Usually what brings down a politician is less the original action, more the hypocrisy or cover-up. In the case of Jens Spahn, until recently one of Germany’s most important conservative members of parliament, it was not a failure to be open. He admitted what he had done and was proud of it, to the point of tears. The problem was that he seemed to forget that it contradicted the moral mores that he and his party advocated.

The crime? Paying a woman in the United States to bear a child on behalf of him and his same-sex partner. In Germany, such a transaction is against the law—as it is in a host of European states, including France, Italy, and the UK.

The ban leads couples, heterosexual and same-sex, to turn to brokers in other countries or sometimes directly to individuals. This is entirely legal, and many people do it. The problem in Spahn’s case is that he was the leader of the parliamentary party of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which only months ago reaffirmed its ban on domestic commercial surrogacy. He was in the room and nodded it through, even though he knew at the time that a woman was carrying his future child. And he repeatedly advocated for the ban.

Sensing the dilemma, Spahn then did a touchy-feely interview with the mass-circulation daily Bild-Zeitung, gushing at the imminent arrival of the newborn, at no time appreciating the mismatch between rhetoric and reality.

Cue a furore, and within a couple of days, Chancellor Friedrich Merz was required to invite Spahn to resign. I say “required”, but in fact, Merz was mighty pleased to have got rid of a potential threat, a man who was a perennial thorn, someone who was seen as just a tad too close to the far-right Alternative for Germany party.

Spahn has one thing in common with Merz: consistently low opinion poll ratings and a long list of enemies. Several other big fish in the CDU appeared to enjoy his comeuppance. But that doesn’t quite explain the opprobrium that was heaped on him or why it was this issue rather than other previous controversies—not least his handling of the purchase of protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he was health minister—that finished him off.

Spahn’s downfall can only be explained by the deeply rooted—so deeply rooted that it is rarely acknowledged—social conservatism of German politics.

Germany’s postwar political settlement and the societal structures that it inherited meant the Catholic Church would inevitably play a prominent role. The CDU—which has led governments for roughly 54 of the 77 years of the federal republic’s existence—had “Christian” as much as “Democrat” in its title.

Indeed, the stability that underpinned the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle, was based in a vision of small-town, church-going communitarianism and traditional gender roles. The motto that began in the Gründerzeit, the foundational years of the German Empire of the late 19th century, and was later adopted by the Nazis continued to have salience well into the 1950s and ‘60s: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church).

That, one might think, particularly when living in the anything-goes capital Berlin, belonged to a bygone era. That would be a misreading.

The existing law banning surrogacy is a case in point. It is motivated by the same logic that informs Germany’s existing ban on egg donation, which is punishable by imprisonment, although sperm donation is perfectly legal. Underlying the discrepancy is the concept of “split motherhood”. Legislators fear that separating the genetic mother (the egg donor) from the gestational mother (the woman who gives birth) harms the child’s psychological welfare and identity. Sperm donation does not create this split, as the birth mother remains both the genetic and gestational mother. (The previous health minister, who has recently been reshuffled to become the head of Merz’s embattled chancellery, has called for a review of the egg-donor issue.)

Surrogacy adds an additional alleged psychological harm to the woman giving the baby away after carrying it to term. With both bans, there is an implicit suggestion that biological parents have a privileged role to play in any ideal family—and an implicit judgment of same-sex parents. (It is impossible to know what Spahn’s fate would have been had his partner been a woman.)

Germany’s relationship with homosexuality is complicated. Criminalised between men under an 1871 law, it was practiced with alacrity—but only in Berlin and one or two other big cities—during the Weimar Republic of the early to mid-1920s. During the reign of the Nazis, thousands of queer men (and some women) were sent to their deaths in concentration camps, a horror that has been openly acknowledged in subsequent decades.

Far less known is that it took until the end of the 1960s for same-sex relations to be decriminalised, but even then, restrictions remained, and the age of consent was higher than for heterosexuals. Indeed, communist East Germany was marginally more liberal on this score. It was only in 1994 that the unified Germany repealed the original legislation enacted under the kaisers.

In the three decades since, Germany has come a long way. Queer culture is widely celebrated in places such as Berlin, culminating in the annual Christopher Street Day parade in July, known in some other countries as Pride. Yet conservatives, including senior figures in the present government, have sought to keep a distance from the whole movement. In 2025, shortly after taking office, Merz himself justified his recommendation that parliament no longer fly the rainbow flag for the occasion, as had become the custom, insisting that the Bundestag was “not a circus tent”.

The attack on this summer’s Christopher Street Day parade—in which one woman was killed and several people injured—has shaken the capital city. It has also shone an uncomfortable spotlight on the nexus between Islamist terrorism, the queer community, and conservatives’ relationship to homosexuality. Merz and other senior figures were criticised by some for double standards after they rushed to condemn the assault as an attack on Germany’s “tolerance” and “openness”.

The concept of social liberalism is selectively interpreted, and several pieces of legislation remain on the statute book that would seem out of keeping in modern times and unacceptable in other countries.

The two most egregious holdovers from the past are the church tax and tax splitting.

All German taxpayers are required to devote at least an extra 8 percent of their tax liability to the church that they attend. The choice is restricted to Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism. There seem to be no plans to extend the “privilege” to Muslims, Hindus, and others.

It is possible to not pay the tax by declining a religious affiliation on your tax form. If you join and then change your mind, it is quite a rigmarole. You are required to renounce your affiliation in writing and then appear before a local district office or court. The assumption—presumption—that citizens by default would want to belong to a church attests to religion’s continued strong influence on public life. Proposals come and go to reform the law, but there seems to be little momentum behind abolishing it.

The other very German anachronism is tax splitting. Unlike most other developed countries, married partners are not taxed as individuals, but as a couple. This lumps together both people’s income and divides it by half, leading the higher earner (usually the man) to fall into a lower tax bracket. The less income that the second person earns, the more advantageous the device becomes. As a result, there is little benefit—financially, at least—for the lower earner (usually the woman) to work more than part time.

In recent years, the arrangement has been extended to same-sex married couples and to civil partnerships of all types. So, in one sense, it could be seen as modern. Whether it is or not, it loses the exchequer €25 billion a year, which is why the finance minister and vice chancellor, Lars Klingbeil, mooted possible reform. The result? No little scepticism that he would succeed and no little opposition to the principle—or rather, the prospect of minimising the tax burden.

None of this is a coincidence, recalling again that the concept of Kinder, Küche, Kirche has not gone away. While parental leave is relatively generous—and fathers take as much of that as the couples wish—the assumption remains that the mother will stay at home for the entirety, or most of, a child’s early years. The idea of paying someone to look after your offspring is generally frowned upon, including by many who might otherwise consider themselves liberal.

What surprises most is that the feminist movement in Germany is hardly shy and retiring. Yet most of its advocacy seems to be based in issues around language and identity. Woe betides anyone who doesn’t use the female form for most nouns—thus, the TV news anchor welcomes the audience with liebe Zuschauerinnen und Zuschauer (dear female viewers, dear male viewers). Or the vexed question of the colon or asterisk when abbreviating in writing: Zuschauer:innen or Zuschauer*innen.

This performative side of politics falls into what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called ‘Woke 1.0’.Might it for German feminists be simply an excuse, a displacement, to avoid bigger questions? Neither the Greens, nor the Left Party, and certainly not the Social Democrats seem to be in a hurry to prioritise some of the nuts-and-bolts issues that are embedded in traditionalism. Given that so little has changed for so long, everyone seems accustomed to the status quo.

Half of all German women in employment do part-time work, double the European Union average, partly because schools end early and childcare provision is so poor. Germany is among the lowest-performing states in the bloc when it comes to women in the boardroom and women as senior corporate executives. As for women in politics, the country is midway on the EU list, but unlike other countries, the number of women members of parliament has fallen over the past decade.

Last, but by no means least important, Germany’s abortion laws are among the strictest in Europe. The termination of pregnancies remains officially classified as a criminal offence under Section 218 of the criminal code, is largely excluded from statutory health insurance coverage (and medical education and training), and requires mandatory state-regulated counselling with a mandatory waiting period.

What does this medley of legislation have to do with the resignation of a cabinet minister who, in the end, broke no laws? If the issue has repercussions wider than the general who’s-up-who’s-down dynamic of the political battle, it is to shine a light on the wider question of reproductive politics in Germany, and to show that it remains highly sensitive and surprisingly difficult to change.

This is an adapted and updated version of a piece that originally appeared in Foreign Policy

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Donald Trump has been doing it for months – using every opportunity to attack a man he regards as a dangerous socialist. Europe’s conservatives have been more circumspect. But the recent dramatic influx of migrants into Ceuta, the biggest single day of irregular crossings anywhere in the EU for a decade or more, has given them the chance to pile in against Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. And they’ve done it with alacrity.

The crisis casts a spotlight on pretty much every aspect of contemporary politics, instant communication and the unrelenting surge by populists. It has given succour to the far right demonstrated the fragility of European unity.

The stakes could not be higher. In Germany, the far-right AfD is gearing up for success in three regional elections next month. In France, everything hinges on next spring’s presidential elections; victory for Marine Le Pen and the National Rally, with their pro-Putin leanings and strong support from Donald Trump, would call into question the future of the European Union and Nato.

Across Europe, mainstream governments are hanging on by a thread, often aping the messaging of the extremes to curry favour with voters, particularly on immigration.

Sánchez has been different. Despite intense pressure, he has refused to increase defence spending to the level demanded by Nato, refused to ingratiate himself with Trump, attacked his war in Iran and Israel’s destruction of Gaza, denounced climate change, and taken a different approach to immigration. He has defiantly argued that Spain and Europe need migrants to fill the gap of a declining labour force.

This left him vulnerable to attack the moment anything went wrong. And how it did.

The cause of the scenes in Ceuta, one of two Spanish enclaves within Morocco, recalled the wave of Syrians and others who flocked to Germany and elsewhere in 2015. The latest death toll – some people drowned attempting to swim to Spanish territory, and others were killed in a stampede – stands at 67, but with many people unaccounted for, it could be higher.

Everyone is blaming everyone else. Theories and conspiracy theories abound. Right-wing politicians have portrayed Spain as Europe’s soft underbelly, its supposedly permissive language towards migrants as opening the door. Others see the dark hand of variously of the White House, the Israelis and Morocco, or all three working in tandem.

Then there is the Russia connection. EU and Spanish officials strongly suspect Kremlin trolls may have been involved in spreading disinformation online, suggesting safe passage for migrants from Ceuta into Spain and across Europe – even though the enclave is not within the Schengen zone and there is no direct access to the Spanish mainland.

As pro-Kremlin and pro-Trump websites project false narratives onto an already combustible situation, it isn’t easy to separate fact from fiction. Some, such as the NGO the International Rescue Committee (IRC) have sought to do so with this useful primer.

Most of the 60,000 or so migrants have returned to Morocco, though an estimated 2,000-5,000 remain. Relations between Madrid and Rabat are often tense, with the Moroccans (not wrongly) pointing out the land is theirs (the dispute is not dissimilar to the UK and Spain over Gibraltar) and the Spanish accusing the Moroccans of weaponising migrants, sometimes stopping them crossing into Ceuta at other times turning a blind eye or even encouraging them. The Moroccans, meanwhile, have their own ‘issues’ with their occupation of the Western Sahara. They didn’t appreciate Sánchez’s recent visit to Algeria, which supports the ‘other side’ in that dispute.

Amid these various wrangles, the EU has convened ministers from member states to learn lessons. But the acrimony is deep.

In a furious letter to the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, and the European Council President, António Costa, Sánchez hit out against “fake news” and “disinformation”.

He expressed frustration that previous incidents of this scale, such as the mass arrival of migrants across the border from Belarus into Poland and from Russia into Finland, were labelled as state-sponsored hybrid attacks, and met with solidarity from the rest of the EU, whereas on this occasion Spain was singled out for opprobrium for a problem it insists was stoked up by malign foreign forces.

Sánchez was particularly angry that 22 EU countries immediately attacked Spain’s handling of the crisis. The ringleader was Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who even called for Spain to be suspended from Schengen. Meloni is regarded by key figures such as Von der Leyen as a bellwether, as a bridge between the extreme far right and the mainstream centre right. In truth, in many European countries the difference is increasingly blurred.

It comes as no surprise that relations between Meloni and Sánchez have gone into deep freeze, with Italy imposing border restrictions on arrivals from Spain, and the Spanish reciprocating. Both are performative politicians from opposite ends of the spectrum.

The problem goes wider than that, however. The crisis has exacerbated the dilemma for what is left of old-fashioned conservative leaders, not knowing which way to turn in times of crises such as these, often ending up echoing the shrillest voices of the extremes in a desperate bid not to be outgunned.

One of those was Friedrich Merz, the German Chancellor, who demanded that Morocco take back the migrants “immediately” but was hardly forthright in defending the Spanish government. Spain has not forgotten how in March Merz sat silently, even grinning slightly, during one of those painful Oval Office occasions when Trump launched into a long denunciation of Sánchez.

Merz himself may not survive the next few months if the forthcoming elections results are as bad as predicted. France’s President Emmanuel Macron has barely nine months to go. Sánchez may be defiant, but he too is beleaguered as his wife prepares to stand trial on corruption charges, and he finds himself increasingly isolated diplomatically.

The more crises such as these take place, the more European cohesion frays, the more Trump and Putin smile and the more the far right licks its lips.

This is an updated version of a piece that first appeared in The i Paper

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The two most important German words doing the rounds are: die Shitshow and der Shitstorm. But if you use them, make sure you get the definite articles right.

The latest example of maudlin humour doing the rounds in Berlin testifies to a country ill at ease. But then you ask yourself – indeed I ask myself all the time – when was the last time a German responded to the usual “how are you?” with the answer “great thanks, nothing to complain about”?

Now the Germans have a real reason to complain: the state of their politics and the state of their economy. They also have two rivals for lugubriousness – the French and the Brits. Indeed, it’s become a ritual among a certain set to debate which of the three countries is in the deepest shit.

The fundamentals are broadly similar between the ailing trio – stagnant growth, non-performing governments, surly populaces, the poison spread online with the help of Elon Musk, and the seemingly inexorable rise of far-right populists. But the extent of the danger fluctuates on a weekly basis.

France is the easiest of the three to read. Everything begins and ends with the two rounds of voting next April and May, which could see Marine Le Pen take office with arguably more executive powers than in any other western system, including the US. It is a binary outcome. Disaster strikes or disaster averted.

This spring and summer have not been kind to Donald Trump. He and his friend in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, have suffered a series of setbacks in Iran and Ukraine respectively; they are seeing their first stirrings of discontent at home as a result. The only tangible victory for Trump was getting a US footballer reinstated in the World Cup. And even that didn’t end well.

However, a victory for the far-right in France, the European Union’s second largest economy and its only nuclear power – would reverse the dynamic entirely, giving the populist movement the boost it sorely needed. It would further jeopardise NATO and the EU.

The decision of the court earlier this month to shorten Le Pen’s sentence for her embezzlement conviction has paved the way for the leader of the National Rally (RN) to pull rank on the 30-year-old upstart, Jordan Bardella, and stand in the presidential elections, with or without an electronic bracelet on her ankle.

Such a stigma might deter a conventional politician, but for the far-right it is a badge of honour, enabling leaders such as her to portray her fight as against the establishment, the blob, the swamp. Nigel Farage is doing it; Alice Weidel has long done it. They have all taken their cues from Trump.

There was hope in Brussels, Berlin and elsewhere that the younger Bardella might be a more amenable president than the veteran bruiser, a Francophone version of Giorgia Meloni. That may have been wishful thinking. In any case that is now gone.

Le Pen and Bardella will be a formidable electoral duo (if they can campaign together without acrimony). But as the Gilets Jaunes protests of 2018-2020 attested, the anti-establishment movement extends beyond the RN itself, incorporating elements of the France Unbowed movement of Jean-Luc Mélenchon – the classic case of the horseshoe, of far-left and far-right converging.

The prospect of a final round between Le Pen and Mélenchon would provide the ultimate proof of the failure of the centre to cut through. The fact that mainstream parties have yet to produce a convincing candidate – at least 30 are touting for support – has given the two extremist movements the early initiative.

Even if the centre alights on a single name, will he or she have time to catch up? And in any case, many voters have had enough of being pressurised into opting for the “whoever isn’t a Le Pen” candidate, as has happened in three of the last five run-offs dating back to 2002.

France has nine months to ponder political Armageddon, just as climate-change Armageddon engulfs vast swathes of the southwest of the country.

