Labour Party, its prospects of establishing itself as one of the major forces on the left, and what do you think about these Muslim independent candidates?
Garton Ash: I do not think the comparison with La France Insoumise really holds up. I would say that Zack Polanski’s Greens are what the French call bobo, or bourgeois-bohemian. His appeal is that he is radical—significantly to the left of Labour on many issues—and, of course, very strong on Gaza.
The classic green issues are also a factor. I am talking to you from Oxford, where the Greens have just had a tremendous success in the local elections, and those are not the kinds of voters you are talking about.
What I would say is that Gaza, and then Trump’s war—or the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran—are not only making us in Europe, including Britain, seem utterly hypocritical through the question of double standards—Ukraine versus Gaza and the Iran war, respect for international law, and so on—but are really damaging what have been relatively good inter-community relations.
In a country where the figure for London is well over 40% foreign-born and nationwide is over 20% foreign-born, with large Muslim communities but also significant Jewish communities, we have had horrifying, repeated antisemitic incidents and stories of antisemitic violence. The Middle Eastern element is a very important part of the story; that is what is helping to tease our politics apart. But that said, Yascha, I think the situation here is nowhere near as bad in that respect as it is in France.
Mounk: You know both countries well, and I have spent a significant amount of time in both as well. I am more pessimistic than you are. When I look at what Zack Polanski has said as leader of the Green Party and how he has positioned himself—he is himself Jewish, but there are members of La France Insoumise who are Jewish as well.
After the terrible terrorist attack in Golders Green recently, in which someone stabbed two visibly Jewish men in a very Jewish neighborhood of London, deliberately targeting Jews, the response of the leader of the Green Party was remarkable, even after other attacks on British Jews in the preceding weeks and months. He had doubted whether a feeling of unsafety among British Jews was rooted in reality or merely perception. His first response after this terrorist attack was to retweet somebody criticizing the police response for subduing the attacker too harshly. Again, we’re talking here about somebody who is in the process of stabbing people, grievously injuring them in a heavily Jewish neighborhood in a terrorist attack and Polanski’s first response was to criticize the police for doing too much to stop this attack.
This is, to me, a level of denial of a very clear and present threat to Jewish life in Britain which is every bit as bad as what Jean-Luc Mélenchon has done in France.
Garton Ash: It is indefensible what he said; I could not agree more. For me, it is utterly shocking that ordinary British Jewish families are talking about needing to emigrate because they do not feel safe in this country.
Where I want to push back a little bit is that La France Insoumise is a major electoral and political force in France. Indeed, there are scenarios in which the second-round runoff might be between someone from La France Insoumise and the Rassemblement National. The Greens are nowhere near that, so I think their larger political significance is much less. However, we are absolutely in danger of attracting the kind of politics in this country from which we have been relatively free.
Mounk: In Oxford, the appeal of the Green Party is to students and left-leaning academics. It is a bobo party—the party of the bourgeoisie bohémien, a term David Brooks invented. I have an episode with him on the podcast about that. In other parts of Britain, the appeal of the Green Party is very different. You see a political coalition in the mix of candidates for local elections: socially progressive students in Oxford and socially conservative Muslim candidates who care about the Middle East. The Green Party is trying to keep this together, but it is not clear how long it can last.
Perhaps that is the natural transition to France. In polls for the next general election—though there are questions about sustainability in a first-past-the-post system—the Greens in Britain currently get between 15% and 20% of the vote. That puts them on par with Labour in some polls. In France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is around 10% in preferences for the first round of the presidential election. It is not obvious that the Greens are that much weaker than La France Insoumise is in France.
Regarding France, we have important presidential elections coming up in the spring of 2027. Emmanuel Macron cannot run again. Interestingly, there is no lifetime limit on presidential ambitions in France, so Macron can run again in the future, but he cannot run this year. It is not clear there is an obvious centrist candidate to stand in for his movement. The likely candidate for the center is Édouard Philippe, or perhaps the young former prime minister.
The frontrunner is on the right: either Marine Le Pen, if she is allowed to run—which will be determined in a court appeal this summer—or her 30-year-old stand-in, Jordan Bardella. Bardella is an interesting figure who grew up in the suburbs of Paris. Then there is a chaotic left with candidates ranging from the “red-green” Jean-Luc Mélenchon to more moderate candidates like Raphaël Glucksmann in the center-left. How would you describe the political situation in France today?
Garton Ash: As it looks at the moment, the likely next president of France is either Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella. If Marine Le Pen is not allowed to stand, the chances may be even better for Jordan Bardella for the simple reason that his name is not Le Pen. In the last quarter century, the French have voted three times in the second round of a presidential election to keep out a candidate called Le Pen: twice to keep out Marine Le Pen, and once before that to keep out her father. There is something about that name which raises a certain allergy. Bardella is presenting himself as the very model of a modern populist.
