By Mika Horelli, Brussels

Cabinet secretaries do not usually make history by writing letters. Howard Lutnick managed it anyway, though not as he intended.

On the evening of June 12, the Commerce Secretary issued a directive to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei ordering the immediate suspension of the company’s two most advanced AI models — Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 — for users who are not American citizens. The stated rationale was a narrow jailbreak technique allegedly posing a national security risk. Anthropic publicly disagreed, calling it a misunderstanding. It then did the only thing it could: shut down the models for everyone, globally, including Americans.

The irony was total. An order designed to restrict foreign access achieved the opposite of its intent within hours. The models vanished for all users simultaneously because Anthropic has no mechanism to verify users’ citizenship in real time. Building one would require the kind of identity infrastructure that governments spend years and billions constructing. It cannot be improvised over a weekend.

This is not primarily a story about Anthropic or about the Trump administration’s increasingly hostile relationship with a company it has already labelled a supply chain risk after the firm declined to participate in the development of autonomous weapons. It is a story about a far older and more fundamental problem: the persistent human belief that technology can be uninvented, or at least cordoned off, once it has entered the world.

History has never once confirmed this belief. It keeps trying to teach the lesson anyway.

The lesson history keeps refusing to teach.

When the Luddites destroyed mechanical looms in the English Midlands in the early nineteenth century, they were not wrong about the immediate consequences. The machines did destroy their livelihoods. The mills did displace skilled craftsmen who had spent years mastering their trade. What the Luddites could not reverse was the underlying economic logic: the looms produced cloth at a hundred times the previous rate, and once that was possible, it was going to happen. The machines were not the cause of their displacement. They were the form that displacement took.

The Catholic Church spent roughly a century trying to manage the consequences of the printing press. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum — the list of books Catholics were forbidden to read — was a sophisticated administrative attempt to maintain control over what ideas could circulate. At its peak, it ran to thousands of titles. It failed comprehensively. Once text could be reproduced mechanically and cheaply, the Church’s monopoly on interpreted knowledge was finished.

The internet arrived with similar promises of democratic transformation, and delivered them, partially and perversely. Information did flow more freely than ever before. It also enabled a scale of organised disinformation that no previous technology had. The United States, Europe, and democracies generally are still working out how to address that combination. They have been working on it for roughly two decades. The problem has not been solved.

Each of these episodes shares a structure. A powerful new technology arrives. Its implications are partially understood and partially feared. Some authority – political, religious, or commercial attempts to control its spread through prohibition or restriction. The attempt fails not because the authority lacked power, but because the technology had already been distributed through too many hands and too many contexts to be recalled. The cat, as the expression goes, is out of the bag. The genie does not go back.

I write this as someone who experiences the AI disruption on every front simultaneously. Traditional newspaper offices, my primary employers for more than thirty years, are cutting freelance budgets, and foreign correspondents and contributors are being squeezed out as editors convince themselves that AI can do the same work more cheaply. At the same time, I have had to reinvent my own practice, producing content that a single journalist could not have delivered without AI assistance.

A premise already overtaken by events.

Artificial intelligence is further along this curve than Washington’s export control directive implies. The models Lutnick’s letter targeted are sophisticated, and Anthropic’s most capable systems are genuinely at the frontier of what exists. But the directive rests on a premise that has already been overtaken by events: that American AI capability is a coherent, bounded thing that can be controlled by restricting access to particular commercial products.

It cannot. The architecture underlying modern AI is largely published. The research is global. The talent pools that produce frontier models are distributed across Europe, Asia, Canada, and the United States, with researchers moving between institutions and companies across these regions. Open-source models, such as Llama, Mistral, and DeepSeek, are not subject to this directive. Anyone locked out of Fable 5 by the Commerce Department’s order can run a capable open-source model on consumer hardware today. The restriction applies to one company’s commercial product. It does not apply to the field.

There is also the question of what the directive actually incentivises. When American companies are told their most advanced products cannot be sold internationally, investors and engineers who might otherwise have backed them start looking elsewhere. Europe and China both have AI development programmes that are currently behind the American frontier. Decisions of this kind narrow that gap, not by improving European or Chinese AI but by creating uncertainty around American alternatives.

The Trump administration has already demonstrated this dynamic in semiconductor policy: restrictions intended to limit Chinese access to chips have accelerated Chinese domestic chip development. This development may prove strategically counterproductive within a decade.

The same logic applies here, with a shorter timeline. AI development cycles are measured in months, not years. The competitive advantage that a restriction like this might preserve is eroding constantly. The cost of the restriction — disrupted services, alienated allies, damaged trust with the international research community — accumulates from the moment it is imposed.

South Korea offers a useful illustration. Korean companies manufacture the memory chips that power American AI infrastructure. They are now locked out of the models those chips help run.

What can actually be governed?

None of this means that AI is ungovernable. The mistake in Washington’s approach is the same mistake made with the printing press and the internet: attempting to control the technology at the point of production, rather than at the point of use.

You cannot stop capable AI models from existing. You cannot meaningfully restrict who has access to the underlying research. You cannot prevent engineers in Frankfurt, Seoul, or Singapore from building systems comparable to anything produced in San Francisco. These are simply facts about the current state of the technology and the global distribution of its developers.

What you can govern — imperfectly, with enforcement that will always lag behind — is what people do with these tools and what they are permitted to distribute.

The European Union’s approach to deepfake pornography illustrates both the possibilities and the limits. Making the production and distribution of non-consensual synthetic intimate images illegal is correct as a matter of principle and achievable as a matter of law. Enforcement will be imperfect. Images will continue to be produced by people who correctly calculate that they are unlikely to be caught in the act of creation.

But attaching liability to distribution creates a point of accountability that does not exist when the activity is simply unaddressed. The person who shares a deepfake image of a real person can be held responsible for that act, even when the creator cannot be identified.

The logic is not new. Someone who sells methanol as premium vodka is criminally liable for the consequences, regardless of whether the distiller is ever identified. The distributor cannot escape responsibility by pointing to the supply chain’s anonymity. That principle is well established in law and directly applies to the distribution of AI-generated harmful content.

This is the productive frame. Not: how do we stop AI from being capable of producing harmful content? That ship has sailed, the press has been built, the looms are running. But: what accountability structures attach to the use and distribution of that content? Where does responsibility fall? What standard of care do platforms and distributors owe to affected individuals?

The European Union has, at least in principle, been working from this frame longer than Washington has. Its requirement that social media platforms remove hate speech and illegal content is a case in point. In the United States, the same obligation is routinely framed as censorship — a government intrusion into the marketplace of ideas. In Europe, it is understood as a precondition of democratic life, an extension of the publisher’s liability that has always governed the press. The underlying logic is consistent: you may distribute, but you are responsible for what you distribute.

The honest caveat is that the EU’s record of execution has been uneven, and the structural reason is not hard to identify. Legislation moves in years; technology moves in months. By the time a regulatory framework is negotiated, agreed, transposed into national law, and equipped with enforcement capacity, the technology it was designed to address has already mutated into something the drafters did not anticipate. The AI Act was still being finalised when the models it sought to classify had already moved two generations beyond the systems the drafters had in mind. This is not a failure of ambition. It is a structural problem that no jurisdiction has yet solved — and one that the United States, by abandoning the attempt at use-based regulation altogether, is not even trying to address.