In Germany, on September 6, voters go to the polls in the small eastern German Land of Saxony Anhalt. The AfD is on course for 40% and no matter what comes the party’s way – the vagaries of Trump, the cosying up to Putin or ongoing allegations of spying and corruption – there are no signs of its appeal fading. Not yet anyway.

It is the new Teflon party. Depending on the vote distribution to smaller parties, the AfD could end up running the state on its own. That would have seismic consequences locally – changes to certain aspects of school and cultural life and ensuring an even more hostile environment for immigrants. It would make it more difficult for the administrations across Germany’s other 15 regions to share information. And it would send shock waves across national politics.

Even if the AfD falls just short, the only way to keep it out of government would be for the other three or even four parties to cobble together an unwieldy coalition that would look terrible for democracy – and would almost certainly collapse.

Two weeks later, elections will be held in another eastern state, Mecklenburg Vorpommern. The AfD is also in the lead and it is now knocking at the door in polling on the same day in Berlin city-region.

Crucially, the AfD doesn’t depend on the popularity of an individual. I have yet to meet anyone who votes for the party because of the personality of Weidel, less still the co-leader Tino Chrupalla. This makes it potentially more durable.

The only positive news for mainstream politics is that Friedrich Merz’s ruling coalition in Berlin is likely to last the course - the next general election is not due until 2029 - simply because his Christian Democrats and their junior partners, the Social Democrats, know that a collapse would lead to electoral humiliation.

The reform package they announced shortly before the summer recess may have been nine months late; it may have included some measures that have already led to mirth (such as a requirement that anyone needing a sick note from work will have to go in person to an already over-stretched doctor’s surgery).

Nevertheless, it marked the biggest set of tax and welfare changes since the early 2000s. Merz is counting on this to kickstart the sluggish economy and demonstrate to voters that they have a functioning government - though his partly-botched summer reshuffle has hardly renewed confidence.

Which leaves Britain, remarkably given its recent history, as the source of the most optimism, or the least pessimism. Has it finally alighted upon someone with charisma and competence? Who would have thought? The arrival of the King of the North, the seventh prime minister in 10 years, has certainly given Labour a new lease of life.

Andy Burnham has hit the ground running, with a series of tangible (if small) initiatives, and a pledge to do politics differently. Labour has overtaken Reform UK for the first time in over a year. The new PM has been dealt a helping hand with Farage’s descent further into the abyss of grievance and self-delusion. Might he ever recover from defeat by a man with a rubbish bin over his head? And even if the great burghers of Clacton renew their vows with him, will his stunt buy him time and give him ammunition to fight the various allegations of financial misdemeanours?

Yet before Brits get ahead of themselves – and even lefties enjoy a bit of Schadenfreude when it comes to the French and Germans – they would be advised to reflect on the recent past. The advent of Keir Starmer in Number 10 might not have had people dancing in the streets in a replay of Tony Blair c.1997, but it did give rise to hopes that the sheer fact of having a grownup in office would repair all the ills bequeathed by a decade of the clowns.

Burnham will have learnt from Starmer’s mistakes, but he will make his own, and he will be operating in an environment that is more hostile than it has ever been. He will need to show the kind of courage and long-term conviction that eluded his predecessor.

He will also need no reminding that the reports of the death of populism are greatly exaggerated. Just as Trump I morphed into Trump II, so Trump II could morph into Trump III/Putin, or into Vance. Just as Viktor Orbán was seen off in April 2026, an even greater threat could emanate from France in 2027.

In Germany, the AfD is waiting in the wings. Farage might eventually be seen off, but that does not mean that the far-right in the UK is down and out. Think Restore, think Tommy Robinson, think Musk and a trillion.

It will take boldness, resilience and imagination to see off these various threats. The next round in the existential fight is only beginning.

This is an updated version of a piece that appeared in The New World

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The Germans are either at our throats or on their knees. We want them to pull their weight but not to throw their weight around. I could go on for ever about the Brits’ sclerotic/neurotic view of the Krauts. The extremes have been tempered to a degree, but it doesn’t take much for the neuralgia to return. I wrote the following piece about Thomas Tuchel before the World Cup started. I’m pleased to share it now as the tension - and the yearning - reach fever point.

He is, said the club that had just recruited him, “a German with a Brazilian soul”. Well, that’s alright then.

In January 2021, as it announced the appointment of another managerial superstar on its merry-go-round, Chelsea included a series of quotes from those who had worked with Thomas Tuchel. The Brazilian defender Dani Alves, who had played for him at Paris Saint Germain, saw Tuchel as one of his own. Others also spoke of his passion, bordering on hot temper. Almost a Latin.

As is the way of things in the English Premier League, Tuchel lasted a tempestuous 18 months, winning Europe’s top competition, the Champions League, only to fall foul of Chelsea’s new owners. From there it was back to his homeland, to the cauldron of Bayern Munich, where he lasted just over a season.

Then England’s national team came calling. For a German. But not that German whom everyone had taken to their hearts, the one with the foppish hair and toothy grin: Jürgen We-Like-the-Krauts-After-All Klopp.

As the Three Lions embark on yet another emotional roller-coaster, this time in the hostile climes of Trump’s America, they are in the hands of someone who doesn’t do touchy-feely. Tuchel is no Klopp. He is also no Gareth Southgate.

The announcement of England’s new manager in October 2024 (he took up the role three months later), didn’t cause as much of a stir in Germany as might have been expected. That is because Tuchel doesn’t press the emotional buttons in his homeland either.

Tuchel is quite content to be judged – in both countries, anywhere in fact – on one thing alone: results. “He wants to be accepted as a technician, pure and simple,” says Tobias Schächter, a journalist who has co-authored a biography of him, whose English sub-title is ‘Rulebreaker’.

The story is one of dedication, hard work and an obsessive attention to detail. After showing promise in his teens, he made it as a player onto to the lower tiers of domestic football. A knee injury brought his career to a premature end in 1998 at the age of 25, but he had already turned his eye to coaching while studying for a business degree.

After several seasons of training youth teams, his first break was as coach with the small Bavarian outfit, Augsburg. Among the players was Julian Nagelsmann, another injury-prone defender, who is now the Germany manager - or at least he was until he led them to another ignominious performance this time around.

In 2009, Tuchel got his first Bundesliga position, at Mainz, where he followed a certain Klopp. Five largely successful years there led him to one of the big teams, Borussia Dortmund, which had just been run by a certain Klopp.

Still, he had made it to the global elite. He took Borussia to the quarter finals of the Champions League, where they were knocked out by Liverpool, thanks to a certain Klopp.

According to those who have worked with him, Tuchel has tempered his annoyance at comparisons with Klopp, particularly the idea that he is his pupil. It now merely irritates him and both men now get on fine and talk respectfully of each other.

That doesn’t hide their differences, though. Christoph Biermann, one of Germany’s best known football writers, describes Klopp as a “Menschenfänger“– someone who draws people to him. The C word: charisma, or at least one form of it.

When Liverpool won the Premier League in 2020 for the first time in 30 years, the pandemic and the lockdowns had only just begun, the remaining games were played in empty stadiums, and they were unable to celebrate. But what people remember Klopp saying was that football didn’t matter: “Please look after yourselves and look out for each other. You’ll Never Walk Alone”. After a surly 2025-26 season under the Dutch Arne Slot, how the Scousers miss their adopted German.

Tuchel enjoyed his time in France, at PSG, where he handled the galacticos on and off the pitch, securing two league titles and two domestic cups. According to Biermann, he was happiest at Chelsea, working with a tight-knit management team – until a new set of owners arrived and combustibility returned. Almost all managers nowadays get the chop, and even though Tuchel didn’t last that long at either, both Chelsea and PSG are regarded as hire-and-fire clubs; but his points-per-match ratio was high and his star didn’t wane.

Bayern was, according to Schächter, a mistake. It set back Tuchel’s reputation in Germany. Even though he secured the Bundesliga title in 2023, which the Bavarian outfit regards as its natural right, Tuchel was in regular conflict with the club’s hierarchy, and particularly the former German international Uli Hoeness, who had the nebulous title of honorary president.

Hoeness wanted to discuss tactics with him. Tuchel made it clear that he didn’t want others meddling in his decisions.

Maybe the rhythm of the stop-start of the national game might suit him? Tuchel appears to have developed a good working relationship with the FA. But what matters is what happens from now. Qualifying for the World Cup was seamless, but the opposition was poor.

So, have the love-affair with Klopp and the appointment of Tuchel finally put an end to the English hate-love-hate-envy obsession with the Germans? The answer, as the Germans would say, is jein, yes and no.

For sure, the English have moved on from Piers Morgan’s “Achtung Surrender” of 1996. The 10 German Bombers song may be sung with a little less gusto than before. German managers come and go from all four English divisions, as do Italians, Spaniards, and the odd Englishman. From Ralf Rangnick to Daniel Farke, they haven’t quite left their mark.

As for players, from Jürgen Klinsmann of yesteryear to Kai Havertz of now, they are treated no differently to other foreigners. Mesut Özil appeared to receive no more and no less racism in both countries.

But it doesn’t take much to scratch that itch. When Southampton – whose manager is a young German by the name of Tonda Eckert – were caught red-handed spying on rivals Middlesbrough ahead of a crucial play-off last month, it didn’t take long for the Sun to send in the Spitfires. Its ‘inside’ story of Germany’s ‘crazy hidden spying culture’, in which seemingly all teams seek to benefit from sending interns to others’ grounds to take snaps on their mobiles was endearingly headlined “Germ Warfare’”. It makes you almost nostalgic for the old days.

All this will be cast aside if Tuchel delivers. Now that his contract has been extended to the 2028 Euros, which the UK home nations and the Republic Ireland will host, he will have two opportunities to do at least as well as Southgate.

And what of the comparison between the two? It didn’t long for Tuchel to be brutally honest in his assessment.

The shirt, he said, continued to weigh heavily. Watching the last Euros in Germany in 2024 (in which England succumbed to Spain in the final), Tuchel said: “I felt tension and pressure on the shoulders of the players, and they were playing not to lose.”

He could have chosen his words more diplomatically, but that isn’t his way. Southgate has achieved the status of national treasure and criticising him is seen as not-the-done-thing. Yet he was only saying what many were thinking. The manager’s ultra caution was their undoing.

Tuchel used the same approach when announcing his squad for the USA, Mexico and Canada, and the inevitable omission of several well-known players. He didn’t smother them with public (or private) love; he just said he was doing what he had to do, picking the technically strongest group.

Cue fury from some of those rejected. But it would be wrong to say that Tuchel doesn’t engender loyalty. He does, and many players stand by his approach. He is a relentless task master. He is desperate to win and he gets emotional, but in his own way. Witness the public spat with hero-of-the-hour Jude Bellingham.

In Germany, they are looking vicariously at England, to see how Tuchel fares. As for Klopp, he was enjoying life as head of global soccer at the Red Bull company, with its international network of clubs including RB Leipzig, RB Salzburg, and the New York Red Bulls. And being star pundit for German TV during the tournament. Plus, he has his luxury villa on the German island of Mallorca to tend to.

Another big club beckoned for him, if cared to take one, but instead he opted last week to go back to the drawing board with the German national team after another crushing disappointment. Everyone assumes he will turn them around - just because he is who he is.

Tuchel is unlikely to achieve that guaranteed most-favoured status. Which is why, Schächter suggests, he might turn out to be a smart appointment. “History is not weighing on him. He sees the job as a technical endeavour, though he knows that the English see it as far more than that.”

Might the hard man from Germany manage to end 60 years of hurt? That would be the irony of all ironies.

This is an updated version of a piece that appeared in The New World

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I’m regularly asked to explain Germany, my current base, to British readers - a task not made easier by the cliches that dominate discourse in the increasingly insular UK. It’s no lesser an undertaking to explain to Europeans and to others how a country that used to be synonymous with stability is about to embark on its seventh prime minister in a decade. Will the new incumbent succeed where the others have failed?

After six failed attempts in the past decade, is Andy Burnham the prime minister finally to get Britain back on its feet? The choice of the latest wannabe saviour—or rather the anointing—of someone who until a few days ago wasn’t even in the House of Commons seems at first glance a curious one.

The stakes are extraordinarily high. As in France, Germany, and elsewhere in the Western world, the next few years are seen as the last chance to preserve liberal democracy from the onslaught of far-right populism. The cause was not enhanced under the two-year failed tenure of Keir Starmer, who squandered a huge parliamentary majority with his dour incrementalism, while the populist-nationalist Reform U.K. party and the Greens became major forces.

Friends and foes are projecting onto Burnham their hopes and fears. Some see his criticisms of Starmer as evidence that he will lead a leftist administration, spooking the already-skeptical bond markets with a spending spree that will further imperil the United Kingdom’s heavily indebted finances. His supporters—and there are many—see him as the breath of fresh air that the Labour Party and Britain have been waiting for.

The nonaligned see him as a chameleon and don’t know what to make of him. They point out that he first supported Tony Blair—now seen as a sacrilegious figure among many in Labour—then Gordon Brown and then the ardent socialist Jeremy Corbyn. Burnham, who tires of the accusation, and the various jokes at his expense, describes himself as a “team player” who tried to do his best no matter who was in charge.

Burnham cultivates his image fastidiously. He likes to present himself as an unstuffy, ordinary bloke who hates wearing suits, except when he must. He casts himself as an outsider but has spent almost his entire career in politics. So, can someone who likes to be liked, and who does video clips seemingly wherever he goes, be the decisive leader the United Kingdom needs?

He is unabashed. His aides point out that, unlike Starmer, he really does know how to relate to people; his nine years as mayor of the Manchester city region has given him hands-on experience to follow his 16 years in Parliament in several ministerial positions under Blair and Brown.

Born near Liverpool in 1970, Burnham was brought up a Catholic in a quiet commuter belt village midway between the two rival cities of the northwest of England. Could the supporter of a Liverpool football club (not the eponymous one, but the less illustrious Everton) really become a favourite of Mancunians?

His parents, a telephone engineer and a medical receptionist, were staunch Labour supporters, and he developed an early interest in politics. He has described—again part of the folklore—how he was inspired to join the party at the age of 14 after being moved by a BBC TV drama about life on the dole. He embraced the Manchester music scenes of the late ’80s and 1990s. He and his two brothers were the first in their family to go to university; at Cambridge he met his Dutch-born wife.

In his early 20s, and clearly on the fast track, he got his first break in politics, working as a researcher for a prominent member of Parliament (MP), Tessa Jowell, who would go on to be a cabinet minister under Blair and Brown. He then became an advisor to another senior minister, before entering Parliament in 2001, aged only 31. So much for his disdain for Parliament.

He didn’t hide his ambition—which politicians do?—and stood twice unsuccessfully for the leadership, in 2010 and 2015. With the Conservative government in chaos during the post-Brexit referendum era, and with the opposition under Corbyn paralysed by strife, he escaped to Manchester, to build a new power base.

Having maneuvered the party to ditch Starmer, he has been given less than a month to build an entire administration. He is doing so with a mix of experienced and fresh faces, of old Westminster colleagues who kept in close touch, much of his team from Manchester, and outside experts. He is moving fast.

It’s on the economy that the new prime minister will want to stamp his mark. He has pledged to work within the confines of the “fiscal rules” that Starmer set before the 2024 general election—to ensure that borrowing does not increase. In addition, Labour pledged no rises in income tax, corporation tax, or VAT. These are not written into law (or, in the case of Germany, set down in the constitution) but are seen by many, though not all, senior figures in the government as articles of faith.

Despite these restrictions, he has indicated he will act in several key areas. The first is devolution of power to the English regions from London (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland already have their own parliaments with jurisdiction in several areas). Britain is possibly the most centralised country in Europe—although France would stake a claim—with authority, wealth, and infrastructure concentrated in London.

Burnham luxuriates in his nickname of the King of the North. In his first major speech, setting out some of the priorities for his administration, he announced he would relocate part of the Downing Street operation back to Manchester, including a new ministry for devolution.

Previous governments have held cabinet meetings outside the capital; the Treasury has moved a few of its operations to the northeast—but this would be radically different. Burnham insists it’s not just symbolism (though that, too, will matter) and that it will enhance investment to areas left behind.

Another term he enjoys is “Manchesterism.” This describes his approach as mayor of one of the few parts of the UK that has enjoyed economic growth: free markets with state intervention. The high-rise skyline of much of the city center attests to his success and that of his predecessors in drawing in tech, creative industries, and other service sectors to the city. At the same time, he has brought the mass transport network fully under public control.

Britain’s economic bind has overwhelmed governments of both parties. Six years of Conservative austerity from 2010 temporarily reduced government borrowing, but at the cost of entrenching poverty, inequality, and social dislocation. Brexit was a manifestation of that, and a subsequent accelerator.