As every presidential candidate must do in France, he has published a book. There was reporting of business leaders meeting discreetly with him for a nice dinner. I think that is what it is looking like, unless a candidate like Édouard Philippe or another unites everything from Macron’s liberal center to the center-left. It does not look likely at the moment.
The question becomes: how does a Europe with a President Bardella look? Is he more like Meloni or Orbán? If he were really Viktor Orbán, trying to put a spanner in the works at every step in Brussels and simply pursuing the French national interest coûte que coûte, that would be disastrous for the EU. This comes at a moment when it faces an unprecedented triple challenge: under attack militarily from Russia, politically from the United States, and economically from China.
If it seems more likely that it is a Meloni option, maybe that could work. We might actually work out some way of strengthening European defense rather rapidly, because we know we can no longer rely on Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin might have a go at Europe in the next two to three years. We will then have a rather consolidated transition of the European right. The European right will be something different from what we thought it was 15 years ago, when it was center-right, Christian Democrat, and liberal conservative.
Mounk: That is very interesting. I absolutely agree with you about the electoral prospects of Jordan Bardella. Interestingly, nobody I talked to in France agrees with that. In the Macronist camp, they all think they can beat Marine Le Pen because they have done it before. For some of the reasons you mentioned, they are convinced that Bardella is too young and unproven, and that he would fall apart in an electoral campaign. They think it is all hype and TikTok, and that he would fall apart in the debate between the two remaining candidates between the first and the second round. I have heard from quite senior people that they are reassured about the prospects of Bardella running. To me, that gives me echoes of what a lot of Democrats were saying in 2016: “Give us Donald Trump; this is going to be great, and we are going to beat him easily.” It did not turn out to be that way.
Tell me more broadly about how you see the shape of France and perhaps Germany at this point. These remain—despite the enlargement of the European Union and the fact that this Franco-German couple is much less at the center of the EU in political and economic terms—the two most important countries in the European Union, even more so now that Britain has left the bloc. They both seem to be in a deep malaise in different ways.
Germany, it seems to me, had a postwar model that worked very well for decades. In certain respects, it has squandered that model; in others, it has failed to update it in a world where it no longer applies. France, in certain respects, has never quite had a model that worked, at least in a number of decades, and is struggling to find one now. It feels as though there is just this significant weakness at the heart of Europe in economic terms and in terms of a self-understanding of what role the countries of the continent can play in the world.
Perhaps we should raise our eyes a bit above the political battle and think about why it is that, from Germany to France to the United Kingdom, citizens have this deep feeling of economic stagnation, of fear of the future, of growing irrelevance, and of a social contract no longer really holding up.
Garton Ash: Germany is a different matter from France. France is a matter of slowly accumulating problems over a long period of time—an ancien régime which Emmanuel Macron attempted to change and failed to change. There is massive social spending, and the French Revolution is repeated because they want to raise the retirement age to 63 or 64, whereas in other countries people are working to 68 or 69.
Mounk: The striking fact according to the Financial Times is that the average pensioner in France has a higher income than the average working person.
Garton Ash: Yes, and by the way, it creates a beautiful, wonderful way of life which many Brexit-voting Brits love to enjoy in their retirement.
The German case, as you know very well, is one of an incredibly successful national business model which has been blown out of the water by the triple challenge I just mentioned: the famous triad of cheap energy from Russia, cheap security from the United States, and easy exports to China. Crash, crash, crash. All three have gone. Actually, China is doing to Germany what Germany did for much of the world—the mercantilist model of export, export, export—and now it is turning the other way around. China is actually catalyzing a rapid deindustrialization of Germany. Tens of thousands of jobs are being lost in the car industry. The situation is dramatic in the German case.
Unlike France and Britain, what Germany has is money in the public purse. Friedrich Merz has roughly a trillion euros to spend over the next few years on defense and infrastructure. The question becomes: why is Merz not doing so well? I do not think it is so much about the individual. It is true that he does not have much government experience, so he does not always know exactly what levers to press, and sometimes he “shoots his mouth off,” but I do not think it is primarily that.
I think it is what Jarosław Kaczyński, the Polish populist leader, used to call “impossibilism”—the impossibility of making things happen. It seems to me that there is a real structural problem in Germany. This system, which was designed to prevent the emergence of another Adolf Hitler—a federal country, decentralized, with lots of checks and balances—has in the meantime acquired so many more bureaucratic and party-political checks and balances, including a complicated coalition, that it is actually very difficult to change things in a big way. Even a Maggie Thatcher, arguably, would be frustrated in the German system.