The threshold that has already been crossed

There is a passage in the history of nuclear weapons policy that is instructive here, though the analogy is imperfect. After the Manhattan Project, the United States briefly considered whether the bomb’s existence could simply be denied — whether enough secrecy could be maintained to prevent other nations from understanding that it was possible. The physicists involved understood immediately that this was not viable. The knowledge that the thing could be built was itself the most important piece of information. Once that was established, the race to build it was inevitable, because the constraint had never been capability. It had been the question of whether it was possible at all.

AI has already crossed that threshold. The question of whether machines can reason, generate, create, and deceive at a level comparable to humans is settled. The answer is yes, and the systems doing it are commercially available and improving every quarter. Controlling the spread of that knowledge is no longer a realistic policy goal. The realistic goals are narrower and more specific: what safeguards should be built into systems at the design stage? What uses should be legally prohibited? What liability attaches to harmful deployment? Who bears responsibility when things go wrong?

These questions do not generate the kind of dramatic political gesture that a Commerce Department directive does. They require the unglamorous work of building regulatory frameworks, coordinating across jurisdictions, and accepting that enforcement will always be partial. They are, however, the questions that might actually produce something useful.

What happened to Anthropic this month is in some ways a minor episode in a much larger story. The models will presumably come back online once the dispute with the Commerce Department is resolved. Anthropic is negotiating; the government is not inflexible. The immediate disruption will pass.

But the episode reveals something about the current administration’s understanding of where AI actually stands. The assumption underlying the directive is that Fable 5 and Mythos 5 constitute a discrete, controllable American advantage that can be protected by restricting access. This assumption treats an AI model the way you might treat a classified weapons design — as a singular object that, if kept out of the wrong hands, remains exclusively yours.

That is not what an AI model is. It is a point on a curve that the entire world is climbing simultaneously, at different speeds and with different resources, but climbing nonetheless. Restricting access to one point on that curve does not stop the curve. It does not slow it, in any meaningful sense. It inconveniences the people currently at that point, including Americans and allies, as the curve continues to rise.

There are things that democratic societies should do about AI. They are not nothing, and they are not easy. They involve questions of accountability, transparency, safety architecture, and the protection of people from harm. Europe is doing some of this work better than the United States, and some of it worse. The conversation about which frameworks actually function, and why, is the most important policy debate of this decade.

By Mika Horelli, Brussels

Last Friday, the United States Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to cut non-American users’ access to its most advanced AI models. Anthropic suspended access for everyone. Within hours, researchers, journalists, civil servants and businesses found themselves locked out of tools they had planned their workflows around, not because of anything Europe had done, but because Washington had decided to pull the plug.

Europe got the message. For the first time, the United States had used a commercial technology company as a coercive instrument against its own allies.

This is the column I did not want to write. I have spent three decades covering American and European affairs and transatlantic relations. I have watched American administrations of every stripe, some more helpful than others, some more irritating than others, but all operating within a shared framework of rules, institutions and mutual interest. That framework is now being dismantled, deliberately and with apparent satisfaction, by the government of the world’s most powerful democracy.

What we are watching is not a temporary aberration. It is a pattern. And before I describe that pattern, I should confess something about the conditions under which I am describing it.

A confession from Brussels

I am writing this column on an Apple MacBook. I will publish it on Substack, an American platform. I use American language tools to refine my prose. I store my files in an American cloud. The AI model I use to assist my research is American. I am, in other words, a European journalist who criticises American technological hegemony using American technological hegemony as his primary instrument. The irony is not lost on me.

There is something else I know. If I were a more prominent writer, if this column reached a larger audience and my criticism of the current American administration were more visible, I could find myself sanctioned. My accounts suspended. My access revoked, not by any European authority, not under any European law, but by the decision of an American company responding to pressure from an American government. It would be entirely legal under American law. It would be entirely beyond my reach to contest.

For that not to be possible, I would need a European MacBook, a European publishing platform, a European cloud, European AI tools. None of those exists today at the scale and quality required.

That is precisely the problem Europe has to solve, not for ideological reasons, but for the most practical reason imaginable: because the alternative is accepting permanent vulnerability to the decisions of whoever happens to be running Washington at any given moment.

A pattern, not an accident

Consider what Washington has done to its European partners over the past few years. It sanctioned Thierry Breton, then the European Union’s Internal Market Commissioner, effectively blacklisting a senior official of an allied institution.

It imposed sanctions on International Criminal Court personnel, cutting them off from American banking and technology services, and punished lawyers and investigators for doing the job the international community created them to do. It has used the extraterritorial reach of American financial sanctions to pressure European banks into closing accounts and cutting off clients that Washington dislikes, regardless of whether those clients have violated any European law. And now it has demonstrated, in the Anthropic case, that it is willing to treat access to advanced technology as a geopolitical weapon to be switched on and off at will.

Countries are either subordinate to American interests or treated as problems to be managed. The old postwar model, in which Washington accepted constraints on its own power in exchange for a durable, rules-based international order, has been abandoned. What remains is raw leverage, applied without sentimentality.

The European response has been a mixture of alarm, indignation and diplomatic hedging. European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said the Anthropic case “further underlines Europe’s need for technological sovereignty.” Finnish MEP Aura Salla called for Europe to “reserve our data and our market primarily for European tech.” The words are right. In practice, the urgency has been insufficient.

The dependency is deeper than we admit

Europe’s vulnerability is not limited to artificial intelligence. It runs through virtually every layer of the modern economy and the modern state.

Financial infrastructure: American payment networks process the overwhelming majority of European card transactions. SWIFT, though nominally international, operates under strong American influence and has been weaponised before, most dramatically against Iran. The digital euro project exists precisely because European policymakers understand this exposure, but it remains years from meaningful deployment.

Technology and cloud: European governments, militaries, hospitals and universities store vast quantities of sensitive data on servers operated by American companies subject to American law, including the CLOUD Act, which allows American authorities to demand access to data held abroad.

The European GAIA-X cloud initiative has struggled to gain traction against the scale and convenience of American hyperscalers. The gap between ambition and reality remains embarrassingly wide.

Defence systems: Finland, like many European NATO members, has committed to purchasing American F-35 fighter jets. These aircraft depend on American software, American maintenance contracts and, critically, American authorisation to operate certain systems.

The question that has been whispered in defence ministries across Europe and is now being asked more loudly is whether those aircraft would function if Washington decided, for whatever reason, to withdraw cooperation. It is not a paranoid question. It is a procurement question that should have been asked more rigorously years ago.

The Franco-German FCAS programme existed partly as an answer to it. Earlier this month, after years of industrial disputes between Airbus and Dassault that neither Paris nor Berlin could resolve, the project was formally abandoned. Europe’s most ambitious attempt to build a sovereign next-generation fighter jet is now history.

The uncomfortable truth is that Europe spent the postwar decades building deep dependencies on American systems on the reasonable assumption that Washington would remain a good-faith partner. That assumption has been tested and found fragile. One election produced an administration that treats these dependencies as leverage rather than as the foundation of an alliance.

The vassal problem

There is a concept in international relations that describes what happens to a country dependent on a more powerful patron without meaningful reciprocity: it becomes a vassal. Vassals are not allies. They are not partners. They are subordinates whose interests are considered only to the extent that they align with the patron’s.

Russia has been operating on this model for years. Its neighbourhood consists entirely of vassals or adversaries: countries that do what Moscow demands or are treated as threats. There are no genuine Russian allies, only states in various degrees of submission.