The UK’s tax burden is set to rise to a postwar record of 38.5 percent of GDP in 2030-31. Much of that goes to debt repayments (including high interest rates), a burgeoning welfare bill to deal with more than a million off work, a health service struggling to cope with an aging population, and a pensions settlement called the “triple lock” that is absurdly generous to the influential baby boomers. Productivity has long been poor. Housing targets invariably undershoot.

Burnham’s determination to take risks, to confront these shibboleths, will be key. Among the many early ideas that he is mooting are a reform of property tax, a rise in capital gains on assets, and an increase in inheritance tax to pay for social care.

On its approach to tax, investment, and infrastructure, in the managing of many of its public services, indeed in so many areas of policy, Britain is ripe for a shake-up.

The area where Burnham will initially be most exposed is foreign affairs. He is due to take over from Starmer within a fortnight of the NATO summit amid increasing tensions between the White House and Europe. He doesn’t like U.S. President Donald Trump, and the feeling is mutual. Following the Capitol riots of Jan. 6, 2021, Burnham declared: “Any UK politician who gave Trump the time of day should be ashamed right now.” When asked about the new man in Downing Street, the U.S. president said he didn’t know him but believed him to be an “extremely liberal” mayor of “a town.” As put-downs go, it wasn’t bad. But, as Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has shown, the Trumpian insult doesn’t have the salience of before.

Burnham is expected to appoint an experienced figure as his foreign secretary. Expect early trips to Berlin and Paris, and to Brussels, where his intentions toward the European Union will be closely watched.

As with other key areas, Burnham has sent out mixed signals. One of his strongest criticisms of Starmer was his reluctance to match warm words toward Europe with deeds. The so-called reset has taken place at a snail’s pace, even though opinion polls in the U.K. show a strong majority favour a rapprochement of sorts.

Burnham has consistently vowed to go further and faster. However, on the recent campaign trail where he achieved his spectacular by-election victory, he sounded less enthusiastic. His new constituency, Makerfield, belongs to the “red wall,” former Labour heartlands that voted to leave the EU exactly a decade ago.

Most of the main foreign-policy issues, such as Russia-Ukraine and China, will follow existing guardrails. It will be interesting to see whether he takes a tougher approach to Israel’s hard-line government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Support for Gaza is a touchstone issue for many activists on the left. Burnham will need to navigate that, while ensuring his party isn’t tainted by accusations of antisemitism that dogged Corbyn’s tenure.

Burnham is a far better communicator than Starmer. But will he also jettison his predecessor’s caution and show some of the courage that is sorely needed? And will he match rhetoric (the easy part) with actual deeds that make a discernible difference to people’s lives? If not, he will go the same way—and by the time of the next general elections, the door will be open for the populists to enter.

This is an updated version of a piece published in Foreign Policy

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If you wanted to encapsulate the reasons why mainstream politics has so struggled across the liberal world, you would call it Keir Starmer. I say this with sadness. But, as I argue in Braver New World, politicians who see their job as managing and tinkering will be destroyed by hostile forces. That’s what’s happened. Andy Burnham can have all the media savvy ‘ordinary bloke’ charm in the world, but that won’t enable him to turn things around. He needs to think big. Take calculated risks. And deliver radical change. It can be done. Others are doing it.

Everywhere you look you see liberal democratic leaders paralysed with fear. They worry about the markets (with reason); they fret about conventional media and social media (with less reason). They wait for bad things to happen, trying to anticipate what their critics might say of them in case they put a foot out of line. It’s a self-fulfilling spiral. They did that before the populists came onto the scene – why else would Tony Blair have flown halfway around the world to an Australian island to curry favour with Rupert Murdoch in 1995? And they do that now, with the populists in the ascendant. Who will forget the NATO secretary general Mark Rutte thanking ‘daddy’ Trump?

Even though he has enjoyed a parliamentary majority that others would only dream of, Keir Starmer obsesses about the latest focus group or the latest utterance of Nigel Farage. The Britain he inherited was in the doldrums – more than a decade into an era of austerity and a failure of governance (not to mention the act of wanton self-harm that was Brexit). Everywhere you looked, public services were in crisis: the NHS, the criminal justice system, housing, social care. These factors feed off each other. Worse housing leads to worse health. Worse health produces more social care demand, more anxiety. That leaves fewer people in work, lower growth and perennially low productivity, leading to lower tax revenues for public spending. More societal dislocation leads to more crime, which leads to jails that are overcrowded and prisoners released early and wrongly.

What has made it worse is a sense of helplessness, of politicians muddling through without any sense of strategy. Voters may put up with all manner of sacrifices if they are given a clear vision – and where possible, involvement in a plan. What will the world look like in a decade, and what does their country want to become? What they get instead is different. Shortly before presenting her Budget in November 2025, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (gave a speech which had been billed as a mature explanation of the difficult choices ahead. It was, commented Mark Borkowski, an author who has written about the history of public relations, ‘the kind of performance that explains why so many have tuned out. Westminster no longer talks with the country, it talks at it, in a beige dialect. Every syllable sanded down until nothing could possibly offend, or indeed, interest… It’s not just political; it’s cultural. We’ve built a political class allergic to spontaneity, terrified of the unpolished truth.’

Populists, by contrast, see in every crisis the opportunity to disrupt, to remake the world in their own image. Imagine if mainstream politicians did the same. Imagine if they didn’t seek to fill in the potholes in the hope of restoring the status quo, but instead saw in every challenge the opportunity to build afresh.

My starting point is that we cannot assume things will return to the way they were. The rise of authoritarian populism has ensured that. Why is it that mainstream politicians, including those who promised so much for so long, end up doing little more than tinkering? The key ingredient that eludes them is courage. What does courage in leadership mean? First, what it isn’t: it has nothing to do with recklessness, shooting from the hip, courting short-term popularity.

In the era of instant judgements and the pressure to make binary choices, that is the coward’s way out. Nor is it triangulation, working out the position of the two extremes and placing yourself in the middle, constantly looking over your shoulder for any criticism from the loudest voices. Nor is it based in rhetoric. I could quote Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope. Or the Tony Blair, 1997 variety. Or JFK, or Willy Brandt, or Nelson Mandela, or Martin Luther King.

No, the courage I am talking about is muscular, reflecting the harder-edged realities of now. It is based on commitment to see something through; staying power; resilience in the face of adversity. It is about being prepared to go against the grain when necessary and being honest with your citizens. Communication is a skill that has earned a bad name in politics, becoming synonymous with spin, scoring quick points, pushing messages that often appeal to the lowest common denominator. The communication I’m talking about is a subset of courage.

Contemporary politicians have been told that voters won’t accept candour. The moment criticism gathers speed on social media or in traditional media, then is whipped up and distorted by political opponents, a chosen policy is toned down, delayed or abandoned. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Much hinges on social solidarity and in citizens having a sense of agency. The evidence is clear that societies where citizens are informed and involved are more likely to cohere and succeed.

Politicians might insist that, long-term, such difficult decisions are all very well, but they don’t win the daily news agenda, the unremitting battle for headlines that was hard enough before the advent of fake news and bots. And they don’t win elections, because most of the problems are so intractable that it would take far longer than the four- or five-year voting cycle for the benefits to be reaped. Where’s the credit therefore in thinking afresh?

Think of it another way. Given that the link between delivery and trust has been undermined, if mainstream politicians don’t think more imaginatively about the future, they won’t have a future. The old world is not coming back.

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Which is worse: an acute disease or a chronic one? Britain’s Labour Party and Germany’s Social Democrats suffer from each of these afflictions. They share many of the same traits – split between trimmers and radicals, lacklustre leadership (I’m being polite) and, most importantly, a loss of identity.

While Keir Starmer may be on his way out, the long-term demise of the SPD as a political force is the most entrenched. That is because, shorn of much of an industrial and post-industrial working class that has deserted it for the far-right AfD, it has almost no voter base left on which to call.

Or rather it does, but any organisation that relies on a rump of state employees, welfare recipients and OAPs is demographically not long for this world.

Except for one notable period, the SPD has been seen as the preserver of the status quo, the land of post-war milk and honey, immutable employment rights and generous benefits. The exception was in the early 2000s, when Gerhard Schröder introduced reforms that by German standards were so radical – forcing people to sign on for work and cutting social security payments for various groups to reduce a budget that was getting out of control – that they were regarded as a kamikaze mission.

Despite his opposition to the war in Iraq (which helped shore up support for him), Schröder was punished in 2005 at the ballot box - and since then has spent most of his time as Vladimir Putin’s propagandist in chief.

Throughout her long period in office, his successor, Angela Merkel, never dared to say anything complimentary about Agenda 2010, as the reform programme was officially called. It was too toxic. And that from the leader of the Christian Democrats, the centre-right.

Now the same beckons, but this time the SPD is not in charge; its leader Lars Klingbeil is playing second fiddle in the present coalition led by a CDU chancellor who is avowedly more right wing. Friedrich Merz is desperate to crack on with a much-delayed reform agenda of his own. With his government committed to a huge increase in defence spending, and with global politics in turmoil and the economy in the dumps, he too is feeling the squeeze.

Merz and Klingbeil are both suffering badly at the polls, but the former at least has a potential route out of the mire. The SPD’s dilemma is more intractable.

Klingbeil – who is vice-chancellor and finance minister – is on board with the reform agenda. But he’s not popular within his party, and the membership is generally hostile to change. He is therefore damned if it goes along with Merz’s plans, and damned if it doesn’t.

How the once-mighty party has fallen. So far 2026, or “super election year” as it has been dubbed by pundits, has been disastrous for the SPD. In the wealthy southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, it took only 5.5% of the vote, its worst result in post-war history, barely managing to pass the 5% threshold for parliamentary representation, a hurdle originally designed to keep out extremists.

Two weeks later, in Rhineland-Palatinate, after 35 years in power, it was decisively relegated to second place behind the CDU, with its worst-ever election result in that state.

Its average in national polls has fallen steadily to 15%. Younger, more metropolitan and socially liberal supporters have drifted to the avowedly left-wing Die Linke (which the British Greens are seeking to emulate). Its socially conservative, anti-immigration voters in smaller towns long ago embraced the AfD.

That is not a passing fad; whatever happens elsewhere, such as in Hungary, the far right’s rise, in the short-term at least, seems embedded.

Only a year ago, the SPD celebrated 150 years since its formation – the oldest party in Germany and one of the oldest of the present type in the world. Such was its strength when it was founded in the late 19^th century, such was the alarm caused in the ruling classes, Bismarck sought to buy off workers with the first employment and social-security rights.

The party has been in government, either in charge or as the junior partner, for all but four years of the 21^st century, including most of the Merkel era. Yet the electoral system, which requires coalition and consensus from the centre, has masked its gradual decline.

For sure, all mainstream groups have been struggling. The Greens are back to where they started. The liberal Free Democrats have all but disappeared. But the fate of the SPD most emotionally expresses the anxiety of now.

I’m reminded of its illustrious history during a visit to the northern port city of Lübeck, a Baltic Sea port, proud shipbuilding centre and one-time capital of the Hanseatic League, with close trading links to London back in the day. The surrounding state, Schleswig-Holstein, is run by the CDU, with the Greens in coalition. The SPD came a hapless third.

This is also the birthplace of the party’s most famous forefather: Willy Brandt, the man who revived social democracy after its failures during the Weimar Republic, followed by the Third Reich, and then the paternalist conservatism that took root in the decades straight after the war.

The Willy Brandt House, in the tourist heart of the centre of Lübeck, is more than a museum. As its curator, Hendrik Grosse-Homann, explains, it is an education centre.

Some of the visitors are weekend tourists from parts of Germany; some are local school trips; others are Scandinavians who see him as one of their own. In recent times, he tells me, couples have been coming to pay homage and to mark their 50^th anniversary as party members – having joined the party in the Brandt years.

Brandt’s life story was colourful and ideological. Aged 16, he joined the party, became a journalist and within weeks of the Nazi takeover, he fled in disguise, first to Norway and Sweden.

On his return to Germany after Hitler’s defeat, he became a big shot in the politics of West Berlin. As governing mayor from 1957, he was the face of the resistance of the city when the wall was put up in 1961. John F Kennedy joined him in that; Germany’s chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, wasn’t that fussed.

After several failed attempts, Brandt finally became chancellor in 1969. This was the time of protest, Germans finally coming to terms with their history, of maximum upheaval, and of social change. Homosexuality was decriminalised, divorce made easier, the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18. Meanwhile, education was reformed, the welfare state considerably enlarged.

He also embarked on Ostpolitik, an attempt to improve ties with the Soviet Eastern bloc. This was Brandt’s legacy, in merely five years, before he was forced to quit in 1974 when his closest aide, Günther Guillaume, was unmasked as an agent of the GDR.

Brandt was charismatic, courageous and deeply controversial. “Many Germans came to see in him and his Norwegian-born wife Rut a German equivalent of the Kennedys,” says Grosse-Homann, as he points out photographs of the chancellor before adoring crowds.

The item that most intrigued me was a poster from the mid-1920s at the start of the exhibition. In large red letters, its headline reads: “Nothing changed?”

It comes from the embattled social democratic government, and it rhetorically exhorts workers to compare the situation that they faced at the end of the Kaiser era in 1918 with the years that had followed. It lists the achievements: “A worker as president, universal suffrage, workers’ committees in companies, eight-hour day, unemployment benefit”.

Not bad, you might say. Except that within less than a decade, the Nazis had taken over.

And that has always been the problem of the centre-left: whatever is done is never enough. Resentment grows, the search for simple solutions follows. Or to put it another way, why stop there?

The problem for the SPD and for many – though not all – its sister parties is that, shorn of the old voter base, Brandt’s successors don’t know which way to turn.

The likes of Klingbeil and Starmer soldier on, paralysed by fear and caution, rather than staking out clearly what they stand for and what they are prepared to fight for. While the prime minister may be eking out the last weeks or months of his premiership, Klingbeil is likely to survive, because the coalition has nowhere else to go.

But unless it works out what it stands for, it will disappear into the periphery of politics. That is a far cry from the heyday of Willy Brandt.

This is an abridged and updated version of a piece that appeared in The New World

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It’s mid-afternoon in Fujisawa. Schoolchildren, rucksacks on their backs, bound into a room where a group of pensioners welcome them boisterously, before sitting them down to help with their homework. This group of older people is looked after by some of the pupils’ parents. Up the road, a cluster of university students live above some over-75s. They get half-price rent in return for checking in on them on their way to and from studies.

This multigenerational community I visited in a small town not far from the port of Yokohama is one of 5,000 in Japan.

Sometimes the solutions to the big social challenges of the day are right in front of us; they don’t necessarily cost much, but they do require forward thinking and a determination to make them work. Across Europe, these challenges are often shirked.

By 2050, the number of centenarians in Japan could reach almost half a million. The proportion of pensioners is expected to rise to nearly 40%. In some ways, Japan is a victim of its own success, with the world’s highest life expectancy for the past four decades. It is now 87 for women and 81 for men.

The destinations I studied had three things in common: resilience, imagination and political courage

Japan has also shown that if you can’t avoid a problem, you might as well confront it. Back in 2000, it introduced the long-term care insurance system, one of the first countries to develop such a public scheme. It is transparent and easy to navigate. Everyone knows what they must pay and when (payments begin on your 40th birthday). Its purpose is to “maintain dignity and an independent daily life routine according to each person’s level of abilities”.

The emphasis is on giving people more of a say in where and how they are cared for. Rather than elderly people receiving services that are assigned by the state, they are encouraged to choose and contract the services themselves.

For three years, I scoured the world for best practice in addressing the big present and future challenges. The 10 countries and cities I visited, from Japan to Morocco and India to Austria, had some surprising solutions; some were radical, others were simply the product of better organisation.

Stories about eldercare robots, for example, tend to dominate international coverage of Japan’s ageing society. But I was more impressed by some of the low-tech solutions. In Kawaguchi, a commuter town north of Tokyo, several community general support centres have opened. These are drop-in hubs that provide “lifestyle support” for any older person who wants it. This could be medical advice, help with paying the electricity bill or just company. They are being rolled out in each of Japan’s over 1,700 municipalities.

What the disparate destinations I studied had in common were resilience, imagination and political courage – qualities that mainstream politicians in Europe have long struggled to demonstrate. And they seem allergic to the other precondition for securing lasting change: serious long-term planning.

With ageing populations, many European economies are creaking under the strain of funding pensions, care services and health. Yet the two areas where European governments remain most politically timid are social care and health reform. All suffer from a lack of doctors, nurses and other care professionals. The German government has just announced a series of cuts to healthcare services to balance the books.

Until recently, France was cited as an example of healthcare success, but the highly centralised system disincentivises doctors and nurses from working in disadvantaged regions – so-called health deserts.