The answers are to hand. The big European problem is quite simply the gulf between our huge potential and our actual. Mario Draghi in his report and Enrico Letta in his report have told us what to do: make it a proper single market; have a unified capital market; have a single digital space; have a Europeanized defense industry. There are ways in which we could get much more dynamism back into Europe economically as well as politically, but at the moment the politics, which are still national, are simply preventing us from doing so.
Mounk: I have a few thoughts on this. First, it strikes me that if you talk to any leading French politician or civil servant, they are very impressive people. They are often somewhat provincial—many of them do not have much experience outside of France and do not necessarily speak good English—though that is changing in the younger generation. But they are intellectually brilliant, highly educated, erudite, and hardworking; they are elites in a self-conscious way, with the education to show for it. Yet, France has, by and large, been quite badly governed for the last 60 years.
You speak to German elites and, while there are exceptions, they are mostly provincials. Of the three candidates Germans could choose from for Chancellor in 2021, Olaf Scholz, who became Chancellor, had what I think Churchill said about Baldwin: a “municipal mind.” He had been a somewhat successful mayor of Hamburg, but was far from an impressive visionary or leader, with no charisma. Armin Laschet, whom I spent an evening with at a conference recently, is a very pleasant guy—he drinks five shots of schnapps, smokes three cigarettes, and is very jovial—but he really does not have a great understanding of world politics. He simply does not know or understand basic things about the United States, for example. Annalena Baerbock was pushed as an exciting figure—she is now the Secretary-General of the UN General Assembly—but I think she has very deep political and other weaknesses as well.
It is striking that you have a country like Germany, an impressive place with so many smart, hardworking people, and yet the top political personnel is just far less impressive than that of most peer countries. There are structural reasons for that, such as the federal system, but it is striking because Germany has been quite well-governed for most of the postwar period. However, I think that is because they stumbled upon a model that worked. As long as that model did not need changing, things were okay.
The German political intellectual class has learned the slogan with which Konrad Adenauer won a number of elections in the 1950s and 1960s: Keine Experimente—no experiments. Let us just stick with what we have because the alternative is “who knows what.” Now, they have in part demolished that model. Angela Merkel’s decision to switch off nuclear reactors and instead import coal from Poland—which is effectively what happened—has led to very high energy costs that are strangling German industry.
In part, the model just does not work anymore. As Constanze Stelzenmüller has said, Germany used to outsource its energy needs to Russia, its market to China, and its military needs to the United States. None of those three parts of the model work anymore. There seems to be a lack of serious conversation about this in Germany. People are talking about it, but not in a serious way, and there is a lack of imagination for what the new role of Germany in the world could be. There is a complete failure to recognize that these changes need to happen.
That is where the second point comes in: the coalitional math. Because the populists are now strong on the right and, to some extent, on the left, you never have an ideologically coherent government anymore. It is always some form of “grand coalition.” At the moment, it is technically a Große Koalition—a coalition between the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, the two traditionally dominant Volksparteien in Germany. Before that, it was an effective cross-ideological coalition between the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Free Democrats. You always have someone blocking change in any direction. In the current government, a big part of the reason for Merz’s failure is the complete immobility of the Social Democrats, who have just not understood anything about this moment and are blocking any attempted reform.
Garton Ash: I have to say, I think you’re slightly over-egging the pudding in your description of the German versus the French elites and political elites. I’ve met some very impressive people in Germany; traditionally post-1945, the most impressive people have been in business or science. That was traditionally the way it worked.
Actually, Berlin—I was just there a couple of weeks ago—is a very interesting, lively place with a very interesting think tank landscape. If you look at the rethinking on Russia and on security and defense policy, I would say it’s more impressive than that in London and Paris, partly because more rethinking needed to be done. But above all, what I want to say is this: I don’t think the perennial slogan of the politics of the Federal Republic of Germany was “no experiments.” Schröder’s labor market reforms in the early 2000s were quite expensive. I think the slogan or the motto was “change through consensus.” That was the key to the success of the German system—not just consensus within Parliament or consensus between the federal government and the Länder, but also, of course, between capital and labor.
It’s a phrase that I owe to my good friend Michael Mattis: “change through consensus.” The problem is, as you rightly point out and as I was saying a moment ago, that the system has become so complicated with the fragmentation of the party landscape—which is absolutely characteristic of Europe in our time—plus this accretion, sort of barnacles on a ship’s hull, of not just constitutional checks and balances, which are already very large, but regulatory and bureaucratic and procedural checks and balances. “Change through consensus” is just proving extremely difficult to achieve, even if you have a trillion euros to spend.