The trajectory of American foreign policy under the current administration points in a disturbingly similar direction. Washington’s relationships are increasingly transactional, coercive and zero-sum. NATO allies are shaken down for defence contributions framed as protection payments.

Trade partners are subjected to tariffs deployed as negotiating weapons. International institutions are treated as obstacles or irrelevancies. The EU-US trade deal reportedly reached last summer was negotiated under duress and on terms that many European trade analysts regard as asymmetric at best. Europe pays tariffs on American goods. America does not reciprocate. This is not a partnership. It is an arrangement.

This does not mean the United States is equivalent to Russia. It is not. American institutions retain depth and resilience that Russian ones do not. American civil society, courts and press remain significant counterweights. But the direction of travel matters. And Russia, it is worth remembering, was also once described as a country that Europe could do business with.

Decoupling without breaking

What Europe needs is not a rupture with the United States. It is independence of action: the capacity to cooperate with Washington when cooperation serves European interests, and to resist American pressure when it does not, without being vulnerable to economic or technological coercion.

A genuinely European payment infrastructure. Accelerated deployment of the digital euro. A serious European cloud capability with genuine data sovereignty. Investment in European frontier AI: France’s Mistral, currently raising three billion euros at a twenty billion euro valuation, is the most credible candidate, and it needs the kind of political and regulatory support that American tech giants received in their formative years through defence contracts and government procurement. A Buy European Tech framework that gives European companies preferential access to public contracts is not protectionism. It is the same industrial logic that built Silicon Valley.

European banks should also be examining their exposure to American financial infrastructure, seriously and urgently. Washington's ability to pressure any European bank into compliance through the threat of dollar-clearing sanctions is not a theoretical risk. It has happened repeatedly. The digital euro is one partial answer. European interbank infrastructure is another. Neither is a quick fix. But the time to begin is not after the next crisis.

None of this eliminates the value of American partnership when that partnership is offered in good faith. Europe is not trying to build a world without the United States. It is trying to build a world in which it can survive and function regardless of what Washington decides on any given Friday afternoon.

The moment of clarity

For years, the phrase “strategic autonomy” was treated in European policy circles with a mixture of French enthusiasm and Anglo-Saxon suspicion. It sounded like a Gaullist fantasy, a bureaucratic slogan designed to irritate Washington while achieving nothing in particular. It is now an existential necessity dressed in embarrassingly modest clothes.

This is not a temporary inconvenience that the market absorbed and moved on from. It is an ongoing demonstration of what American technological dominance means in practice when wielded by an administration that does not consider European interests worth protecting. The kill switch was not a warning shot. It is the current state of affairs.

Every time Washington blacklists a European commissioner, sanctions an international court’s staff or locks European users out of an AI model, it is showing Europe something important: that the infrastructure of modern life, the platforms, the payment systems, the cloud services, the defence software, can be turned into instruments of coercion at a moment’s notice, by a government that has decided allies are a category that no longer exists.

Europe has been given a warning. The question is whether it will act on it before the next demonstration involves something that cannot be restored with a policy reversal: a defence system that fails to function, a financial network that goes dark, a critical infrastructure dependency that becomes a crisis rather than an inconvenience.

I will keep writing this column on my American laptop, publishing it on my American platform, and backing it up to my American cloud. For now, I have no alternative. That is precisely the point. Europe needs to build one.

By Mika Horelli, Brussels

I start with a biology lesson. There is one human species on this planet: Homo sapiens. The last other human species our ancestors shared the earth with was Homo neanderthalensis, the Neanderthal, who disappeared roughly 40,000 years ago. A trace of Neanderthal DNA persists in the genomes of most Europeans and Asians — a ghostly reminder that our prehistory was messier than we like to imagine. But for the past 40 millennia, there has been only one kind of human being walking the earth.

The concept of race as a meaningful biological category does not hold up under modern genetic analysis. Human populations differ in visible characteristics, such as skin tone, hair texture, and facial structure. These are real, observable variations. But genetically, we are a remarkably uniform species. The differences between any two people picked at random from opposite ends of the earth are, at the molecular level, trivially small. There are no human races in any scientifically rigorous sense of the word.

And yet the word racism dominates European public debate about immigration as if it were the only analytical tool available. It is used to describe phenomena that range from genuine discrimination to simple cultural friction, from institutional prejudice to individual anxiety about rapid social change. By stretching the concept so far, we risk making it explain everything and therefore nothing.

Perhaps the more precise and ultimately more useful frame is cultural difference.

Because cultures are different. And cultures carry genuinely different assumptions about how society should be organised: the role of women, the rights of sexual minorities, the boundary between religion and the state, the legitimacy of violence in resolving disputes. Pretending otherwise is not tolerance. It is the abandonment of honest conversation.

Europe’s Long and Painful Education

At this point someone will object that Europe is simply flattering itself: yet another iteration of the old civilisational hierarchy that once sent gunboats to the coasts of Africa and Asia.

The objection is not without merit. For centuries, Europeans styled themselves as the pinnacle of civilisation while colonising, enslaving and extracting from much of the rest of the world. The British built an empire in India. The Belgians turned the Congo into one of the most brutal chapters in the history of colonial rule — a regime under King Leopold II that, by scholarly consensus, killed several million people between 1885 and 1908. The French administered vast territories in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa using methods that rarely aligned with the universalist principles inscribed on their own public buildings.

And yet something else is also true.

Europe underwent an extraordinary, genuinely agonising learning process over the course of the twentieth century. It was neither clean nor voluntary. It was beaten into the continent by catastrophe.

Two world wars that killed, by conservative estimates, over 70 million people between 1914 and 1945. The Holocaust, carried out by a country that had been, by many measures, the most culturally and scientifically advanced in Europe.

Read more

By Mika Horelli, Brussels

There is a peculiar kind of genius in building a cage so sophisticated that no one inside it quite realises they are confined. Europe has been quietly perfecting this art for decades.

I was reminded yesterday in Brussels, sitting in a conference room listening to Enrico Letta, former Italian prime minister and author of the authoritative 2024 single market report, Much More Than a Market, offer his first reactions to a new study commissioned by the European Banking Federation. The study, produced by Oliver Wyman, arrived with a number that deserves to be tattooed somewhere prominent in every European finance ministry: 1.4 trillion euros.

That is Europe’s estimated annual investment gap. Not the deficit of some struggling peripheral economy. The shortfall of the entire continent, measured against what Europe actually needs to invest every year to remain competitive, resilient, and capable of shaping its own future.

For context, this figure has already grown considerably from the 0.8 trillion-euro estimate published in Mario Draghi’s landmark competitiveness report just a year ago. In twelve months, the chasm has not narrowed. It has widened by more than half a trillion euros.

And yet, in the fine tradition of European institutional gatherings, the mood in the room was earnest rather than alarmed. There were PowerPoint slides. There were panel discussions. There was excellent coffee, wine and beer.

Letta said something that stayed with me long after the event had ended. He did not want Europe to become a colony, not of the United States, not of China. He wanted Europeans to be Europeans. He was not speaking at an anti-globalisation rally or channelling some romantic vision of a European superstate. He was talking about capital markets. About the unfinished architecture of the single market. About the gap between Europe’s savings and Europe’s investments.

He chose the word colony anyway.

It is worth pausing on that word. In the twenty-first century, colonies do not typically arrive by gunboat or through formal annexation. They emerge through dependence. Dependence on foreign technology platforms. Dependence on foreign capital markets. Dependence on security guarantees underwritten elsewhere. Dependence on decisions made in boardrooms and legislatures where European preferences are noted, acknowledged, and then politely disregarded.