By contrast, Sweden, which has a more decentralised approach, continues to overperform. Spain’s success might be seen as more surprising, with one of the highest life expectancies in Europe. It has a universal national system, which, like Britain’s NHS, is free at the point of delivery, but it is run by its 17 autonomous regions, not by a central monolith.

When it comes to building a transparent system for funding care for older people, the UK is the most abject of all. Successive prime ministers have called for change yet have run away from sensible reforms produced by commissions they established, hoping that, by delaying a problem, it would somehow go away.

As they flail around, leaders of many European nations look desperately for instant balm

Japan and Taiwan, as I discovered, started preparing for the demographic challenge decades ago. Taiwan’s national health insurance (NHI), for example, unlike Britain’s NHS, is quick, efficient and highly digitised. Medical literacy and patient autonomy are paramount; everyone learns about diet and exercise from a young age, part of a whole-society approach to “owning” your own health. The system has very few GPs. Patients usually go straight to hospitals or clinics, where they can expect to have a first consultation within 20 minutes. Or they can book on the app, and their doctor can have a look straight away online. Alongside speed of delivery, the other remarkable aspect of this system is the cost. At around 8% of GDP, it is far cheaper than the European average of 10%-12%.

In these examples, and others I looked at – all of which are transferable into a European context – what matters is what works.

Some politicians say all this is impossible. They insist they would be punished for asking voters to endure short-term pain, and that the gains would be enjoyed by successor governments. Yet many examples show the opposite: when a policy is presented transparently, when other political parties are invited to input, and when voters are included in the conversation, they are more likely to accept change.

And leaders are being punished anyway. Friedrich Merz faces the worst opinion poll ratings for a modern German chancellor; Keir Starmer could be out of Downing Street very soon; in France, centrists face a pincer movement from the far left and the far right in next year’s presidential elections. As they flail around, leaders of many European nations look desperately for instant balm; the more they do so, the more they consign themselves to failure.

Everywhere you look, you see liberal democratic leaders paralysed with fear. They worry about the markets (with reason); they fret about conventional media and social media (with less reason). They wait for bad things to happen, trying to anticipate what their critics might say of them in case they put a foot out of line. It’s a self-fulfilling spiral.

Mainstream parties agonise about tacking to the left or the right. About whether to spend more on public services or slash them; to privatise or nationalise; or to clamp down further on immigration. These are the wrong questions.

Instead, they should do something different – exercise humility, find some curiosity and learn from others. Across all areas of policy, and in all parts of the world, there are examples of good practice: how to build an education system that meets the skills challenge posed by AI; how to provide equitable housing; how to create a sustainable environment and simultaneously boost growth.

Think of it another way. Consider the political developments in London, Paris and Berlin: given that the link between delivery and trust has been undermined, if mainstream politicians don’t think more imaginatively about the future, they won’t have a future.

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I was asked this week by Foreign Policy to give my assessment not of the runners-and-riders or the minute-by-minute drama but of why Starmer, and people like him, so fail to meet the challenges of the moment. These are my thoughts, slightly adapted and updated

Keir Starmer was always a curious choice for Labour Party leader; he never got the hang of politics and often gave the impression he didn’t want to. Britain’s former Director of Public Prosecutions rose imperceptibly up the party ranks at a time when Labour was desperate for someone with the basic commodity of competence—nothing more, nothing less.

The Britain of 2020 was in the throes of post-European referendum chaos. It had just transpired to elect Boris Johnson as prime minister, despite his buffoonery, based on his vague promise to “get Brexit done”. The main opposition party was in the grasp of the far-left Jeremy Corbyn. It decided on a change of course and settled on a man with no history: Starmer.

His promise was to make Labour electable again, and that he did emphatically. In July 2024, Labour won a general election for the first time in 14 years and with a thumping majority of 174. It was the third-best showing in the party’s history. The Conservatives had collapsed. The two insurgent parties that are now the talk of the town—the far-right Reform UK and leftist Greens—were nowhere to be seen.

Starmer inherited an economy in the doldrums, over-leveraged on the bond markets, and a moribund public infrastructure. There was little of the exuberance and optimism that marked Tony Blair’s famous victory in 1997. But there was relief and an assumption that the dour new prime minister would roll up his sleeves and make things work again.

Less than two years later, the mood is sourer, and living standards for most have continued to stagnate or have fallen further back. Starmer is on his last legs, assailed by all factions within his party and suffering possibly the worst opinion poll ratings of any prime minister in recent times. In recent elections for local councils in England and for parliaments in Scotland and Wales, Labour was humiliated.

As members of his own party have called on him to resign, or to set a timetable for a more gradual and dignified departure, Starmer digs in his heels. He repeatedly promises to learn the lessons: his most recent ‘big speech’ was advertised as relaunching his leadership with added passion and vision. Instead, it was a damp squib. He couldn’t do it because he can’t do it.

How did it all come to this?

In his biography of the PM, published shortly before Starmer entered No. 10 Downing St., Tom Baldwin called him the “unpolitician”—“because he doesn’t fit the template of political leaders,” Baldwin wrote in the Guardian in February 2024. Baldwin intended the phrase as a compliment, adding: “His backstory is messy and flawed, and he has neither a grandiose vision that can be summed up in a three-word slogan nor the kind of charisma that for so long made so many think Boris Johnson was unbeatable. However, even if ‘unpolitician’ had been a real word, it still wouldn’t have been a fair description of Starmer who, for all his misgivings about this profession, has learned how to become pretty good at it.”

Though still personally loyal, Baldwin has joined the mass ranks of those who see how much he has disappointed.

Almost from the first day he took office, Starmer set a gloomy tone and embarked on a timid approach to policymaking. On the odd occasion when he allowed his ministers to show some determination, the government ended up doing a U-turn to tone down or abandon a particular proposal.

He abandoned plans for welfare reform after a rebellion among his ranks. He angered older Britons by announcing cuts to support for heating payments, only to back down. Among the many fiscal changes that were then reversed or pared back, the plan to increase inheritance tax on large plots brought farmers onto the streets. He botched the introduction of digital ID cards, turning a proposal that had been popular into one that was deeply unpopular. The longer the list (and there were many more failures), the more he became the butt of jokes.

Starmer could never make up his mind. He feared upsetting anyone and ended up infuriating pretty much everyone. So determined was he not to leave himself open to attack, Labour went into the 2024 election campaign pledging not to increase income or VAT. That left the Treasury with no headroom. Starmer’s government then briefed that it might have to break the pledge—which raised hackles but was praised by some for showing candour—only to end up not doing so and trying to cobble other tax revenues on the sly.

Timidity, U-turns, countless relaunches that went nowhere, the communication skills of a funeral director, and endless unnecessary mistakes. But the problem was more fundamental than that. Starmer never knew where he stood on the big issues of the day. He allowed himself to be swayed by a single advisor, his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, who became possessed of the view that Labour had lost the working-class vote and needed to tack rightward to win it back from Reform.

The worst of several faux-populist speeches led Starmer to echo the views of the archconservative MP Enoch Powell of the 1960s, warning that immigration was turning Britain into an “island of strangers.” Amid the opprobrium that followed, Starmer tried the excuse that he didn’t realise the racist toxicity of the connection.

Then came the single-worst decision—the one that has taken him to the brink. A man who would walk across the street to avoid taking a risk, Starmer decided to throw caution to the wind in his choice of Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the United States.

It would later transpire that Mandelson—a former cabinet minister and European commissioner, a man synonymous with the creation of the Blair era, a man who had been close friends with Jeffrey Epstein and had strong business ties to Russia and China—had been deemed a risk in his security vetting report. Somewhere between the Foreign Office and Downing Street, this seemingly wasn’t relayed, as everyone knew Starmer wanted to appoint Mandelson and they didn’t want to upset the prime minister. The paradox is that Starmer didn’t particularly like him but was persuaded that he would be the right person to get into U.S. President Donald Trump’s good books. It backfired—spectacularly.

Starmer immediately sacked the head of the Foreign Office. The body count now includes one cabinet secretary, and from within Downing Street, two chiefs of staff, at least three heads of the policy unit, four communications directors, and many more senior ministers, advisors, and officials have “moved on”.

Starmer can rightly claim that he has been a steadying hand on the international front, working well with European partners on Ukraine. Relations with Trump have gone into free fall, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect badly on him—it is the fate of anyone who has not given the U.S. president uncritical support. His dogged negotiating skills might have made him more suitable as foreign secretary. Yet he cannot hide the diminution of British influence, in the Middle East, with China, and even in the Commonwealth. As for the European Union, it has become increasingly frustrated by Britain promising to “reset” relations and then avoiding serious discussion about the mechanism to achieve that, such as restoring links with the customs union and single market.

Deep disappointment he may have been, but the anger that has been directed toward Starmer appears out of proportion to facts. He hasn’t been given credit for any of the (small) improvements during his tenure, such as the lessening of waiting lists in the NHS, or for various reforms in education and elsewhere. The King’s Speech, delivered just as rivals were jostling to stand against the prime minister, included a few legislative measures worthy of merit.

Yet voters have tuned out. Labour candidates during the recent council elections reported that very mention of his name at the doorstep often led to fury. Sociologists as well as political scientists and historians will point to a mix of factors—social media-driven bifurcated politics seen everywhere and a country that has long been ill at ease and struggling to find its place in the world.

Whatever transpires next, Britain’s reputation has taken a further hit. A change at the top would mean a seventh prime minister in 10 years (though it must be said the previous five were during the Conservative era). Whoever eventually takes over will need to show far more imagination and courage than Starmer has. Perhaps Andy Burnham might have it within him? Recent signs are moderately encouraging.

Whenever it ends, Starmer’s term will serve as a how-not-to guide in the exercise of power.

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Friedrich Merz one year on; Keir Starmer facing electoral oblivion. The far right braying in both countries. Both leaders have record lows in the polls, reflecting frustration at the slow pace of reform.

Yet the fury levelled at them both bears no relation to rationality, reflecting more a hysteria that threatens to engulf politics. The only way out, as I argue in ‘Braver New World’ is to take far more risks, face down opponents, define yourself more sharply. In short, to show courage.

As things stand, the German Chancellor has more time to do this than the British prime minister, for whom events will shortly go into over-drive.

Here is my anniversary assessment of Merz, what he’s done wrong - and what he’s not given credit for.

Is there something wrong with me? I ask myself that question when, more frequently than might be good for my health, I find myself the only person in any Berlin room with a good word to say about Friedrich Merz. As he marks his first year as Germany’s Chancellor (coffee and water at the cabinet meeting), the leader of Berlin’s latest fractious coalition sees denunciation all around him.

The Right within his Christian Democrats accuse him of running scared of vital economic and welfare reforms, for fear of alienating the Social Democrats, whom he depends on to keep the government going.

The Left see the 70-year-old as an unreconstructed conservative, in hoc to business interests. One side sees him as victimising migrants, the other as going too soft on them. It is no wonder that his party is shedding votes and that his personal ratings are worse than even his predecessor, Olaf Scholz, at the lowest point of his chancellorship.

Meantime, just as the economy was beginning to crank slowly into gear, came the US and Israeli war on Iran, the closing of the Straits of Hormuz, and a surge in oil prices not seen since the outbreak of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Merz would be forgiven for cursing his fate. He lashes out at others – at the European Commission for not deregulating fast enough, and at Donald Trump for making his life, and that of pretty much every European leader, miserable.

That is the case against, or just a snippet of it – there is more. Even when he has a good few days, grappling quietly with a thorny issue, he manages to undermine himself. Sometimes there seems no purpose behind a statement beyond self-sabotage. Hence, on returning from the UN Climate Change Conference in Belem, Brazil, last November – one of only a handful of major leaders to bother going – he talked of a conversation he had had with accompanying journalists about the host city: “Who among you would like to stay here?…everyone was delighted to be back in Germany and to have left that place.’

As for Trump, given his mercurial state of mind, and over-sized ego, caution might be regarded as the best approach. Not for the German Chancellor. One minute he thanks the US President for doing the West’s ‘dirty work’; next he is suggesting blithely to a group of school pupils that ‘an entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership’.

What therefore is the case in support of Merz? Does one even exist? Many Germans there isn’t. But they’re wrong.

I wouldn’t presume to argue that he has been sure-footed or consistent. However, I would contend that he has been more strategic than he has been given credit for, particularly on defence and security. He has worked diligently behind the scenes to help reinforce Ukraine; he has been forthright in seeking to wean those remaining Germans away from their idiosyncratic remaining affection for Putin.

Most importantly, he has used the mayhem of the moment to demonstrate to his country that it must looking after itself, after decades of relying on the US. And that’s not just words; Germany will as early as in 2029 hit the NATO target of 5% defence spending (including 1.5% on critical infrastructure). Its military will be the size of that of the UK and France combined.

He has not shirked a public discussion across Europe about a more confident and military resilient Germany. This, inevitably, has caused some bemusement in Paris (President Emmanuel Macron, in keeping with Gaullist tradition, has been talking for years about ‘strategic autonomy’), and it has caused consternation in Warsaw, with Poles predisposed to thinking the worst of the Germans. Late in the day it might be for his country, but Merz has shouldered that responsibility.

Like many embattled leaders, Merz is criticised for devoting a disproportionate amount of time to international affairs. Given that every aspect of global tension affects the lived experienced of voters – from food shortages to gasoline prices to terrorism – this charge has little merit.

Yet, by his own admission, progress on the domestic front has been slow. Asked in a revealing interview in the latest edition of Der Spiegel to rate his government’s performance so far on a scale of 1 to 100, he responded: ‘Below 50’.

He didn’t resile from repeated questioning about arguments within the coalition, or about the dangers facing both his CDU and the SPD, led by the Vice Chancellor and Finance Minister, Lars Klingbeil. ‘This is one of the last chances for the political centre’, Merz stated, in an appeal to his junior partners – who happen to be even more unpopular than his party – to drop resistance to the gamut of reforms on welfare and pensions that he’s seeking to push through. Both parties are inching towards changes to health funding, but as all sides admit, it has been acrimonious and difficult.

But unavoidable: In a dig at his predecessor, Merz said that Scholz had continually told citizens that everything would be alright if they voted for him, insisting that they didn’t have to choose between social welfare and defence.

Merz’s strengths are the flip side of his weaknesses. He shoots from the hip, but there is a bluntness about him that is refreshing. He acknowledges things are dire and doesn’t want to hide that from Germans. The bile thrown at him is part a by-product of the rancorous era of social media; it is also in part Germans struggling to come to terms with the end of the politics of consensus.

Germany’s politics overall has been turned on its head. The requirement of different parties to form coalitions, haggle and reach compromises is now denounced as weakness. Meanwhile, the far-right AfD, which seeks to break that consensus, now regularly tops opinion polls.

In September, the AfD is widely predicted to win the election in the Eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, setting in train a crisis. The fear is that mainstream politicians there and in Berlin will panic themselves into a panic.

Merz knows that time isn’t on his side. For the moment, neither of the two ruling parties have anywhere else to go. They could summon the courage to deliver real change. That would entail taking risks.

However, muddling along would pose an even greater peril.

This is an adapted and updated version of my politico column

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It’s been a frantic few days since publication of Braver New World on April 16. For those who haven’t heard Start the Week on Radio 4 or any of the other media appearances, my website will have full details.

I also penned a two-page essay for The Times which appeared last Saturday. It was great to be asked. I was even more heartened by the extremely positive comments from readers. There seems to be an appetite for optimism - of the radical and practical variety.

This morning I did an enjoyable discussion on the Today programme, setting out several examples of good practice around the world.

Last but by no means least, if you buy a subscription to the excellent The New World, you get a copy of the book for free. On- and offline, and on Substack, the magazine consistently produces content that you struggle to find elsewhere. It dares to look beyond Britain’s shores. Here’s a long chat with The Two Matts in their podcast.

What follows is an abridged version of my Times piece, setting out some of the themes.

Please buy the book. Please engage in the arguments. Please spread the word:

Liberal democracy — the architecture surrounding it and the values underpinning it — is going through its deepest crisis since 1945. Governments from established parties struggle to boost their economies, improve people’s lives and address long-term challenges such as ageing and climate that threaten even worse to come.

Everywhere you look, you see liberal democratic leaders paralysed with fear. They worry about financial markets (with reason); they fret about conventional media and social media (with less reason). They wait for bad things to happen, trying to anticipate what their critics might say in case they put a foot out of line. It’s a self-fulfilling spiral. We’ve built a political class allergic to spontaneity, terrified of taking risks.

The ingredient that eludes them is courage. The politics of caution and incrementalism, epitomised by Keir Starmer and others in Europe, will finish off democracy.