The larger point I just want to make—I think I’ve made this to you before, but I want to make it because it’s so important to understand: in most European languages, there is no separate word for “policy.” The key structural problem of Europe—I mean the European Union—is that the policies we need are European, but the politics are still national. We need European-scale defense industry, defense policy, capital markets, etc. But the politics keep holding us back because they’re always national. For me, the future of Europe hangs to a large degree on how we manage that tension. Obviously, the logical answer would be to say, well, let’s make the politics European. Let’s have European political parties and direct elections to European Parliament. Been there, tried that; it hasn’t got us very far. So my view is just get on with it and try and make it work.
Mounk: That is a huge structural challenge where a lot of important decisions are now taken at the European level, but it is very hard to muster the will for some kind of coherent change at any of the national levels, and even harder to then bundle that at the European level.
Garton Ash: One consequence of that is that you only need a single veto player in Brussels in the decision-making of the European Union. This brings us on our little tour to Hungary because the prime minister of one small European country, because it was a member state of the EU, could hold up packages of sanctions that everyone else wanted against Russia. He could hold up 90 billion euros, which are crucial to the future of Ukraine for the next two years, until he exacted his price.
The unique structural nature of this voluntary empire, which is the European Union—this empire by consent which empowers small and medium-sized countries—enables them to block larger countries because of the requirement for unanimity. It is a beautiful thing and something new in history, but it does mean that national politics can put an enormous spanner in the works of a very big machine.
Mounk: I see on American lists of “great German words” many phrases that would not be instantly recognizable to most Germans. They might understand them in the sense that they can scan the components and grasp the meaning, but they are not existing idioms. However, there is a lovely German phrase that really does exist: Besitzstandswahrung.
It is the idea that people are motivated by preserving what they have—the protection of vested rights or acquired status. It applies to the German political scene and society, and it is one reason for the current lack of imagination. It applies in France as well. I took part in an exercise called France 2050, which was forward-planning by the French government. An interesting poll found that most French people think things will be a little worse in the future than today; they are pessimistic, but they think things will not change that much.
It strikes me that this is the attitude of many Europeans today outside of France as well. I do not think it is realistic. Either Europe reforms itself properly—in which case things might be better in 20 or 50 years—or it fails to reform, and things could really get a lot worse.
To what extent is Besitzstandswahrung the real condition of Europe? We see it in Britain with the triple lock on the pension system. We see it in France with the rage at Macron for attempting reforms. In Germany, perhaps some think-tank people in Berlin are starting to understand the need for change, but certainly it is not translating into policy, and it is not really translating into a demand for real change from voters either, other than perhaps relative to immigration with people migrating over to the Alternative for Germany. To what extent is Besitzstandswahrung the real condition of Europe, and can the continent overcome it?
Garton Ash: I think that is the question of questions. Because we are still, in spite of all the multiple crises, on the whole—in most, certainly, Western European countries—too comfortable. And look, the largest war in Europe since 1945 has been going on just next door for more than four years, longer than the Great Patriotic War, Russia in the Second World War. I think as of June 11th, it will be longer than the First World War. And most of life just goes on as normal in Western and Central Europe.
What I have just written is a new book, a very short introduction to Europe. One of the points of the book is precisely to say to Europeans: wake up; learn from history. If you do not change, then things can collapse quite suddenly. Tancredi in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard said, “Things must change so they can remain the same”—the famous, oft-repeated line. I think that is exactly where we are.
I think there is an intellectual understanding of that among a lot of the European elites. If you go to a policy intellectual conference, people will absolutely understand that. But does it translate into our politics, which are all about defending our pensions, defending the welfare state, and defending this and that? I think not. And therefore, the quite possible, perhaps even probable scenario is that Europeans in their majority, particularly Western and Central Europeans, will choose gentle decline and suddenly one day find out that, like the old joke about going bankrupt, it is not gentle; it is quite sudden.
Mounk: That is my fear as well: that there is this option of gradual, genteel decline in the minds of a lot of Europeans that may turn out not to exist.
We briefly alluded to Hungary. I feel like a good conversation makes people depressed and gives them some hope, so let us try and give people some hope about Hungary and perhaps about Ukraine for the rest of this conversation. Viktor Orbán ruled for 16 years. He clearly undermined democratic institutions in a very serious way. There were huge amounts of personal corruption with a great enriching of the entire environment of Viktor Orbán, including old friends and relatives. You had a genuinely unfree media landscape. I remember when I was doing some reporting in Hungary, seeing every newspaper reporting on a speech by Orbán with the same flattering photograph and the same positive write-ups—something quite striking to see. A lot of people thought that it would no longer be possible to displace Orbán from elected office at the ballot box.