Letta is not alone in reaching this conclusion. Mario Draghi reached the same destination from the angle of industrial competitiveness. The former president of Finland, Sauli Niinistö, arrived there from a security and resilience perspective. Three statesmen, three reports, three different starting points, one diagnosis: Europe does not suffer from a lack of analysis. It suffers from a shortage of political courage to act on what the analysis reveals.

The Oliver Wyman report placed a specific, somewhat uncomfortable stress test on one part of that diagnosis: the role of European banks.

The argument, in essence, is this. Europe’s future investment needs are not simply large; they are structurally different from the investments Europe has financed over the past generation. They are long-duration. They are capital-intensive. They carry higher risk profiles. Green infrastructure. Defence logistics. Digital transformation. Biotechnology. These are not the kind of assets that lend themselves to short-term, risk-averse balance sheet management. These are precisely the assets that patient, well-capitalised European banks ought to be well positioned to finance — and that European banks are currently constrained from financing by a cumulative architecture of regulation that, taken individually, makes perfect sense, and taken collectively, makes rather less of it.

Here is where the story becomes genuinely interesting, and where a journalist who has spent too many years watching European institutions confuse procedural virtue with strategic effectiveness starts to feel a familiar unease.

The implementation, however, has followed a pattern recognisably European in its thoroughness, good intentions, and unintended side effects.

Layer by layer, capital requirement by capital requirement, reporting obligation by reporting obligation, supervisory burden by supervisory burden, European banks have been made progressively more resistant to the thing regulators most wanted to prevent — and simultaneously less capable of doing the thing Europe most urgently needs them to do.

The Oliver Wyman study makes this point with the blunt force of data rather than opinion. European banks are well-capitalised. European banks are resilient. European banks are safe in precisely the way post-crisis regulation intended. They are also, as a direct consequence of this architecture, less able to deploy capital into the long-duration, higher-risk investments that Europe’s future requires.

A fair-minded reader will object at this point, and the objection deserves a direct answer. The Oliver Wyman report was commissioned by the European Banking Federation, which is, to put it plainly, a lobbying organisation for European banks.

Self-assessments of regulatory burden by those being regulated are rarely exercises in disinterested analysis. And European banks have, it should be noted, been performing rather well of late. The year 2025 was historically strong for the sector; interest margins remained elevated, merger and acquisition activity was robust, and major institutions posted capital ratios comfortably above regulatory minimums. If the cage is so constraining, the birds appear to be singing.

These are legitimate points. But they do not quite reach the heart of the matter.

The question is not whether European banks are profitable today. The question is whether European capital markets, banks and non-banks together, the full financing continuum, are structurally equipped to deploy European savings into European investment at the scale and risk profile required by Europe’s strategic situation. On that question, the evidence from sources considerably less interested than the EBF is unambiguous: they are not. The European Investment Bank, the European Commission’s own Capital Markets Union assessments, and independent academic research all arrive at the same uncomfortable conclusion. The problem is real; it predates the Oliver Wyman report; and it will outlast it.

What the banking federation’s involvement usefully reminds us, however, is that deregulation is not the answer. The Silicon Valley Bank collapse in 2023 offered a brisk tutorial on what happens when the post-crisis regulatory architecture is dismantled prematurely, and European policymakers would be unwise to mistake a financing gap for a licence to abandon the prudential framework that has made European banks genuinely stable. The goal is not to return to 2007. The goal is to design a regulatory framework that treats resilience and productive investment as complementary objectives rather than competing ones.

There is a broader pattern here that transcends banking regulation, and it is the pattern that Letta’s word colony points toward.

Consider what European financial fragmentation actually means in practice. A European start-up that grows to a certain size faces a choice: it can attempt to raise the capital it needs from a patchwork of national banking systems operating under overlapping but not identical regulatory regimes, from venture capital markets that remain dramatically undersized compared to their American equivalents, or from a European public capital market that is, to put it diplomatically, not yet the unified thing the Treaties suggested it might become. Or it can move. List in New York. Relocate its treasury operations. Gradually shift its strategic centre of gravity toward a jurisdiction that offers the depth of capital market it requires.

Many of them move. The European Investment Bank has documented this in detail. Between 2008 and 2021, roughly 30% of European unicorns relocated their headquarters, predominantly to the United States. At the scale-up phase, the critical moment when a promising start-up needs to grow into a serious competitor, European venture capital investment is below 10 per cent of the equivalent American figure. In more than four out of five European scale-up funding rounds, the lead investor is foreign.

This is not a metaphorical drain. It is a measurable, recurring, structurally predictable transfer of European innovation — and of European future tax revenue and employment — to jurisdictions outside Europe. The investment gap does not exist in a vacuum. It is being filled. Simply not by European capital, for European purposes, under European governance.

What fills it instead? American private equity. Sovereign wealth funds from the Gulf. Strategic investments from Asia. Each of these is a perfectly rational actor pursuing its own interests. None of them is pursuing Europe’s.

The problem with European banking regulation is not that it exists; it is that it fails. The problem is that it was implicitly designed around a single objective, preventing the recurrence of 2008, and that objective, worthy as it was, has crowded out a second objective that was always present but less politically urgent at the time: ensuring that European banks could finance European growth.

These objectives are not inherently in conflict. A well-regulated, well-capitalised banking sector, one capable of providing long-duration, higher-risk financing to strategic industries, is not a mutually exclusive state. Other major economies have managed to pursue both simultaneously. The United States did not dismantle its post-crisis regulatory architecture; it calibrated it, debated it, pushed back on parts of it, and retained enough policy flexibility to adjust when the investment climate required.

Europe, by contrast, has tended to treat the Basel frameworks and their European regulatory transpositions as closer to moral commitments than to policy choices. Prudence became an end in itself. Safety became a synonym for virtue. And in the process, the question of what the banking system was actually for — the financing of productive economic activity, the intermediation of European savings into European investment, the support of European companies competing globally — receded into the background.

The Oliver Wyman report’s seven recommendations for enabling banks to play a larger role in financing European growth are, in this context, less a set of radical proposals than a gentle reminder that policy can be rebalanced without being abandoned. Better capital allocation frameworks. Reduced regulatory duplication across national jurisdictions. A more appropriate risk appetite, one that distinguishes between the kind of risk that caused 2008 and the kind of risk that is inherent in any long-term productive investment.

None of this is revolutionary. All of it requires political will that has, thus far, proved elusive.

It also requires honesty from the banking sector itself. If European banks want a seat at the table in the conversation about Europe’s strategic financing needs, they will need to demonstrate that the capital unlocked by regulatory recalibration flows toward the long-duration, higher-risk investments Europe actually requires; green infrastructure, defence logistics, deep technology rather than toward higher dividends, share buybacks, and the kind of short-term yield optimisation that regulatory relief historically tends to produce when left to its own devices. The argument for reform is strong. The argument for trusting that reform will automatically produce the desired outcomes is rather weaker.

Letta’s use of the word colony deserves one more moment of attention because it contains an insight that is easy to miss if you are accustomed to the European political discussion’s tendency to frame every question as a choice between integration and sovereignty.

A Europe that refuses to pool its capital markets, that maintains national banking systems with overlapping but incompatible regulatory frameworks, that watches its most dynamic companies relocate for lack of financing depth, that allows its annual investment gap to grow from 0.8 to 1.4 trillion euros in a single year — that Europe is not preserving its sovereignty. It is negotiating the gradual surrender of its capacity to act independently, one missed investment opportunity at a time.