That is lesson number one for Peter Magyar, the new Hungarian prime minister, the ray of hope after 16 years of Orban intimidation and sleaze. He has shown great resilience in getting this far. Will he be similarly bold in office? If not, he will be swept away before he knows it. The same applies everywhere.

If mainstream politicians don’t think more boldly about the future, they won’t have a future.

Trump’s one positive contribution has been to shake us out of our torpor, to make us realise that caution does not work. But the courage I am advocating is the opposite of bombast or triangulation — placing yourself in the middle of two extremes, looking over your shoulder for any criticism from the loudest voices, as Starmer has done almost from the moment he took office.

No, true political courage is about being honest with your citizens and making decisions that in the short term can be unpopular but in the long term are unavoidable. And so, over the past three years I have gone on a journey in search of good practice, of countries and cities seeking to meet the challenges of present and future with innovation and imagination.

We share similar problems. Where am I going to live? Who will look after me when I get old or sick? Am I learning the right skills to face the challenges of artificial intelligence? Do I have information I can trust? What kind of community do I want to live in? How can my environment be protected without it costing me my livelihood? Wherever we look, someone has a lesson for us, if only we have the humility to want to learn. All the solutions I cite are transferable to countries such as ours.

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Some examples: at the time of the financial crash in 2007, Morocco was almost completely reliant on imported fossil fuels for its energy. Then, as now with the Iran crisis, oil prices surged. The king ordered an overhaul, to build wind and solar plants to ensure that over half the energy mix would come from renewables by 2030. Having hit their interim targets early, they will easily do that. Morocco saw the dangers and opportunities in advance, did not delay and took a hard-headed economic decision.

In Vienna, 60 per cent of properties are public housing; much of it is of stunning quality. Underpinning the system are shared responsibilities. Housing collectives designate jobs to match residents’ skills — the plumber, the IT specialist, the teacher. Such is the prestige of these developments that famous architects compete more keenly for contracts than they do for private projects.

Finland’s education system is not defined by rote learning or tests but by training teachers to the highest standard (you need a master’s degree) and then trusting them. At a school in Tampere, alongside the core subjects of maths, science and language I saw pupils learn business skills, media literacy and democracy. With a threatening Russia just over the border, the emphasis is on self-reliance.

On restoring independence from the USSR in the early 1990s, Estonia saw in the rapid adoption of technology a route to security. It was called Tiger Leap. The country now has one of the world’s most sophisticated cybersecurity systems and works hand in hand with Ukraine. Estonia also represents a new form of citizen democracy. Each of its 3,000 state services can be accessed online. You could long ago file papers for marriage; now you can for divorce, too. Tax returns are filled out in minutes. It is reckoned that e-government has saved 2 per cent of GDP and gives each person an extra week of time off. Most importantly, citizens control their own data. This is not dreamy utopianism. It gives people a practical stake and builds trust.

Estonians (and pretty much everyone else in Europe) are baffled by British hang-ups about digital ID. Brits seem relaxed about cameras on every street corner but when it comes to a single, easy-to-use credential that would dramatically improve their access to services, they balk.

Starmer was intrigued by the Estonian example, but when he announced a British version, he put short-term exigency over long-term benefit. It was all about cracking down on illegal immigration, he declared. It would, for sure, help do that. Nowhere is it easier than in the UK to disappear. Yet the PM missed a huge opportunity to present a bold vision of government working for the people. It was an object lesson in how a government acting timidly ends up reinforcing scepticism on all sides.

Japan is at the forefront of one of the most important challenges facing mankind: the ageing of our populations. By the end of this century, it is predicted that 97 per cent of the world’s nations will have fallen below the replacement rate of births. Successive Japanese governments have shown that if you cannot avoid a problem, you might as well confront it. And they have a problem. By 2050, four in ten Japanese are expected to be pensioners. The number of centenarians could reach half a million.

Back in 2000, Japan introduced the long-term care insurance system, one of the first states to do something of that sort. The system is a mix of insurance, taxation and co-payment (a small fee per visit). Everyone over 40 is obliged to start paying. It has become part of the social contract. Everyone pays and, in the end, everyone benefits.

Once you or your family think you need some form of care, eligibility is determined initially by a 74-item multiple choice questionnaire. A software package generates a tailored care plan — there are seven levels — and a dedicated care manager is entrusted to the individual. Every social care programme is reassessed every three years to ensure the money is well spent and that services are keeping pace with technology. The average monthly cost for over-65s receiving care is a little over 6,000 yen, or around £30. The wealthiest pay three times as much.

I was most impressed by the ways in which communities integrate the elderly into day-to-day-life, creating a new form of intergenerational living. In a residential street in Fujisawa, near Yokohama, students receive subsidised accommodation; in return, on their way to and from classes they pop in to say hello to the old folk living on the floor below. A separate initiative came into effect last year: Kayoinoba, meaning “having a place to go to”. It is designed to ensure that as many older people as possible can live independently, while receiving long-term care within 30 minutes of home. Community support centres are also being established in all municipalities, a series of drop-in hubs the elderly can access for non-urgent medical care, advice, a meal or simply company. To get it right, the Japanese started planning for all this 20 years ago.

Compare that with the UK, which has been shirking the social care challenge for decades. Successive prime ministers have called for change yet run away from it, fearful of a public backlash at the costs involved. Theresa May’s candid proposals on the issue — denounced by Labour as a “dementia tax” — almost lost the 2017 election for the Conservatives. But what is Britain left with? A non-system that covers precious few and is based on the blithe assumption that most elderly will buy their care through the sale of assets.

Neither hubristic populists nor frightened mainstream governments are levelling with citizens about the rewiring required. No serious discussion is taking place about how public services can be maintained in the future, or about the skills required to equip the next generation. From climate to immigration to the future of the welfare state, the short-term politics and the long-term economics point in opposite directions.

There is no instant solution. But there are directions others are taking that we too should adopt: accept that the old ways are over; be ever self-critical, open to best practice elsewhere and reject “we know best” hubris; accept that what matters is delivery not ideology and be prepared to ditch shibboleths; embrace modernisation and digital solutions; plan for the long term, not merely the next election; be candid with citizens and don’t hide problems from them. Most of all, demonstrate courage. But for our governments to take greater risks, we the people need to demonstrate greater resilience. We need to confront hard truths and reward those thinking afresh.

If we don’t, we will have only ourselves to blame.

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For three years, I embarked on a global journey looking at best practice in 10 countries and cities. It was eye-opening, and it impelled me to put to one side (against all my instincts) the professional pessimism that has defined my analysis of international affairs.

The result is ‘Braver New World’.

I looked, inter alia, at Taiwan’s cost-effective, popular and speedy health service; an approach to social housing that Vienna has been pursuing for a century; the remarkable turnaround in Costa Rica’s environment, to Finland and its schools, to India and mobile apps and electronic payment systems that have emancipated small traders and farmers.

I ended my voyage in, of all places, a town in western Romania, Timisoara. Why so?

What follows is an adapted and abbreviated extract from my final chapter.

I hope you enjoy the book; please do buy it - it’s on pre-sale ahead of official release (first in English) on April 16. Please engage with it; let me know any thoughts, observations, criticisms. Please spread the word. I hope it helps to galvanise liberal democracies to display some courage in decision-making. Because, without it, our system is over.

—

When you hark back to the great revolutions of 1989, the year that gave Europe and the world so much hope, your thoughts don’t immediately turn to Timișoara. But they should, because in this small city in western Romania began the uprising that led to the downfall of the tyrannical Nicolae Ceaușescu.

I’ve come here to talk to the mayor, a German – yes, German. Dominic Fritz wants to turn the place around and, like so many mayors in so many places, is trying to stave off a return to the far right. He has invited me to speak at a conference on democracy attended by representatives of dozens of European cities, and by his close ally Nicușor Dan, the newly elected president of Romania.

The day before I arrived, in late September, the results of parliamentary elections had just come through from Moldova, the former Soviet state across the border to the east. Remarkably, given the relentless misinformation and bribes offered to voters by pro-Moscow oligarchs, Moldovans opted for the main pro-European party of president Maia Sandu. If she had lost, Vladimir Putin would have gained another important foothold in the heart of Europe.

The presidential elections in Romania in late 2024 were even more controversial. A previously marginal extreme figure by the name of Călin Georgescu, who had single-digit support in opinion polls, came from nowhere to pole position in the first round.

Days before the run-off vote, the Constitutional Court annulled the vote and banned Georgescu from standing. His supporters took to the streets; the country was in ferment. Five months later, Dan, a diminutive mathematician turned activist, was elected. But the situation is fragile – and the past continues to prey on the present.

Before embarking on the conference, I want to absorb as much of the history of 1989 as I can. It’s not easy because there is little signage, as if the locals are still hesitant about confronting their demons.

And so, I take a guide. We start in the south of the city at the church of a dissident priest called László Tőkés. When news emerged on December 16, 1989, that he was about to be banished to a remote rural parish for giving an interview to Hungarian TV that was critical of the regime, a small group of people tentatively showed up outside his home. This was no organised dissident movement, but somehow a quiet protest turned into a fully fledged revolt.

We walk for nearly two hours along a route that eventually (so I’m told) will be inaugurated as Revolutionary Road. We go close to the building that housed the dreaded security service, the Securitate – now the office of the local TV station. We continue past the spot where a lone woman, carrying a string bag on each arm filled with bread, was run over by an armoured personnel carrier, and on to the local Communist Party headquarters, which had been designed in the 1930s as a school for training housemaids.

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We end back in the centre, in Liberty Square, where soldiers opened fire on the crowd. They did so from a two-storey, 18^th-century building that was originally an Austrian guards’ house. It was taken over by the Romanian defence ministry and recently lent to the culture ministry to build a museum to the revolution. Except they haven’t. The plaster is fading, and the place is padlocked.

On one side of the facade is a small plaque to the first martyr of the revolution, a woman called Lepa Bărbat, who was gunned down in front of her husband and daughter. Her body was then spirited away, along with others’, to be secretly cremated – against Romanian Orthodox tradition – in a bleak spot outside the capital, Bucharest.

This small memorial is a start, but there is much more yet to do to honour the dead. Nothing prepares me, however, for what I’m about to see next.

On the other side of the Garrison Command Building, as it was known, is another plaque. It is dedicated to the “heroic people of Timișoara” who died “fighting for freedom” and comes from a certain Donald J Trump, that great defender of liberty.

It was presented to the city towards the end of Trump’s first term, not by the president himself but by the American ambassador, to mark the 30th anniversary of the revolution in December 2019. Some people here told me they’d like to take down his kind paean to democracy, but fear that for obvious political-intimidation reasons they can’t. It’s one thing not to win the Nobel peace prize; it’s quite another to be commemoratively cancelled.

More than 1,100 people died across Romania in the revolution. Unlike Poland, the Czech Republic and other states, there was no hero in the mould of Lech Wałęsa or Václav Havel. It would take more than a decade longer for the old regime to be properly flushed out. There was no clean break. Many of those who profited from the old system continued for years to wield influence in the new. Some still do.

And some of those who risked their lives for democracy now denounce it. The story of Daniel Zăgănescu is emblematic. In December 1989, he was the first person to jump on top of a tram close to Tőkés’s home, stopping traffic and declaring: “I am not afraid of the security, down with Ceaușescu”.

And now? Zăgănescu’s Facebook posts are filled with conspiracies and support for George Simion, the far right candidate narrowly beaten in Romania’s recent and compromised elections. Just hours after the conference I had attended, he liked a post that contained a photograph of Dan and Fritz, with the words: “The de facto president of Romania, together with slaves and his autistic puppet. This tent of filth has put the services and the masters of Brussels at the top of the country.”

It is a well-trodden route; anti-communist activist turns Putin fan and denouncer of the west. Viktor Orbán next door in Hungary is the most accomplished practitioner of this art.

Many people have developed a nostalgia for the old times, convinced that under Ceaușescu, at least everyone had something. It is a dangerous myth, but thanks to Kremlin bots and Silicon Valley platforms, it is powerful.

Yet throughout my stay, I detect a steely determination among many people, a courage that seems often elusive in more comfortable western European states. Perhaps the Brits, the French, the Germans feel their democracies are so long established, their checks and balances so strong, that they are not in danger. We know, courtesy of the US, where such complacency leads.

Romania is pushing back, nowhere more so than in Timișoara. It is doing what it can to be a good European citizen.

Its term in 2023 as European Capital of Culture gave the city new confidence. For most of its 900 years, this has been, as the blurb puts it, “a mosaic of multiculturalism”, a plae once held by the Ottomans, then the Habsburgs, where Hungarians and Germans used to dominate and where people of different religions lived relatively harmoniously.

This city of 300,000 people, which is situated close to the borders of Hungary and Serbia, is now plugged into tourism networks across Europe. Artists have come from everywhere and have left a legacy of free festivals and exhibitions all year round. The tourism board has come up with a snappy logo: “Free City, Free Spirit”.

Yet this openness is fragile. The Trump/Putin axis that is taking such a hold on so much of Europe is instilling fear. One city official recalls the weeks around the cancelled elections and near-takeover by the right: “We were paralysed. None of us could sleep or eat. We were really scared.” Business conferences were cancelled; visitors stayed away.

In Fritz, Timișoara has a mayor who is prepared to confront the past, take on his detractors and try to build something different. He’s not one of the many Romanians with German heritage, but a fully fledged German from the Black Forest with no previous connection – and with a Chinese wife. In other words, he personifies everything the nationalists loathe.

“I like to watch the shock on visitors’ faces when they realise how much their preconceptions about Romania differ from the reality,” he says to me by way of welcome. “I too grew up with the stereotype of Ceaușescu, Dracula, orphanages and corruption.”

He first came here in 2003, doing a year’s voluntary work in an orphanage for a Jesuit organisation. He returned to Berlin, ending up in 2016 as office manager for Horst Köhler, a former German president.

Three years later, he handed in his notice to go back to Timișoara to stand in the mayoral elections – a right that all EU citizens have in all countries, if they have been granted residency, but which almost none have the wherewithal to try. In September 2020, against the odds, he won with 55%, ushering in a new era and new politics. And remarkably, in the face of sustained attacks, he was re-elected four years later.

As well as being mayor, he is now head of one of the national parties. He is being touted as a potential president of the country (his denial of such ambition is accompanied by a knowing smile). For him to be able to stand, his application for citizenship will have to come through in time, and there are fears that some in the old bureaucracy in Bucharest will not be in a hurry to grant it.

In the meantime, he’s continuing to use what powers he has to tackle an entrenched bureaucracy, introduce change – and, in his many walkabouts around the city, convince inhabitants that there is a positive way of doing politics.

One initiative, which has been going for over three years, is called participatory budgeting. Part of the city’s budget is allocated to a process in which citizens can club together and propose projects for improving their localities. These plans are worked up with the help of officials into formal bids, which are submitted to a jury of nine people – five council officers and four people from civic society groups. A small number are then submitted to a public vote.

In 2024, 4m Lei was distributed to 19 projects, including a children’s playground, a cycle route, better lighting. That’s around £700,000 in total, an average of £40,000 per scheme. The number of people voting (online only) is increasing, as are the number of projects and the amount allocated. It’s still small – it’s not going to change the world – but it’s a start.

He is also greening the city courtesy of money from the EU, introducing cleaner and better public transport. He has been unapologetic about the multi-ethnic nature of the city – something that, in Romania as elsewhere, is now a divisive issue. He also cites rapid response and planning. Four days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he summoned city departments and civil society organisations to prepare for an influx of refugees, a whole month before the EU cranked into gear.

Shortly before the 2024 municipal elections, Fritz saw that his poll ratings had tanked. He and his advisers concluded that he needed to get out more and to listen harder. “You must identify the problem before it hits you. I tell people candidly that it will take time to turn things around because of the corrupt elites that came before me.”

To prove his point, he has ordered the destruction of 100 buildings, construction sites or plots that were illegally “privatised” by people under the communist system. They’ve been turned into parks or made accessible to the public. “I name and shame my enemies,” he adds. “We must fight the old system and the fake anti-system.”

If Fritz makes it on to the national stage, the stakes will be much higher, the dangers greater. In January 2022, shortly after he had been elected, his office was alerted to a commotion down the corridor. Simion, the far right MP who went on to be pipped to the presidency in 2025, had stormed into the council building.

With a posse of thugs in tow, he marched up the stairs, chanting “come out, you dirty dog” and “this is not your city”. The solitary elderly security man would have been no match, but the group decided to go no further. Simion had made his point, courtesy of social media of course.

Fritz immediately put a live video post on Facebook, telling voters they shouldn’t feel intimidated. “They are looking for all kinds of ways of taking me out of here,” he reflects. I choose not to press him on what he means.