He finally overstayed his welcome, in part because of some straight-up scandals of governance—pardons for people who were running institutions in which child abuse had taken place and things like that. There was, ironically in part because of electoral rules that Orbán introduced to boost his majority, a particularly strong majority against him in the new parliament.
I have two questions about this. First, is democracy more resilient than we thought? Is the fact that the opposition was able to displace Orbán at the ballot box—that he did not call out the military or somehow try and sustain himself in power, and that the opposition now has a two-thirds majority—a sign that democracy is more resilient than we have given it credit for in the last 10 or so years?
Secondly, what are the dilemmas of post-populist rule? The new government will have a choice: either tolerate a lot of Orbán loyalists who are not committed to democratic rules and norms and who often are not qualified for their positions—keeping them in place, which has obvious downsides—or try to throw them out of office. But that, of course, just normalizes the rule that every new government comes in and throws out the old guys. It could even, at the extreme, lead to an over-consolidation of power in the hands of a new prime minister.
In general, should we be more optimistic about the resilience of democracy? And can the new government deal with this post-populist dilemma?
Garton Ash: I booked my ticket to Budapest many months ago because I have known Viktor Orbán since 1988. I first met him when he was a seemingly idealistic student leader, just three months after they had founded this wonderful new party called the Young Democrats, Fidesz. I still actually have the notes in my notebook where they were telling me about the rule of law, multi-party democracy, and all these wonderful things that he proceeded to destroy. I wanted to be there to see his fall.
The day and the evening in Budapest were magical; they even exceeded my wildest dreams because it was not a level playing field. For all the reasons you have given—gerrymandering, media control, abuse of the state administration, and abuse of state funds—it was an uphill battle. But there was such a massive outpouring of popular will and a sense that it was time for a change that it just swept all those obstacles away.
What you had was this overwhelming sentiment, mainly about social and economic conditions, meeting a seemingly credible change. Péter Magyar had a very clever campaign. He only gave one interview to the international media. He did virtually nothing in Budapest. He did not touch the classic urban liberal themes; he just went from small town to small town and village to village talking about social and economic issues and corruption. The “time for a change” sentiment met what looked like a credible change, and it was a fantastic moment.
Now, to the question you posed: you and I have for some time been saying—or I, at least, have certainly been saying—that Hungary is no longer a democracy. We have a member of the European Union which is no longer a democracy; it is a competitive authoritarian or electoral authoritarian system. So how come he could win an election? I think there is an answer to that. Elections are dangerous moments, even for competitive authoritarian regimes, even with all those advantages. Remember Slobodan Milošević was toppled by an election in 2000. Remember the spark for the Orange Revolution in 2004 was an election.
Elections in competitive authoritarian systems are unpredictable. On the day, it was relatively clean—it wasn’t massively rigged like an election in North Korea. They thought they had the system under control, as they had for many years. The difference from other cases is that those often involved an element of violence. To our astonishment, at about 9:20 p.m. on election night, a message flashed on Péter Magyar’s Facebook page: “Viktor Orbán has just rung me and congratulated me on my victory.”
I think you have to say that being inside the EU was a constraint. Were you really going to send in the thugs and use the Russians to try and falsify what was clearly a landslide result through force and fraud? It remains true that it was a competitive authoritarian system, but it was overcome by the combination of a “time for a change” sentiment, a credible alternative, and the external constraint of the EU.
To your second question: it is absolutely fascinating because, as you know, in Poland, we had another wonderful electoral moment when Donald Tusk was re-elected in autumn 2023, and this has gone completely pear-shaped. We have what is now famously called the “post-populist trilemma.” There are three things you want to be: rapid, effective, and legal. The trilemma says you can only be any two of them at once. Poland is now completely stuck in a situation of legal chaos, something almost like what Trotsky called “dual power” between Donald Tusk’s government and the Law and Justice president.
Fortunately, there is very good news about Hungary. Because the incoming TISZA government has a constitutional majority, and because of the way Orbán built his system—wanting formally to comply with EU rules while violating the norms—it is in a much better position. It can, with a bit of luck, restore the legal order and a neutral civil service, and legally replace the people Orbán put in place. It will not be easy. There will be local power holders in place and massive issues with corruption. But for me, if you can undo such far-reaching state capture by essentially legal and constitutional means, that will be a very positive sign for the rest of Europe and perhaps even for the United States.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Timothy discuss the Russia-Ukraine war and the future of the relationship between Europe and the United States. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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