The paradox, and it is genuinely a paradox, is that those who most loudly champion national financial independence — who resist the Banking Union’s completion, who block the Capital Markets Union’s consolidation, who defend national regulatory prerogatives against European harmonisation — are, in effect, defending the conditions under which European savings are deployed elsewhere, European companies are capitalised from elsewhere, and European strategic choices are constrained by dependencies created elsewhere.

There is a scene I keep returning to from the Brussels conference room.

The Oliver Wyman analysts presented their numbers with the measured professionalism of people who have spent considerable time with data that they know will be received politely and acted upon slowly. The audience of bankers, regulators, and policy professionals nodded with the measured engagement of those who have heard this argument before and are not entirely sure what the next step should be.

Letta spoke with the slightly weary authority of a man who wrote a significant report on European single market reform two years ago and is watching the world outside accelerate while the implementation of his recommendations proceeds at the pace of a particularly cautious committee.

Somewhere between the numbers, the nodding, and the excellent coffee, the 1.4 trillion-euro gap persisted. Donald Trump’s second presidency continued to pursue its logic of transactional great-power competition. China continued its long-term industrial strategy with the patient confidence of a civilisation that is accustomed to thinking in decades rather than electoral cycles.

Neither Washington nor Beijing was in the room. Neither needed to be. Their interests were adequately represented by the investment gap itself and by the capital that European savings generate, which European markets, in their current configuration, are insufficiently equipped to deploy at home.

European regulators are not corrupt. European policymakers are not foolish. European capitals do not lack talented, serious people who understand perfectly well what the numbers mean. The European Banking Federation did not commission a study from Oliver Wyman because anyone needed to be told that a 1.4 trillion euro investment gap is a problem.

The problem is the gap between diagnosis and action. The problem is that the political economy of European reform consistently rewards those who defend existing arrangements over those who propose changing them. The problem is that the national politics of every member state generates incentives to protect domestic financial champions, preserve national regulatory prerogatives, and avoid the difficult conversation with voters about what it actually means to share sovereignty to preserve it.

Europe does not lack prescriptions. It lacks the courage to take the medicine, or, more precisely, lacks the political architecture that would make taking the medicine in the interest of those who would have to administer it. And it lacks, perhaps above all, the institutional capacity to ensure that when the medicine is finally administered, it actually treats the patient rather than simply enriching the pharmacist.

A colony, Letta suggested, is not necessarily a place that has been conquered. It is a place that has been made dependent.

The risk Europe faces is not dramatic. It will not arrive with flags and declarations. It will arrive, if it arrives, through the accumulated weight of investment gaps, regulatory constraints, and financing shortfalls; through the steady migration of European ambition toward jurisdictions better equipped to finance it; through the gradual erosion of European capacity to act strategically at the moments when strategic action is most required.

Europe can still change course. The analysis is clear, the prescriptions are available, and the window for choosing a different trajectory has not yet closed.

But the coffee at these events is always very good, and the meetings are always very cordial. The gap between diagnosis and action has been widening for longer than anyone in that Brussels conference room would be entirely comfortable admitting.

The question is not whether Europe knows what needs to be done. The question is whether knowing is enough. History, on this particular point, is not especially encouraging.

The debate about why right-wing populists win elections has gone on long enough. The more important question is what happens after they win. The evidence from Hungary, Poland, Germany and the United States points in a consistent direction — and it is available to anyone willing to look.

By Mika Horelli, Brussels

I have been following international politics as a journalist for more than thirty years, and, for the past several years, from Brussels, where the machinery of the European Union grinds on regardless of what any single government does or says. In that time, I have witnessed many political phenomena that were supposed to change everything. Most of them did not.

The rise of right-wing populism is different.

This is no longer a story about protest movements howling from the margins. Giorgia Meloni leads Italy’s government, the eurozone’s third-largest economy. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland leads or runs a close second in several federal states. Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National is positioning itself, again, for the French presidency. Viktor Orbán spent fifteen years remaking Hungary in his image before his party’s electoral defeat in April 2026. Donald Trump has returned to the White House. These are not footnotes. These are the dominant political facts of our era.

Enormous amounts of journalistic energy have been spent explaining why these movements have grown. That is a legitimate and important question. But it is not the most urgent one. The more urgent question is this: what kind of political order do these movements actually build when they are given the chance? Not what their opponents fear they will do, but what they themselves say they want, and what the evidence of their governance shows.

The answer is available to anyone who looks. You do not need to consult dystopian fiction. You need only examine the countries where the experiment is already underway.

Democracy Without the Liberal Part

In 2014, Viktor Orbán delivered a speech at a summer university in Băile Tușnad, Romania, that has since become something of a foundational text for a certain kind of political thinking. He announced that Hungary would become an “illiberal democracy.” The phrase struck many observers as a contradiction in terms. Democracy, after all, means the rule of the people. How can it be illiberal?

Orbán’s answer was precise: he had no intention of abolishing elections. What he intended to do was reduce the power of the independent institutions surrounding elections; the courts, the universities, the press, the civil society organisations, and thereby reduce the constraints on what a governing majority could do with its mandate.

Over the following decade and a half, that intention was systematically translated into policy. The Constitutional Court was packed with loyalists, each appointed to a twelve-year term. The electoral law was redrawn to favour the governing party.

Public media became instruments of state communication. Independent outlets were acquired by businessmen with close ties to the government. The Central European University, founded by George Soros and one of the most distinguished institutions of its kind in the region, was effectively expelled from Budapest in 2018, not by a single dramatic decree, but through a law tailored so precisely to CEU’s circumstances that it amounted to a personalised eviction notice. The university relocated to Vienna.

The European Commission, Freedom House, the V-Dem Institute and a range of international rule-of-law researchers reached broadly similar conclusions over those years: Hungary remained formally democratic but was no longer genuinely competitive as a political system. Orbán’s Fidesz party did not simply win elections — it set the conditions under which elections were held.

That experiment came to an abrupt end on 12 April 2026, when Péter Magyar’s centre-right Tisza party won a landslide victory, securing 53.1 per cent of the vote and, due to Hungary’s electoral system, a constitutional supermajority in parliament, with 141 seats in the 199-seat National Assembly against Fidesz’s reduced 52. Magyar took his oath of office on 9 May 2026, ending Orbán’s sixteen years of rule. He is more pro-EU and less accommodating of Moscow than his predecessor; his election was greeted with undisguised relief in Brussels and Kyiv alike.

But Orbán’s exit from office is not the same thing as the end of Orbánism. That distinction matters enormously, and not only for Hungary.

Winning the Election Is Only the First Gate

The difficulty facing Magyar illustrates, with unusual clarity, something that students of democratic erosion have been pointing out for years: it is far easier to dismantle a liberal democracy than to rebuild one.

As the scholar Alberto Alemanno has written, Orbán did not simply occupy Hungarian institutions — he legally rebuilt them to entrench his authority beyond the reach of elections. Experts call this “constitutional hardball”: the systematic use of formally legal instruments to make democratic reversal as difficult as possible. Every step Orbán took was, in a technical sense, lawful. He had created the legal system that made it so.

Long-term appointments in the prosecution service, the Constitutional Court, media authorities, university foundations, public companies and regulatory bodies created a state structure capable of resisting a new government. Winning an election does not mean automatically taking control of the state. It opens the first gate; the deeper struggle begins inside the bureaucracy, the judiciary, public finance and media infrastructure.