I ask myself: if a relatively small city in a relatively small country, with few of the underpinnings of democratic stability, can show courage, not look over its shoulder, and instead seek innovative ways of improving lives, why can’t we all?

Maybe, though, that’s the wrong way of framing the question. Maybe it is because they are aware of the fragility of their project that they fight so hard for it. By contrast, more established democracies tinker and bicker, seemingly unable to meet the many present and future challenges that they face. Many of these governments have shown a poverty of ambition and aversion to risk. They have been mired in fear, but it is the wrong kind of fear.

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In this latest piece ahead of publication of ‘Braver New World’ on April 16, I make a plea not to cut back on diplomacy. After all, just look at the basic errors (not to mention everything else) committed by the Trump administration in the war on Iran. The US has lost many talented experts. The UK and others are in danger of going in that direction. (Plus I wanted to replay that wonderful 90s TV classic).

Of all the concerns in the world, the demise of the Ferrero Rocher ambassador might not be top of the agenda. In days gone by, thanks to an excruciating TV advert, the chocolate with the golden wrapping was synonymous with the diplomatic circuit. You really had made it if you offered them up to your bejewelled and bemedalled guests.

That was the 1990s. Almost all diplomats I have met over the years are very serious and very hardworking. They still must schmooze and dress up on occasion, but most of their time is spent trying to fathom out what’s going on and reporting that back to base, often from difficult places.

Thanks to Donald Trump, the job has got a whole lot harder. The basic tenets of British foreign policy have been shattered. Yet many of the problems predate him and are self-inflicted. Brexit stares diplomats in the face every day, requiring rictus smiles when reminded of the decade-old decision. Its consequences are not just the obvious ones. One is the informal exchange of ideas and experience that occurred at various EU gatherings; now Brits must knock on the door.

The so-called “reset” that Keir Starmer promised occurs in fits and starts. In keeping with his manner of governing, it frustrates all sides. Underlying it is a wider problem: the absence of a realistic strategy for Britain’s place in the world.

A combination of hubris and underconfidence guided the relationships of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, Tony Blair and George Bush, and David Cameron and Barack Obama. (The Boris Johnson era was about managing humiliation.) Even under serious prime ministers, Britain luxuriated in its permanent membership of the UN security council, the Commonwealth and influential role within Nato. The first of those is now paralysed, and the second irrelevant. The third remains true, but it has not gone unnoticed that while Germany still aims in principle to reach the new target of 5% defence spending (including critical infrastructure) by 2029, and Poland and the Baltics are strong too, the UK is likely to struggle to get there even by 2035. Talking the talk has never been the problem.

For many politicians, wallowing in monolingual mediocrity, all roads led to Washington, particularly after Europe was dispensed with. The “special relationship” was a term used by successive US administrations to keep the Brits sweet. The diplomatic equivalent of stroking a cat, it worked well for all. Until it didn’t. Trump has turned the transaction entirely to his benefit, pocketing an unprecedented two state visits and then spitting out his contempt for Starmer.

The reality, as most seasoned British diplomats know, has been much more nuanced than politicians pretended. Behind the scenes, they have tried to develop insurance policies, investing in a variety of bilateral and multilateral relationships. These take language skills, expertise, time – and proper funding.

Just when they are needed most, these are being drastically cut back. For reasons of rivalry, the Treasury has always had it in for the diplomats across the courtyard in Whitehall. Downing Street has sometimes shared that disdain, depending on the incumbent. Now, in a further act of self-harm that will damage British interests for a generation, they are taking a scythe to the Foreign Office.

Up to a quarter of its 8,000 UK-based jobs are at risk, starting at the top, at director general level, and then moving through the ranks. Many of those affected do the unsung but vital work of policy analysis. The remaining 9,000 based abroad are next for the chop. The official line is that the department is “transforming to be more agile and focused”. There may well be savings to be made on administration. But as one diplomat told me: “I’m not sure we will be best served if we type ‘Angola’ into ChatGPT and see what comes out.”

The damage is already being done. Many talented figures have already left, for academia, thinktanks or the private sector; others spend part of their days job hunting or competing against each other for dwindling positions – perhaps not the best way for the country to be navigating the Middle East war, Trump, Russia-Ukraine and tariffs.

Yvette Cooper, who has inherited a funding “deal”, has made Sudan one of her biggest priorities, and yet cuts in Africa departments and the broader global south are among the most stringent.

The plans have been attacked by MPs across the parties. In parliament earlier this month, the chair of the foreign affairs select committee, Emily Thornberry, called them “restructuring in order to restructure, while not looking first and foremost at what the Foreign Office is about”. The Conservative MP John Whittingdale drew a link between the Foreign Office and damaging cuts to the British Council and BBC World Service.

The UK is not alone. Germany is among several similar partners that are restructuring diplomatic personnel and soft power institutions, as more resources are devoted to defence spending. Yet diplomacy is neither isolated nor elitist; it is integral. Sharp antennae serve to give early warnings on climate, health, migration, demography, indeed pretty much every aspect of people’s lives. There is barely a challenge that isn’t shared and doesn’t require strong collaboration.

Shorn of institutional links with Europe and of a reliable partner across the Atlantic (to put it mildly), the UK is more vulnerable and is forced to be more reliant on its own resources. This is no time to cut back on expertise.

This is an adapted version of a piece that appeared in the Guardian.

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For the past decade, I repeatedly forecast doom – and was usually right. I assumed in 2016 that Brexit would happen, and Trump would triumph, followed by the far-right in France. I got this last prediction wrong, but with elections due next spring who knows for how long?

Then came Trump’s second victory in 2024; I won several bets on that. I had become a professional pessimist. Wallowing in crisis provides some form of instant catharsis. But it doesn’t improve anything. So I told myself: how about trying to look for the good?

And so, for my new book – my eighth – I decided to go in search of best practice. I’ve called it Braver New World. It will be published in a month, on April 16, first in English, and on September 22 in German, and after that in other languages.

Over the next few weeks, I will outline some of my thinking. Braver New World is already on pre-sale at Amazon, Waterstones and wherever you buy your books. I hope you buy it, enjoy it (I appreciate all feedback) and will be part of the conversation that follows, including at any of many speaking events in the UK and elsewhere.

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Call it a survival kit, a way of navigating this new era. Over the past three years I have gone in search of countries and cities, governments and communities which are tackling the threats that we face with imagination. No matter our culture, history or geography, we all share similar challenges.

Where am I going to live? Who will look after me when I get old or sick? Am I learning the right skills to face the challenges from artificial intelligence? Do I have trustworthy information to help me make my choices? What kind of community do I want to live in? How can my environment be protected without it costing me my livelihood?

Wherever we look, someone has a lesson for us, if only we have the humility to want to learn. That’s the difference between societies that are open to new influences and those that fly the flag and think they know best.

For me, this has been an extraordinary venture and adventure. My journey revived in me some of the hope I had felt during the early part of my career. In the late 1980s and 90s, I had the great fortune of being based in East Berlin, seeing the Wall come down and then in Moscow to witness the collapse of Communism.

Like many, I succumbed to a very Western-centric blithe optimism that followed. At what point did that optimism start to break down? Was it the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the sudden realisation of the limits of the state’s capacity to keep us safe? Was it Iraq, the duplicities on the road to invasion (which I wrote about in Blair’s Wars) and the failure to accomplish anything there? Was it the financial crash of 2008 and the fact that not a single person in a position of power has ever been seriously punished?

Was it a more long-term trend – the deregulation of financial markets by Reagan and Thatcher and the hegemony of subsequent waves of globalisation? Or was it the simpler human failings of complacency and greed?

I think it was all of those and something else. It was a failure of imagination.

My starting point is that the old world is not coming back. The rise of authoritarian populism has ensured that. If mainstream politicians don’t think more imaginatively about the future, they won’t have a future.

The key ingredient that eludes them is courage. This has nothing to do with Trumpian recklessness. Nor is it looking over your shoulder for any criticism from the loudest voices. No, the courage I am talking about is muscular, reflecting the harder-edged realities of now. It is based on resilience in the face of adversity. It is about being honest with your citizens and making decisions that in the short-term can be unpopular but in the long-term are unavoidable.

It is also about listening, about social solidarity, about citizens having a sense of agency. Countries that have been through difficulty are more capable of absorbing difficult decisions. The evidence is clear that societies where citizens are informed and involved are more likely to cohere and succeed.

No political system is guaranteed forever, and the best way to condemn liberal democracy to oblivion is to fail to acknowledge the gravity of the crisis we face, and to fail to engage the public in a candid dialogue about what the future holds.

The nativist authoritarian backlash is a response to maladministration, unfairness and government by increment, government by cowardice. Trump’s contribution has been to shake us out of our torpor, to make us realise that caution does not work. The irony is that it is the populists who tend to show greater courage, but of a different kind. They don’t worry about making enemies (they define themselves through their enemies). They are delighted to be known as disruptors. It has worked well for them, and for many it is intoxicating.

It provides an outlet for anger and an easy nationalist balm; but in the long term it cures few problems and doesn’t benefit those seduced by it. Saying that, however, provides no reassurance of its eventual demise.

Everywhere you look you see liberal democratic leaders paralysed with fear. They worry about the financial markets (with reason); they fret about conventional media and social media (with less reason).

They wait for bad things to happen, trying to anticipate what their critics might say of them in case they put a foot out of line. It’s a self-fulfilling spiral. We’ve built a political class allergic to spontaneity, terrified of the unpolished truth.

Populists, by contrast, see in every crisis the opportunity to disrupt, to remake the world in their own image. Imagine if mainstream politicians did the same.

For all the major challenges, from climate to demography to the future of the welfare state, the short-term politics and the long-term economics point in opposite directions.

Neither hubristic populists nor frightened mainstream governments are levelling with citizens about the rewiring that is required. A serious public discussion is not taking place about whether public services can be maintained in the future, or about the skills required to equip the next generation.

Instead of looking inwards, it is time to embrace fresh thinking from elsewhere.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be sharing some stories of the most courageous countries from the book, why I chose them, what they do best and what we can learn from them. I met extraordinary people with a variety of recipes for improving the lot of their communities. Many exciting examples of good practice exist in the unlikeliest places.

Braver New World is published by Atlantic on April 16. Here is a video introduction

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As the Trump administration bombards Iran, it’s easy to forget its wider strategy - to pick and promote far-right leaders around the world to do its bidding. On April 12, Hungary goes to the polls; the results will be pivotal to the future of the European Union. The White House will pull out all the stops in coming weeks. As I saw in a recent trip to Budapest, the potential for electoral mayhem is considerable

Viktor Orban placed his bet early, and he placed it smartly. A decade ago, in early 2016 he made a beeline for Donald Trump, later agreeing with Trump’s description of them both as “black sheep” who would get on well. This was at a time when the Republican maverick was seen as a long shot for the U.S. presidency.

“Orban had nothing to lose,” said Andras Biro-Nagy, director of Policy Solutions, a political research institute in Budapest. “He already had a terrible relationship with the Democrats.” From that moment, the MAGA movement saw Orban as its most important supporter in Europe, a continent that Trump ideologues denounced as liberal and “woke”. A succession of strategists from the inner circle, starting with Steve Bannon, began to spend time in Budapest.

Even when Joe Biden came to power, that closeness didn’t wane. Orban kept a distance from official Washington, preferring the sanctum of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

This history matters, because in Hungary’s general election on April 12, Orban—Trump’s mentor, disciple, outrider—could be ejected after 16 consecutive years as prime minister (he also served four further years prior to that). Thanks to stagnant growth, deteriorating public services, and ever-entrenched corruption, Orban is losing his lustre. Opinion polls show that the party formed by his chief opponent, Peter Magyar, has roughly a 10-point lead—though with several weeks of campaigning left, few expect the outcome to be as clear-cut as that.

The result will have huge repercussions for the war in Ukraine, for Europe, and for ultranationalism around the world. MAGA is alive to the danger of losing one of its prized assets and is pondering its next step. Should it do more to prop him up? Should Trump himself pay a stump visit?

Credit where it’s due: To turn a country of fewer than 10 million people, with an obscure language and economy the size of a medium-sized U.S. state, into a geostrategic pivot is some achievement. Orban is now a favourite not just of Trump, but of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, too.

He is also the scourge-in-chief of the European Union, doing all he can to undermine it, thereby fulfilling one of the key goals set out in the U.S. administration’s National Security Strategy. Central to Orban’s message is war: Ukraine, not Russia, is the problem. On the eve of the fourth anniversary of the war, Orban made one of his most confrontational decisions yet, blocking a fresh sanctions package against Russia, and ensuring that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and other EU officials would turn up in Kyiv empty-handed. EU governments responded with fury. Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, said Orban had “managed to create a climate of hostility towards the victim of aggression, and … now is trying to exploit that in the general election.”

Offline and online, the ruling Fidesz party’s messaging is relentless. Every few yards in cities, towns, and villages, billboards display posters depicting a small cabal who would enslave Hungary. One is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Another is von der Leyen. A third is Manfred Weber, the leader of the center-right EPP grouping in the European Parliament—hardly a household name. But it helps to have Germans in cahoots with Ukrainians. Alongside them is Magyar, who is portrayed as in their pocket. High-production videos posted online depict sons and wives crying as they await the man of the house, who has been sent to war to fight in the service of Ukraine thanks to the perfidious West.

Orban is doing everything he can to cling to power. Pensioners, large families, and other groups that form his base have been given extra payments and tax breaks. Single-member constituencies, which account for just over half of the 199 parliamentary seats, have been gerrymandered to favour Fidesz. According to various studies of the 2018 election, clientelism was common practice in small towns and villages. The measures included bussing in ethnic Hungarians from abroad, or the offering to voters of a “bonus” of up to 10,000 forint ($30) for casting their ballot “patriotically.”

Fidesz’s state capture is almost complete. The government has changed the rules to ensure that its appointees will survive any possible election defeat. The presidency, state audit commission, electoral commission, the constitutional courts, universities and the wider education sector, and the media are firmly in Orban’s grip. That would change only if Magyar won a two-thirds supermajority—something Orban currently enjoys—allowing incumbents to make sweeping constitutional reforms. That is considered unlikely.

Pro-government influencers are now highly valued—a large group of them were invited to accompany Orban on his jet during a recent visit to Washington. They return the favor by producing memes and other content showing how Magyar and his Tisza party would sell out Hungary’s interests. Meanwhile, news websites produced “exclusives” such as Ukrainian bomb threats on local schools—which didn’t stand up to subsequent scrutiny.

The most recent “bombshell” was a government announcement that it was ready to publish a “sex video” involving Magyar. They then produced a black and white photo, which seemed to have come from a security camera, and which Magyar himself involved him having consensual sex with a consensual adult woman. In other words, nothing to see here. His camp is wondering what might be conjured up. Other kompromat—to use an old Soviet word—is believed to be getting prepared against Tisza candidates in the dozen or so seats that could swing the outcome. Orban doesn’t need to call in Russian propaganda or methods. He is a past master himself.

While the standard of living was steadily increasing, during much of the 2010s, concern about the clientelism around the Orban circle tended to be shrugged off. Since the pandemic, the going has gotten harder, and with that a wider dissatisfaction with the way the country is being governed. Magyar’s lines of attack have therefore focused on the economy, the quality of services—and corruption.

Orban steadfastly avoids these themes, focusing instead on immigration, the battle against “gender ideology,” and the fear of war. Two contrasting ideologies are presented to Hungarian voters: Orban is inviting them to choose between “the Brussels path”—LGBT rights, money for Ukraine, the unfettered arrival of millions of migrants—or the Hungarian path. That is not a million miles away from the land of decent (white) Christian, family-oriented folk outlined by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in his speech earlier this month at the Munich Security Conference.

Rubio made a point of visiting Hungary and (similarly minded but less strategically important) Slovakia immediately after Munich. He lavished praise on Orban, making clear that Trump would support his “friend.” Yet for all the rhetoric, the U.S. administration has been more circumspect. Hungary has not been supplied with the same large-scale credits as were given to Argentina. Insofar as Trump is thinking about Europe at all, his attention appears to be turning toward Poland, ahead of elections in the fall of 2027 that could see the far-right Law and Justice return to power, and particularly to France, where in just over a year the ultraconservative National Rally could finally take over. Slovenia is heading in that direction; the Czech Republic has just reelected right-wing nationalists, and in Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, Trump has his favourite.

“Trump’s calculation might be: Is he prepared to risk backing a losing horse?” said Peter Kreko, a senior associate at the CEU Democracy Institute, a Budapest think tank. “Would he fly all this way just to see his man lose? This presupposes that Orban will lose, which is anything but a foregone conclusion,” Kreko added. “Expect fierce election battles and many dirty tricks.”

Many observers worry that Orban might refuse to leave office, claiming he was cheated out of victory. This is not impossible. What’s more likely is that he would spend the four to six weeks that the outgoing parliament is likely to continue to sit, in which his two-thirds majority allows him to make constitutional changes, to reinforce his parallel levers of power.

He would then, with the help of Trump and Putin, do all he could to undermine Magyar, to make a rapprochement with Brussels politically dangerous, and wait his turn again, as a hamstrung administration flounders. Just as has happened elsewhere in Europe. Just as happened in the United States.

This is an adapted version of a piece published in Foreign Policy

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“The old order is unraveling at breathtaking pace,” declared Friedrich Merz to the great and good at Davos as they assessed the multitude of storms whipped up by Donald Trump. The world, the German chancellor added, has entered a new era built on brute force, and “it’s not a cozy place”.

This week marks a year since voters booted out the anaemic government of Olaf Scholz. That anniversary pales into insignificance compared to the start of the fifth year of the brutal war in Ukraine. Yet it still matters, as it marks the coming the age of Germany as a hard power. Not before time.

At the Munich Security Conference, Merz insisted to organisers he wanted to break with convention and give the opening address. With everyone fearing a repeat of JD Vance’s menace the year before, he took it upon himself to galvanise. His message: the world order is over; European complacency is over; Europe won’t apologise for its values. “Freedom can no longer be taken for granted. We don’t believe in protectionism and tariffs; we see the climate crisis for what it is.” It was a speech that stiffened the sinews.

Wherever he looks, Merz sees menace - from Russia, China and, of course, Trump. Also this week, he embarks on a visit to Beijing, his first as chancellor (it hasn’t escaped the notice of his hosts that it’s taken him eight months, far longer than his more biddable predecessors). German exports to China have fallen off a cliff. Once seen as trade partner of choice, China is increasingly regarded as threat.

As he seeks to shore up his alliances within Europe and beyond, the person Merz increasingly looks to is Canada’s Mark Carney, whose own speech in Davos about the “rupture” of the West left a deep impression.

The two have more in common than they realise. A former central banker, Carney certainly looks the part of the leader he’s become; but that was by no means guaranteed. In early 2025, staring into an abyss, Canada’s Liberals decided to dump then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Then, just weeks after taking over, Carney called a general election and, against the odds, defeated populist conservative Pierre Poilievre.

The person he really had to thank, however, was Trump who, after just a few months in office, had already vowed to absorb Canada as the 51st US state. These are trying times for those who refuse to kowtow, but for Carney, they are paying dividends — his approval ratings are now at their highest since he took office in March 2025.

So, might the same happen to Merz?

He is thinking the previously unthinkable. He has ordered a revamp of his foreign security apparatus, in the knowledge that it is no longer safe to work with the Americans. He discusses out loud the prospects of the Americans no longer coming to Europe’s defence.

In recent days, Merz disclosed he had held initial talks with President Macron over the possibility of joining France’s nuclear umbrella, underlining his call for Europe to develop a stronger self-standing security strategy. And this from someone, whose career in politics and business has been more staunchly aligned to the US than most other Germans.

Domestically, he continues to face headwinds. His party’s polling ratings remain doggedly low. The first poll of 2026 showed the far-right AfD extending its overall lead to 27 percent of the vote, while the Christian Democrats came in at 24 percent. The chancellor’s personal popularity remains in the doldrums as well, as only 23 percent satisfied with him. Within the CDU, however, he appears to be consolidating his position. At his party conference in Stuttgart in recent days, he was re-elected - a formality but still 91 per cent isn’t bad - and he choreographed a brief but important reconciliation with Angela Merkel.

One date in the diary is filling them all with trepidation: Sept. 6, when voters in the eastern state of Saxony Anhalt cast their ballots. Ahead of that vote, the AfD is currently at around 39 percent, with the CDU trailing at 26 percent, followed by the Left Party at 11 percent, and the once-mighty SPD hitting rock bottom at 8 percent.

These elections are seven months away, and seven months of MAGA mayhem is a long time. Trump’s threats to take over Greenland even caused far-right parties across Europe disquiet, impelling some to criticise him, and nonetheless discomfiting those who didn’t.

Politics in Europe is hurtling into the unknown. No government can predict what harm Trump will unleash next. But the leaders who stand up to him, and who display candour to their citizens, are the ones most likely to survive. What has helped Carney so far could help his partners in Europe too.

This is an adapted version of a piece published in politico

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It was 1996, a year from the general election that would sweep Tony Blair into power. The leader of the Labour Party (rebranded New Labour) seemed to walk on water; the Conservatives didn’t dare to criticise him. Even hostile right-wing newspapers bit their lips. That millennium era will be remembered by history as a public relations triumph. Even the country acquired a new moniker: Cool Britannia. Several people were responsible for this double rebranding, but one man oversaw it all: Peter Mandelson, otherwise known as the “Prince of Darkness” or “Svengali.”

I was the chief political correspondent for the Financial Times at the time, and one moment has stayed in my memory. I was taking Mandelson out for lunch for the first time. He proceeded to tell me that I needed to show more discipline in my writing. I reminded him I’d just spent time in East Germany and the Soviet Union. I sought to divert his attention by inviting him to gossip, which he duly did. He ran through the plusses and minuses of prospective Labour MPs. About one whom I considered among the most talented, he proffered: “He thinks too much.”

Watching Mandelson’s demise of the past few weeks, I’ve turned over in my head our various interactions. On one occasion, he described a veteran commentator—who was reluctant to toe his preferred line—as a “has-been” and suggested he would “have words” with his editor. After I moved to the BBC, I had a comment slot on the morning radio show, Today, that sometimes annoyed the Downing Street operation. I learned I, too, had been denounced to my bosses.

New Labour was a spectacular election-winning machine, but it became increasingly evident that Blair and those around him seemed more interested in keeping office than introducing the changes they promised to the country. The atmosphere throughout was macho (it was always male-dominated) and obsessed with discipline. Blair’s several cabinets, particularly the early ones, did contain some impressive free spirits—I think of Robin Cook, his first foreign secretary, and Mo Mowlam, Northern Ireland secretary, to whom I became close. They were not disloyal, but evidently not loyal enough. And so they, too, were undermined.

After a decade, Blair was finally forced out in 2007 by his friend-turned-rival Gordon Brown. But Brown had been so driven by gaining the top job that, once there, he seemed to have little left in the tank. He lasted only three years, and what followed was 14 years of Conservative rule, a disastrous Brexit referendum and a chaotic merry-go-round of prime ministers. Labour was back in the political wilderness, riven with factionalism and taken over by the left. Under Jeremy Corbyn—the opposite of everything the Blairites represented—it achieved the spectacular feat of losing successive elections, to the unloved Theresa May and then calamitously to the clown Boris Johnson.

By 2020, the Blairites saw their opportunity to reassert control, but they had already been hatching their plans for some time before, through an organisation they had set up called Labour Together. The mastermind behind that was a relatively young Irishman by the name of Morgan McSweeney—who happened to be a protégé of none other than Mandelson.

In Keir Starmer, they believed they had found their man. (Unlike the Conservatives with four, Labour has yet to have a female leader.) The fact that Starmer, a human rights lawyer and public prosecutor, had no political hinterland was seen as an advantage. Dull, methodical efficiency would do. His political flexibility was a further asset. Starmer had served under Corbyn in two different positions, only later to distance himself from him.

Once installed as leader of the party, Starmer steadily purged it of Corbynites and brought back in Blairite old-timers and their younger acolytes. In the general election of July 2024, he secured a huge majority, thanks in large part to quirks in voting patterns—the party’s actual share, 33.7 percent, was the lowest of any governing party on record. This was much more about removing the Conservatives than endorsement of the alternative. Starmer had little of Blair’s charisma—or political acumen. Unlike Blair, he quickly lost control of his party.

On the world stage, he appeared far more assured, working well with the Europeans to try to help the increasingly beleaguered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and to navigate the many perils of Donald Trump. But domestically, the government quickly became mired in a series of policy U-turns and personnel calamities. His propensity to buckle at the first sign of a rebellion from within his own party on anything remotely controversial—from cutting a universal heating allowance for the elderly, to raising inheritance duties for wealthier farmers, to the introduction of digital ID cards—became his signature tune. That produced a vacuum, which in turn produced infighting. Starmer lost his chief of staff; then his deputy prime minister was forced to quit, while a succession of officials in Downing Street came and went.

He became almost completely reliant on McSweeney, whom he had appointed his chief of staff. As the government’s opinion poll rating plunged to record lows, Starmer and McSweeney became ever more embattled and ever more interdependent, alienating other ministers, MPs, and civil servants by their decisions. One decision most of all.

McSweeney overruled several wiser heads and urged Starmer to appoint Mandelson to the post of ambassador to the United States. The incumbent, Karen Pierce, had been deemed a success, cultivating strong contacts across the aisle. Her time was up, but some in the Foreign Office were urging the prime minister to keep her on. As for other alternatives, there were several capable senior diplomats on offer, plus some other big names from politics, from former Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband to the former Conservative Chancellor George Osborne. Instead, Starmer opted for Mandelson, someone he didn’t know particularly well but whom he regarded as a grown-up, versed in trade negotiations (from his time as an EU commissioner) and with the oleaginous skills to keep Britain in Trump’s good books.

There were concerns aplenty, but they were cast aside in a vetting procedure that was anything but thorough. It was considered not relevant that Mandelson had been forced by scandal to resign twice during the Blair era. His friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, which had long been in the public domain, was also seen as a trivial concern, as was copious information attesting to his friendship with Russian and other oligarchs. It was not as if Mandelson was particularly secretive about his predilections toward money and power; pace his breezy statement back in 1998 that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich—as long as they pay their taxes.”

Labour leaders seemed to rely on Mandelson as a prop. Even Brown, who had always been suspicious of him, became so desperate to kick-start his regime that he brought him back into the cabinet as business secretary in 2008. Perhaps it was no surprise that Mandelson considered himself unassailable. Starmer believed his appointment as envoy in Washington to be a masterstroke. Within months, however, it all came crashing down when the first tranche of Epstein files was published. The prime minister was persuaded to remove him last September; he did so very reluctantly.

Starmer was already at a low ebb when the latest tranche of files revealed not just more about the exploitation of women and girls by Epstein and his cabal, but that Mandelson, while a minister under Brown, was apparently sending the sexual predator confidential economic information from the heart of the U.K. government. The police are now assessing whether criminal charges should be brought against him. Mandelson has gone from being feared to being disparaged. Many MPs and aides who owe their careers to him are now trampling on him.

Downing Street is haemorrhaging. McSweeney has quit, quickly followed by the head of communications (the fourth Starmer has had in barely 18 months), who was also close to Mandelson. Other officials and ministers are likely to be implicated when Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, which has been asked to investigate, releases emails and text exchanges around the saga.

As candidates for the succession are jockeying for position, Starmer’s future is hanging by a thread. Elections due in May for local councils, and for devolved governments in Scotland and Wales, were always going to be difficult. Pollsters now predict a calamity for Labour. Within hours of McSweeney going, the leader of the Labour Party in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, called on Starmer to step down. Yet, after a frantic ring-around by aides, the Cabinet in London was press-ganged in pledging support for their leader. An acute crisis has become merely a chronic one.

Labour has always been a curious amalgam of hubris and under-confidence, seemingly deriving strength only from a narrow cabal of individuals. The problem goes beyond the fate of one prime minister and one party. Long term, it is possible that someone will emerge who might inject into the Labour Party a policy courage it lacks—that could be both radical and mainstream—while shedding the tribal narcissism that it has often personified. That will be its only route to survival, but it has many hurdles to cross to get there.

Meanwhile, with the Tories also in the doldrums, the path has never seemed rosier for the far right, for Reform UK and Nigel Farage, to exploit a growing sentiment of disdain for all mainstream politics. These are dangerous times for British democracy.

This is an updated version of a piece published in Foreign Policy

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One country is the biggest spender as a percentage of GDP on defence in Europe. The other is spending big to catch up. The former is one of Europe’s fastest growing major economies. The latter is the continent’s traditional economic powerhouse. Both acutely recognise the dangers posed by Russia, their adversary to the east.

Poland and Germany, in other words, have the basis for a new special relationship at the heart of Central Europe and a new motor for deeper European integration. Yet relations between Poland and Germany have rarely been as fraught as they are now.

The two countries should be working hand in glove, particularly when it comes to protecting Europe from the East. Poland has suffered more hybrid attacks on its airspace from Russian drones, alongside disinformation and other malign interference than any other major European Union country. Germany is contributing a small contingent of forces and equipment to Poland’s East Shield project to strengthen its border with Belarus. Military cooperation is just one of several areas where cooperation does take place, but it is stuttering, and everyone suffers as a consequence.

Even if parts of the two governments would like to go further, the atmospherics often get in the way. The iciness is the consequence of the present and past. In deeply divided Poland, history is instrumentalized.

With parliamentary elections due next autumn, there are few votes in being seen to be too friendly to the Germans. It has been more than half a century since German Chancellor Willy Brandt made his historic gesture of reconciliation in 1970, dropping to his knees in front of the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto to beg forgiveness for Germany’s World War II crimes. Ties gradually improved after that, particularly after German reunification in 1990 and the removal of communism in both Poland and what was then East Germany.

But in recent years, they have gone backward. The Polish-German Barometer, a survey conducted regularly since 2000 among the German and Polish populations, shows that Polish attitudes toward Germans have significantly worsened in the last few years. Turbocharging this trend has been the ascent of far-right populism across Europe, aided and abetted by the first and second Trump administrations.

In a bid to rally citizens around a unifying cause, the Polish far-right Law and Justice (PiS) party, which ran the government from 2015 to 2023, put reparations for damage caused by the Nazis’ occupation of Poland at the heart of foreign and European policy. Amid increasingly bellicose rhetoric, the then-government commissioned a report that in 2022 calculated the compensation owed at $1.3 trillion. Even though it was more than three times the size of Germany’s annual federal budget, PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski described it as “conservative.”

The demand was passed overwhelming by the Polish parliament, the Sejm, with even the centrist Civic Platform party of Donald Tusk voting in favor. Even though he became prime minister the following year, ousting the ultranationalist PiS after eight years, Tusk has not shelved the demands—for fear of being seen as “siding” with the Germans. The German government, in advance of bilateral consultations in July 2024, reportedly was set to offer 200 million euros (about $214 million) to support surviving Polish victims of World War II. Warsaw, however, ultimately rejected the proposal.

The issue has continued to rumble, with successive governments in Berlin insisting that the matter has long been legally closed. Germany argues that Poland waived its right to war reparations in 1953, as part of an agreement in which its Eastern Bloc ally East Germany ceded territories beyond the Oder-Neisse border to Poland and Russia. The current Polish government argues that the waiver was agreed under pressure from the Soviet Union. Furthermore, Germany says any outstanding reparations issues were settled with the 2+4 agreement between Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States that sealed reunification in 1990.

In late 2025, the newly installed German ambassador to Warsaw, Miguel Berger, expressed his frustration. “Sometimes I have the impression that some people who talk about reparations do so because they perhaps do not want Polish-German relations to develop positively,” he told a Polish TV station. He went further on social media, declaring that these demands were stoking divisions that help only Russian President Vladimir Putin—to which PiS politicians expressed further fury, and the cycled continued.

In between, progress is made in small steps, such as the return of artefacts looted during the war. A much-awaited memorial to the Polish victims of Nazis in Berlin has yet to fully materialise however; a temporary stone has been unveiled, but the ultimate monument appears a long way off.

The results of the Polish presidential election last May put paid to hopes of a thaw. Against the odds, the ultranationalist Karol Nawrocki defeated Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, the Civic Platform candidate.

Nawrocki’s past is just a little colourful. The list of allegations accompanying him include whether he swindled an elderly man into transferring ownership of his apartment in the northern city of Gdańsk to pimping at a luxury hotel at Sopot, a beach resort nearby. It is an assertion Nawrocki strenuously denies. He also has a record of football hooliganism. None of these seemed unduly to bother his base.

He instead portrayed himself as at the vanguard of Polish identity, declaring that ‘historical politics’ would play a key role in his presidency. The narrative is focused on his countrymen’s record as heroes and victims, on ‘defence of Polish dignity’.

The Polish Constitution, designed in the post-communist era of the early 1990s to prevent any leader from accumulating too much power, has instead produced deadlock over the past decade whenever the posts of president and prime minister have belonged to radically different parties.