Magyar has moved quickly. On 20 May 2026, the first set of bills was introduced in the new parliament, including a constitutional amendment proposing an eight-year term limit for the office of the prime minister, as well as five parliamentary committees of inquiry to address the most controversial abuses of power during the Orbán era. He has called on senior officials appointed under the previous government, including the president of the Constitutional Court, to resign voluntarily.

But those judges and officials remain in office and have the power to delay and block new legislation. Even with a two-thirds legislative majority capable of rewriting the constitution, dismantling the web Orbán constructed will not happen overnight. “It would be a cumbersome, time-consuming process,” says Zoltán Ádám, a senior research fellow at the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest. There is also a more uncomfortable question hovering over the entire process: if Magyar resorts to the same instruments of constitutional hardball that Orbán used, he risks initiating a cycle of tit-for-tat judicial reform in which the courts’ independence becomes permanently contingent on whoever holds a parliamentary supermajority.

The Hungarian case thus offers a warning that extends far beyond Budapest. Populist governance does not merely change policies; it reshapes the terrain on which future governments must operate. The damage is, by design, durable.

The Judiciary as a Battleground

Poland under the Law and Justice party, PiS, offered a second case study, one with a different ending but instructive for precisely that reason.

Between 2015 and 2023, PiS pursued a systematic restructuring of the Polish judiciary. The Constitutional Tribunal was brought under political control. A new Disciplinary Chamber was created within the Supreme Court, with the power to remove judges who issued rulings the government disliked. The European Court of Justice found these arrangements incompatible with EU law; the Polish government ignored the rulings. The European Commission withheld billions of euros in cohesion funds.

What is striking about the Polish case is not simply that it happened; it is how it happened. Each step was presented as a reform: an efficiency measure, a modernisation, a correction of communist-era legacies. The rhetoric of improvement accompanied the dismantling of independence. And for several years, the international response was slow, uncertain and divided, partly because the EU’s instruments for disciplining a member state are blunt, cumbersome and politically costly to use.

The experiment ended, or at least was interrupted, when a coalition of opposition parties won the 2023 parliamentary elections, and Donald Tusk formed a new government. The restoration of judicial independence has proved considerably harder than its erosion. Some of the appointments made during the PiS years are legally contested. Institutions, it turns out, are much easier to damage than to repair.

The Politics of Normalisation

In the September 2024 state election in Thuringia, the AfD became the strongest party in a German federal state for the first time; winning approximately 33 per cent of the vote under the leadership of Björn Höcke, a politician who had twice been fined by German courts for publicly using a slogan from the Third Reich. The result was, by any historical measure, extraordinary. It marked the first time since the Second World War that a far-right party had become the leading force in a German state parliament.

And yet Höcke did not become minister-president. The other parties held the firewall — the Brandmauer — and formed a government without the AfD, at the cost of considerable parliamentary instability. Thuringia’s election results left even the combined forces of the Christian Democrats, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen and the Social Democrats one seat short of a parliamentary majority. Governing became an exercise in managed dysfunction: a minority administration kept alive by the implicit consent of parties that could not agree on much else beyond their shared determination to exclude AfD from power.

That determination is now under its most serious test yet. On 6 September 2026, Saxony-Anhalt goes to the polls. Current polling gives AfD approximately 41 per cent — roughly double its 2021 result of 20.8 per cent — while the CDU trails at around 25 per cent. If those numbers hold, AfD would become the largest parliamentary force in Saxony-Anhalt by a margin that would make minority governance considerably harder to sustain than it was in Thuringia. The governing parties in Saxony-Anhalt currently secure only around 36 per cent of the seats in polling projections and would lose their parliamentary majority.

What AfD has said it intends to do with power in Saxony-Anhalt is not a matter of speculation. The party has promised to expand Russian-language teaching in schools, abolish the compulsory licence fee for public broadcasting and pursue the repatriation of the large majority of the approximately one million Syrian nationals currently in Germany. At a recent gathering in the small town of Kalbe, in Saxony-Anhalt’s rural heartland, AfD politicians promised voters a politics that put “German money for Germans” first — no contributions to Ukraine, no support for migrants, no public broadcasting. The audience was not a fringe gathering. It was a routine Tuesday evening meeting in a rural cultural centre.

This is what the Overton window looks like when it has moved. I have been a journalist long enough to remember when certain statements ended political careers. The same statements today can generate millions of views on social media and invitations to prime-time television. The content has not changed. What has changed is the surrounding territory.

AfD has been described, including by Germany’s domestic intelligence service, as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation, a classification AfD challenged in court and which has been provisionally suspended pending the outcome of legal proceedings. The party contests the label vigorously. What is not contested is its record of positions: open sympathy for restoring relations with Moscow, hostility to sanctions on Russia, calls for the drastic curtailment of public broadcasting and restrictions on civil society organisations working on migration, anti-discrimination and democratic participation.

A decade’s worth of attempts by mainstream parties to contain AfD’s rise, through isolation, through legal proceedings, through the adoption of harder migration policies, have produced little visible effect. The AfD is at the height of its popularity. The Brandmauer has held so far. Whether it holds after 6 September remains to be seen.

Whose Freedoms Are Being Defended?

Right-wing populist parties speak frequently about freedom. The word appears constantly in their manifestos, speeches, and social media. What is worth examining carefully is the precise shape of the freedom they are defending.

It tends to be a freedom defined in relation to the state; freedom from taxation, from regulation, from migration policy determined by supranational institutions. It is often articulated as a defence of the ordinary person against remote, unaccountable elites. In this framing, there is, it should be said, something that resonates with genuine democratic impulses. The perception that decisions affecting millions of people are being made by institutions beyond democratic reach is not an invention of the populist right.

But the same movements that invoke freedom with such fervour adopt a strikingly different posture when the freedoms in question belong to people whose lives diverge from a particular vision of the normal.

Hungary’s 2021 law restricting the representation of homosexuality in material accessible to children was presented as child protection. Poland’s self-declared “LGBT-free zones”, established by local governments during the PiS years, were framed as defending traditional communities from ideological pressure. In multiple countries, civil society organisations working on LGBTQ+ rights, refugee assistance or anti-corruption advocacy have faced registration requirements, tax investigations and funding cuts specifically designed to constrain their operations.

Every person belongs to some minority. A religious minority, perhaps. A linguistic minority. A political minority. Or simply to the category of people who live differently from the majority. The liberal democratic tradition rests on the proposition that minorities have rights the majority cannot simply vote away. The illiberal democratic tradition rests on the proposition that the will of the majority is itself the ultimate authority, and that institutions designed to qualify or constrain that will are themselves anti-democratic.

These are genuinely different ideas about what democracy is for.

The First Casualty

There is one target that appears on almost every right-wing populist movement’s list of priorities, regardless of country or context. It appears in Hungary, Poland, Germany, and the United States. It appeared early, and it was not accidental.

That target is the institutional credibility of independent information.

The methods vary. In Hungary, independent media outlets were not shut down by decree; they were bought. Businessmen with close ties to Fidesz acquired television channels, newspapers and online outlets until the Hungarian media landscape had been comprehensively reorganised around a single political centre of gravity. The process was gradual, market-conforming, and legally formal. Its effect was to make independent journalism in Hungary structurally precarious and commercially marginal.

In Germany, AfD’s approach is different in form but similar in intent. The party has consistently demanded the radical restructuring or outright abolition of the public broadcasting system, which it characterises as ideologically captured by a liberal establishment. The framing is one of liberation — freeing the public from biased state media. In practice, it would remove one of the few remaining institutional sources of shared factual reference.

This distinction matters. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt observed, writing about totalitarian systems in the mid-twentieth century, that such systems do not require citizens who believe in falsehoods. They require citizens who no longer believe in anything. When every claim becomes a matter of opinion and every institution a matter of suspected bias, facts lose their special status. What remains is identity. And alongside identity, force.

The mechanism by which this is achieved does not require censorship in the classical sense. It requires only the sustained delegitimisation of the sources through which facts are established and verified. A court ruling becomes a political act. A scientific consensus becomes an elite opinion. A news report becomes enemy propaganda. None of these moves eliminates the fact in question. They eliminate the shared framework that distinguishes facts from assertions.

This is why the attack on media institutions is not simply one policy preference among others. It is structurally before the rest of the programme. A government that has successfully convinced a sufficient portion of the population that no source of information can be trusted has, in effect, immunised itself against accountability. Scandals do not land. Investigations do not accumulate. Each new revelation is absorbed into a general atmosphere of “they all lie,” which protects the powerful rather than challenging them.

I have watched this process unfold slowly, then quickly. What strikes me most is not the hostility toward individual journalists or outlets — that is an old story, and press freedom has always required defending. What is new is the systematic targeting of the institutional conditions that make independent journalism possible at all: public funding models, legal protections for sources, the organisational infrastructure of editorial independence. Remove those, and you do not need to silence anyone. The silence takes care of itself.

The American Mirror

Europe does not need to speculate about how democratic backsliding accelerates when constraints on executive power are simultaneously weakened across multiple institutions. It can observe the United States in real time.

Since his return to the White House, Donald Trump has governed with a Republican majority in both chambers of Congress that has shown little inclination to exercise independent scrutiny. Federal agencies have been staffed with officials whose primary qualification appears to be personal loyalty. The Department of Justice has been directed to prosecute political opponents and protect presidential allies. Universities that have resisted administration pressure have found their federal funding threatened. Law firms that represented clients the administration dislikes have faced executive orders targeting their government contracts.

Each of these actions has been contested in the courts. Some have been blocked, at least temporarily. But the cumulative effect is a sustained pressure on every institution that exercises independent authority; and a demonstration that such pressure, even when it fails in individual cases, reshapes the landscape within which future decisions are made.

What is instructive about the American case for a European audience is the speed at which it unfolds. Democratic institutions that had seemed robust proved more fragile than most observers had assumed, not because they were inherently weak but because they had never been subjected to simultaneous, coordinated pressure from a governing executive with both the will and the legislative numbers to act on it.

The Real Question

I am aware that many of those who support these movements will read this kind of analysis as precisely the sort of elite condescension that drove voters toward right-wing populism in the first place. The objection deserves to be taken seriously. These parties did win their elections. Their voters had reasons. A journalist who simply attributes the rise of populism to irrationality or ignorance is not doing their job.

But the fact that a party wins an election does not settle the question of what it does with power once it has won. Democracies do not typically die in coups. They change gradually: one institution at a time, one law at a time, one exception at a time. The erosion is incremental, and it is almost always accompanied by an explanation that, in isolation, sounds reasonable enough. The judiciary needs reform. The media lacks accountability. The university is not serving national interests.

By the time the pattern becomes undeniable, a great deal has already been dismantled.

Europe’s next great political test is not whether right-wing populist parties will gain more ground. That test is already underway, and the results are being recorded. The real question is what happens to the systems designed to protect citizens from the abuse of power if these movements implement their programmes without the institutional constraints they have so consistently identified as their primary obstacle.

The answer to that question is not hypothetical. It is available in the public record of countries where the experiment has already begun.

I have been reporting on European politics for more than thirty years. I have learned, slowly and sometimes reluctantly, that the things that seem unthinkable tend not to remain so. What changes first is not the law. What changes first is the conviction that the law will hold.

By Mika Horelli, Brussels

Since my previous column about Brexit was the most-read of all Nordic Ledger pieces, I continue to dig a little further into the same topic.

When Britain voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, the decision was presented as a liberation. A sovereign nation reclaiming its destiny. Freedom from bureaucratic shackles. A glorious leap into a brighter, more prosperous future.

A decade later, Brexit increasingly resembles something rather less romantic: arguably the most expensive political experiment in modern European history, financed not by the people who designed it but by the people who were persuaded to want it.

That distinction is worth holding in mind throughout what follows.

A very expensive decade

The debate about Brexit’s economic impact has largely moved past the question of whether there was a cost. The remaining disagreement concerns the size of the bill.

The UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility, the government’s own independent fiscal watchdog, has long estimated that Brexit reduces Britain’s long-term productivity and trade intensity by roughly fifteen per cent compared with a counterfactual in which Britain remained inside the European Union, with a corresponding reduction in economic output of around four per cent. More recent academic estimates place the loss at considerably higher levels. The Centre for European Reform, which tracks Britain’s economic performance against a modelled “doppelgänger” economy constructed from comparable countries that did not leave the EU, has concluded that Britain’s economy may now be six to eight per cent smaller than it would otherwise have been. The London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance has produced similar findings. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has described the scale of the trade reduction as “large and persistent.”

Britain’s economy produced roughly £3 trillion in output during 2025. A loss of six to eight per cent corresponds to hundreds of billions of pounds every year. If one aggregates the cumulative effect since 2016, the total economic cost already approaches one trillion pounds, according to some estimates. Those are estimates rather than settled accounting; the precise figure depends on methodology, counterfactual assumptions, and what one chooses to measure. Different economists produce different numbers. What none of them produces is a version of events in which Britain came out ahead.

The story becomes considerably more striking if Britain eventually decides to rejoin the European Union, which is an increasingly serious topic of political conversation even if it remains years from becoming a serious topic of political action. The Labour government under Keir Starmer has moved cautiously toward what it calls a “reset” of relations with Brussels, signing a new defence and security partnership in May 2025 and restarting negotiations over veterinary standards and youth mobility. These are meaningful steps. They are also a very long way from membership.

Many advocates of closer European integration assume that a future British government could simply reverse the decision. Reality is considerably more complicated. A serious attempt to return would almost certainly require another referendum. Organising a national political consensus around such a vote would take years. Negotiations with Brussels would take additional years. Ratification across all twenty-seven member states would take longer still. Even under an optimistic scenario, Britain would not be back inside the Union before the early 2030s. By then Brexit would have consumed roughly seventeen years of British political history.

Under middle-range projections, the cumulative economic cost over that period could range from £2.5 to £3 trillion. That would translate into roughly £35,000 to £45,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. These figures are illustrative estimates rather than precise invoices, but they convey the order of magnitude involved. When politicians sell a country a vision, someone always ends up paying for it. The question is who.

The human scale of these losses is worth pausing on. According to research published in 2024 by the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance, roughly 20,000 British small businesses have stopped exporting to the European Union entirely since the new trading rules came into force. Not “reduced” their exports. Stopped.

More than 440 financial services firms have, meanwhile, relocated part of their business, staff, or legal entities to EU cities; banks alone have moved assets worth over £900 billion out of the country, representing roughly 10 per cent of the entire British banking system. Dublin, Paris, Frankfurt, Luxembourg and Amsterdam have been the primary beneficiaries of this quiet but systematic departure.