Nawrocki has assembled a foreign-policy apparatus of his own. While Tusk has sought to bring Poland closer to the heart of European Union decision-making, Nawrocki has aligned himself firmly with MAGA, endorsing the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy. Indeed, Washington did everything it could to help Nawrocki get elected, inviting him to the White House in the middle of the campaign and receiving formal endorsement via Kristi Noem, President Donald Trump’s secretary of homeland security - she of ICE shoot-first-ask-questions-later fame - when she visited Poland to attend a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference.

PiS politicians are warmly welcomed in Washington at CPAC events, while the official Polish ambassador—accountable to Tusk and his foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski—struggles to gain access. When Nawrocki went to see Trump for a second time within four months, this time as president, he broke with tradition and invited no one from the foreign ministry to the meeting.

The United States, which is hosting the next G-20 meeting in December in Florida, is reportedly toying with the idea of inviting Nawrocki rather than Tusk. The NSS makes clear the Trump administration’s intention to weaken the EU and to embrace right-wing nationalists in Europe, be they in power, as in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Italy; sharing power, as in Poland; or bidding for it, as in France and Germany.

Yet Poland’s bellicose approach toward Germany is not all dictated by Trump; much of it predates him. Kaczynski, the longtime PiS leader, framed the current nationalist rhetoric in the 2000s, seeing the EU as a den of liberal vice and Germany as pulling its strings. He has regularly declared Poland to be imperilled by these twin threats, talking of a “Fourth Reich” while describing Tusk as a “German agent,” a statement for which he received a rare parliamentary reprimand.

One historical moment is used against Tusk, time and again: the fact that his grandfather served in Nazi Germany’s armed forces during the war. This revelation was seen as one of the key factors behind Tusk’s defeat in the 2005 presidential election. Lost in the noise was that Jozef Tusk didn’t have a choice about being enlisted and later deserted to join the many Poles who fought against Adolf Hitler.

All of this presents a dilemma for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who kept his electoral promise to visit both Paris and Warsaw right after entering office last May, hailing a “new opening” in German-Polish relations. With strains in its relationship with France, Germany would dearly like closer cooperation with Poland, particularly in supporting Ukraine and pushing back against Russia. Those diplomatic efforts continue. The trilateral Weimar Triangle, constituting the governments in Paris, Berlin and Warsaw, has been revived. But overall, the strains show.

Germany’s unilateral decision last year to introduce immigration checks on its border with Poland infuriated Warsaw. When German police began turning back migrants and asylum-seekers, self-declared “citizen patrols” amassed on the Polish side of the border in a bid to stop them from being turned back. As pressure on Tusk grew, he was forced to exclaim that “Poland’s patience is running out.” His government introduced tit-for-tat checks on the Polish side of the border, and while they have since been pared back on both sides, it would not take much for tensions to be inflamed again.

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This is an adapted version of a piece I wrote for Foreign Policy.

I was planning to start writing about the themes in my forthcoming book, Braver New World, the result of a three-year journey across 10 countries looking at political courage in solving the problems of our times, from healthcare to ageing, education and AI to immigration. The book is out in April (it’s already available for pre-order) and more information is on my website.

I will do so in my future newsletters as it’s my contention that unless liberal democracy shows greater courage it has no future. But that immediate danger, Trump, cannot stop intervening. So it would be remiss not to focus on him this time, and the ever-increasing threat he poses.

—

Shortly before Donald Trump stood up in Davos to deliver his latest tirade against Europe, I asked a senior German official if it would be correct to describe the United States no longer as an unreliable partner but as a potential enemy. ‘Absolutely’, he replied. I had written as much in recent months, but it was salutary, if scary, to hear the assertion made with such clarity.

Has the penny finally dropped in governments across the continent? I remain to be convinced. Trump’s apparent climbdown over an invasion of Greenland and tariffs on anyone who might have the temerity to object gives rise to cautious optimism. But nobody has a clue whether he means it, what his intentions are on this latest fracas, and where his malign attention will turn to next.

Keir Starmer patted himself on the back (as he tends to do when anything goes right), saying that British ‘pragmatism’ had played an important part. Emmanuel Macron let it be known that his blunter approach also paid dividends. Mark Rutte seems to have embedded a few micro-moments of sanity into the American President’s ear when they met on Wednesday evening.

Friedrich Merz earned some rare praise from Trump in his speech. Finland’s President, Alexander Stubb, ‘Trump whisperer’ and fellow golfer, occasionally gets through to him. Good cop, bad cop, word in the ear and all that – but none of this constitutes a strategy. These are well-meaning leaders grappling as best they can with one of the great crises of a generation. But they are playing according to redundant rules.

The EU, NATO and the various coalitions of the willing are merely responding to Trump’s latest whirlwind. Europe struggles to accept the reality – the end of the Transatlantic alliance.

It is there in black and white in the US government’s National Security Strategy. That document denounces all that the EU and the West stand for and exhorts the far-right to seize power wherever it can. ‘America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.’

It is the very embodiment of enmity. Trump is following it in the letter and the spirit.

Yet even when it was published two months ago, several leaders sought to play down the severity of the situation. They did the same throughout 2025 even as Trump was making clear his admiration for Vladimir Putin and his contempt for Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, on whom he pushes a deal largely on the Kremlin’s terms.

The prospect of seizing land that belongs to a NATO member state appears to have finally brought Europe to its senses, as elucidated so icily and forensically on the Davos stage by Mark Carney. The world was going through a ‘rupture’, not ‘transition’. Nostalgia for the good old days of American leadership didn’t represent policy; the old order was not coming back. The Canadian Prime Minister, now clearly one of the leaders of the Rest of the West, warned his colleagues that compliance (with Trump’s bullying) will not buy them safety.

Carney knows the dangers as his military has reportedly war-gamed an invasion from the south, and the conclusions are sobering. It would take US forces barely two days to capture the main installations; resistance would take the form of Afghan-style insurgency. The very fact that the exercise was commissioned speaks volumes. The mayhem of the past 12 months shows that when it comes to Trump it would be foolish to rule anything out, no matter how previously unimaginable.

The likes of Nigel Farage and others on the far-right across Europe have been embarrassed by the Greenland affair, forced to issue awkward utterances about European sovereignty. If he is genuinely toning down his threats, they will be relieved. They can continue working methodically with their mentors, Trump and Putin, to undermine liberal democracy from within.

An element of calmness constitutes an even greater threat than the hysteria of the past week. Trump is a tactician as well as a thug. He is poised, ready to strike, again and again. Europe needs to find the strength to resist; it will be a long haul.

This is an updated version of a piece I wrote for the i-Paper.

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I sometimes hear from my friends back in Britain that, unlike Germany and France, somehow the far-right threat in the UK isn’t so serious. Reform is not as extreme as the AfD or National Rally and, in any case, the Brits are too reasonably minded. I humbly disagree. Over the next year or so democratic resilience will be put to the text in all three countries. All isn’t lost - if only mainstream politicians knew how to take them on.

British politicians have for a long time seen America as the bigger brother. Labour strategists, especially during the “New Labour” days of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, would flock to Democrat conventions, in awe of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Conservatives have seen the Republican Party as their lodestar. Between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the affection was deep and genuine.

The supplication has not changed. What has changed is the politics. The MAGA movement has for several years been putting down roots in London. With think tanks, social media consultants, behind-the-scenes wargaming, and public events—all supported by considerable American money—the United Kingdom, often described as “Broken Britain,” is the favoured destination for the export of Trumpism. Its backers are thinking long term, beyond Trump himself, even beyond arch-Brexiter and now head of the Reform UK party, Nigel Farage, and, of course, beyond the man who is notionally standing in their way, Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Brexit was phase one. In April 2016, two months before the referendum, Obama used a trip to the United Kingdom to warn that it would go “to the back of the queue” in any trade deals. He was denounced for interference, a criticism that now feels somewhat quaint, particularly given the amount of financial and disinformation support that came from the Kremlin.

For those around Trump, a Britain decoupled from Europe opened countless opportunities. They prepared for the long haul. A business-like but frosty relationship with former Prime Minister Theresa May was followed by the mateyness but ideological emptiness of her successor Boris Johnson. Trump’s absence from the White House coincided with the final disintegration of Conservative rule under the hapless Liz Truss and luckless Rishi Sunak.

A Labour victory in 2024 seemed inevitable. What has stunned the MAGA team is how easily a government that ought to have been stable and long term has imploded.

With the Conservatives much diminished with only 121 MPs and under the incompetent leadership of Kemi Badenoch, it is the right-wing populist Reform UK party led by arch-Brexiter (and Trump and Putin buddy) Nigel Farage that has surged. While only winning five seats in 2024, it made strong forays in council elections in May 2025. Last summer, Reform UK overtook Labour in the polls. Which has given MAGA a much bigger opportunity.

For the moment, Trump is “playing” Starmer reasonably well and Starmer is surviving Trump reasonably well. The relationship is based on certain shared interests, accompanied by sycophancy from the prime minister and an uncharacteristic discretion (some of the time) from the president. Together with the Germans and French, Starmer does what he can to mitigate the American damage on Ukraine. Through ingratiation, he secures marginally better tariffs than the EU. On intelligence, the Five Eyes—the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada—is bearing up, just.

Starmer does what he can to avoid crashing the diplomatic car. The royal family comes in handy for that. The second Trump state visit to the UK in September was a masterclass in fawning, but it succeeded on its own terms. It bought the British government more time. The problem is that the prime minister has played his final card. It’s unlikely he could invite Trump a third time (though never say never in these curious times) and he does not determine who gets the Nobel Peace Prize.

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With his Hebridean mother’s heritage and his golf courses, Trump embraces his Scottish links. His “private” visit last summer allowed him to play a few rounds and play king to a few courtiers, such as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Amid a heavy police and security (which led to an argument between the Scottish and UK governments about who should pay), protesters were kept far beyond the grounds of his luxury Scottish resort at Turnberry.

The more important action last summer, however, took place further south—in the Cotswolds to the west of Oxford, a wealthy and picturesque collection of stone villages now dubbed the Hamptons of the UK. It was here that JD Vance, the intensely ideological vice president and likely successor to Trump, chose to spend part of his vacation.

In a sign of the enduring flexibility of Conservative principles, George Osborne, former Chancellor of the Exchequer when the Tories portrayed themselves as liberal and environmental, took it upon himself to be Vance’s party planner.

He arranged a series of dinners and teas for the Vances to meet Britons “of note.” The guests included not Kemi Badenoch, the current Conservative leader who is seen as largely irrelevant by the Trumpians, but her ambitious deputy, Robert Jenrick. Another former moderate, Jenrick has swung to the nativist cause with all the zeal of the recent convert.

Jenrick assumes that, on dislodging Badenoch, the Tories will find common cause in a coalition government with Reform. Unlike Germany, there is little talk of a “firewall.” The parties often share platforms and the defection of Tories to Reform continues steadily, most recently today that of Nadim Zahawi, another chancellor, and one of a string of former Tory minister of little longevity and less stature.

A parade of still-just Conservatives, from Jenrick to Truss to Priti Patel, another defeated leadership candidate who is now shadow foreign secretary, have made the pilgrimage to Washington to give talks at the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, the blueprint for the second Trump administration.

Heritage has deeps links to a cluster of British think tanks. Over the years, several have set up shop in a Georgian townhouse, 55 Tufton Street, in the heart of Westminster. These range from Leave Means Leave (which lobbied for the hardest possible Brexit), the Institute for Economic Affairs and Taxpayers’ Alliance (classic neo-liberal/small state), to anti LGBTQ, pro fossil-fuel and climate change outfits. According to an investigation by media websites Byline Times and Democracy For Sale, donors to these London groups have given tens of millions of dollars to the Trump cause.

Think tanks on both sides of the Atlantic often work in tandem, producing reports presented as academic papers, holding conferences and coordinating media attack lines. I wrote about the National Conservatism Conference in 2023. A MAGA alternative to Davos is said to be under consideration.

While certain national differences remain (the Brits wouldn’t contemplate abolishing the National Health Service, though a radical change to its model is advocated), most policy areas are coalescing—on immigration, cutting state services, and an acute focus on culture war issues, such as DEI.

In terms of presentation, the aim is to spread fear, talking up societal collapse. The ultra-right are outperforming the Conservatives (and Labour) on social media. Reform has over 400,000 followers on TikTok, and Farage himself has over 1 million followers on the platform, which is used predominantly by younger people.

Their success could be further enhanced by the Labour government’s decision to grant the vote to 16 and 17-year-olds. It had been thought that these Gen Alphas would opt for liberal-left options. Opinion polls suggest it’s not as clear as that, as many young people across Europe are turning to parties like Vox in Spain, the RN in France and the AfD in Germany.

A few hundred meters away from Tufton Street, in a much larger building of much less grandeur, is a newer organisation. The Centre for a Better Britain (CBB) was established in early 2025 as the brains trust of Reform. It is housed in offices in the same Millbank Tower skyscraper—which has over time provided headquarters for the Labour Party of Tony Blair and for the groups advocating a re-run of the Brexit referendum.

The CBB’s chair is a theology scholar at Cambridge, James Orr. The 47-year-old, who is also friends with US Vice President Vance, has already become a figurehead of British religion-based conservatism, until recently a rarefied concept, and the organization already has considerable financial backing.

Behind many of these new stars is Sir Paul Marshall, a hedge funder whose net worth is estimated to approach €1 billion. Marshall has over time morphed from supporting the Liberal Democrats to the Tories and is now bankrolling The Spectator magazine, the iconoclastic right-wing website Unherd, and the Fox News-lookalike GB News.

The British TV station recently hosted a launch party in Washington attended by several key Trump allies, many Trump wannabes, and whose guest of honour was Farage. Speaker after speaker referred to him as “Britain’s next prime minister.” Meanwhile, Trump’s is attempting to sue the BBC for up to $5 billion for splicing together two quotes of his about the January 2021 assault on Congress, while his spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, has denounced the embattled corporation as “total 100 percent fake news.”

During its sojourn in DC, GB News was granted an interview—or rather audience—with the president, during which the presenter lamented London’s violent crime rate (which is considerably below Washington’s). She also described Trump’s state visit to the UK as “beautiful. Incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it.” That is the kind of “journalism” that wins plaudits in MAGA-land.

I have yet to mention Elon Musk. Unlike the other power brokers, the world’s richest man is not keeping in the background. His embrace of, and then banishment by, Trump has left him in limbo. He fell out earlier with Farage, seeing in the Reform leader someone who is not disruptive enough.

Musk’s closest political ally in the UK is Tommy Robinson, one-time member of the British National Party and founder of the English Defence League with a string of violence-related convictions. Robinson succeeded in getting more than 100,000 people onto the streets of London on a Saturday in August for a rally called “Unite the Kingdom.”

To many people it marked the moment when the extreme had become mainstream. Several parts of the capital city felt as if they had been overwhelmed by thugs, as they called for mass deportations. Charlie Kirk, the recently murdered right-wing influencer, featured on many T-shirts. MAGA, MEGA (Make England Great Again), and MBGA (Make Britain Great Again) hats were proudly worn. Among the chants was: “From the river to the sea, let’s make England Abdul-free.”

The high (or low) point, depending on your point of view, was a video address by Musk. To rapturous applause, he told the crowd: “whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or die.” Government ministers, under strict instructions not to upset Trump or the British right, said they didn’t quite see that statement as an incitement to violence.

All this has had a huge effect on how the Labour government operates. Everything Starmer does is stress-tested through the lens of the Reform voter, particularly on immigration. The recent announcements of a crackdown—if the measures ever came into effect—would turn the UK into one of the countries most hostile to irregular migrants in the democratic world.

Labour is haemorrhaging support not just to the right but also to the progressive left. There are signs that liberal voters furious with Starmer will vote tactically, choosing between the Greens, Liberal Democrats, and the Scottish or Welsh nationalists—to keep out not only Reform and the Tories, but Labour, too. Like the right, they also look wistfully to the United States. In their case, they have been galvanised by the dramatic arrival on the scene of Zohran Mamdani, the newly inaugurated mayor of New York City.

Labour has publicly declared the Conservatives to be over and out. Next May’s regional and local elections could spell the end for not just Badenoch, but Starmer too, as his leadership is openly questioned and mocked from within his own ranks. A devastating result may force him to resign, with a number of Labour hopefuls waiting in the wings.

Which leaves Farage and Reform UK in pole position to consolidate their takeover of the UK come the next general election. For Trump that would be a pivotal moment, as he seeks to implant like-minded souls to run countries around the world. Argentina, Hungary, Italy, El Salvador, and others are, for sure, important.

But one prize stands out. It’s not so much the power of Britain, but its symbolism that would bring Trump - and Putin - the ultimate glee.

This is an adapted version of a recent piece I wrote for International Politics Quarterly

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