The irony is considerable. Brexit was sold partly as a defence of British business against European interference. The businesses left anyway.

Europe remembers

Many British discussions about rejoining the European Union contain an unspoken assumption: that Europe is patiently waiting for Britain to return, perhaps with a cup of tea ready and a slightly reproachful but ultimately forgiving expression.

That assumption deserves scrutiny.

Britain was never an ordinary member state. Over decades, it negotiated a remarkable collection of opt-outs and special arrangements. It remained outside the euro. It stayed outside Schengen. It secured a budget rebate, negotiated by Margaret Thatcher in 1984 and worth billions of pounds to the British Treasury over subsequent decades, that many other governments openly resented. It enjoyed substantial influence while maintaining considerable distance; a position that, if one thinks about it, required an extraordinary degree of patience from the other member states.

For years, British politicians and large sections of the British press portrayed the European Union as incompetent, undemocratic, bureaucratic and fundamentally hostile to British interests. European leaders were mocked. Jean-Claude Juncker, the Commission President during the crucial years of the Brexit negotiations, was subjected to sustained personal ridicule in the British tabloid press. Donald Tusk, the Council President who memorably said there was a special place in hell for those who promoted Brexit without a plan, was treated as a pantomime villain. Continental partners were consistently framed as obstacles to be managed or outmanoeuvred rather than allies with legitimate interests of their own.

Those memories did not dissolve when the Brexit negotiations finally concluded.

That distinction matters enormously. A future British application would almost certainly be judged by the same rules as every other applicant. The country that once enjoyed some of the most favourable membership conditions in the Union’s history would return as a candidate seeking readmission on standard terms. Joining the euro would be a formal requirement for new members, though in practice a long transition period would likely apply. The budget rebate would be gone. The opt-outs would require renegotiation from a position of considerably less leverage than Britain previously enjoyed. That would not necessarily prevent accession. But it would change the enterprise’s political psychology entirely, and it would add yet further years and costs to the running total.

The strange absence of accountability

What makes Brexit particularly fascinating is not the scale of the mistake. History contains many expensive mistakes. The United States spent roughly two trillion dollars on the Afghanistan war over twenty years, with results that are now matters of painful historical record. The Iraq invasion of 2003 cost an estimated two trillion dollars and contributed to a regional destabilisation whose consequences are still unfolding. Countless economic and geopolitical miscalculations have cost nations dearly.

Consider the mechanics of the original campaign. Boris Johnson, then the former Mayor of London and a man whose relationship with factual precision had long been a subject of comment among those who worked with him, became the most prominent face of the Leave campaign. Voters were told that leaving the European Union would free up £350 million per week for the National Health Service. This figure was displayed prominently on the side of a red campaign bus and repeated at every available opportunity. It was, to put the matter diplomatically, a creative interpretation of the available data; Britain’s actual net contribution to the EU budget was roughly half that figure, and the gross figure ignored the substantial funding that flowed back to British universities, farming communities, regional development projects and scientific research. The UK Statistics Authority wrote to Johnson personally, warning that the figure was misleading. He continued using it.

When the Leave campaign won, the promise was quietly retired within days. Nigel Farage, perhaps the single most influential figure in making Brexit politically possible over more than two decades of campaigning, appeared on television the morning after the result and suggested that the £350 million figure had perhaps been “a mistake.” Johnson became Foreign Secretary, then Prime Minister, negotiated the very withdrawal agreement he had spent years denouncing as unacceptable, prorogued Parliament unlawfully in an attempt to force it through, won a general election on the slogan “Get Brexit Done,” and then departed Downing Street in July 2022 under circumstances unrelated to Brexit but entirely consistent with the character he had displayed throughout.

David Cameron, the Prime Minister who called the referendum in the first place, having promised it in his 2015 election manifesto as a device to manage internal Conservative Party politics, resigned the morning after the result and largely withdrew from public life. He returned to government as Foreign Secretary under Rishi Sunak in 2023, a rehabilitation that passed with relatively little comment. He has since published a memoir.

The promised reduction in bureaucracy never materialised. For many businesses, particularly smaller exporters, the administrative burden increased substantially. The Federation of Small Businesses estimated that new customs declarations and Rules of Origin requirements added hundreds of pounds in costs per export consignment. The fishing industry, which had been prominently promised that Brexit would restore full control of British waters, found that its exports to European markets faced new and expensive certification requirements; the sector that had served as one of the most emotionally resonant symbols of the Leave campaign became one of the most vocal critics of the resulting trade arrangements.

Yet most of the politicians who championed Brexit emerged from the experiment politically intact.

Some retired comfortably to the lecture circuit. Some remained influential. Some reinvented themselves entirely and moved on to the next political battle, applying the same techniques to new subjects: the sweeping promise, the dismissed complication, the enemy conveniently identified as the source of all difficulty.

The voters, for their part, largely moved on. That is not a criticism; it is a structural feature of democratic time. By the time the consequences of a decision become measurable, the statistics accumulate, the studies are published, and the economists reach something approaching consensus, public attention has already shifted elsewhere. The debate no longer concerns the original decision. It concerns inflation, immigration, housing, healthcare, or whatever dominates the current news cycle. The people who promoted the original mistake are rarely required to stand before the damage and explain themselves. Responsibility diffuses. It dissolves into the general background noise of democratic life.

The snake-oil salesmen of politics share one key advantage over their counterparts in commerce: there is no trading standards authority empowered to pursue them.

The real cost

The highest cost of Brexit is not financial. Money can, in principle, be recovered. Economies grow. Productivity improves. Trade relationships evolve. The pound has survived worse.

Lost time cannot be recovered. While Britain spent a decade arguing about Brexit, negotiating it, implementing it, managing its consequences and debating its reversal, Europe confronted a pandemic, an energy crisis, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, an accelerating programme of military rearmament, intensifying technological competition with both China and the United States, and a fundamental transformation of global supply chains. Britain participated in all of those developments. But it did so while simultaneously devoting enormous political energy, institutional bandwidth and financial resources to managing a problem largely of its own creation.

No senior civil servant working on Brexit border procedures was available to work on anything else. By any measure, the scale of administrative redirection was extraordinary: at the peak of Brexit preparations, an entire generation of senior officials was absorbed by a single self-created task. Every parliamentary hour spent on the Withdrawal Agreement Bill, the Internal Market Bill, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement and the subsequent Windsor Framework was not spent on something else. Every pound allocated to the £4.4 billion Border Delivery Programme, which was intended to build new customs infrastructure at British ports and which significantly overran its original budget, was not spent on something else.

If Britain eventually returns to the European Union, the financial damage will inevitably dominate the discussion. Journalists will write about the trillions. Politicians will argue about the methodology. Economists will dispute the counterfactual.

The larger story will be something else. A country will have spent the better part of a generation travelling in a large and expensive circle, guided by people who had every reason to start the journey and very little reason to be present when the bill arrived. Those people will not, for the most part, pay for the detour. They rarely do.

That, in the end, is what makes Brexit not merely an economic event but a political parable.

The question it poses is not specifically British. It applies wherever democratic systems allow large promises to be made without requiring the people who make them to be present when the bill arrives.

Which is to say: it applies almost everywhere.

A decade after the Brexit referendum, a serving British minister has finally said what many have long thought in private: that leaving the European Union was a mistake and that a return is inevitable. But Brexit’s most important lesson was never economic. It was a warning about what happens when political lies become more attractive than facts — a warning every democracy should have heeded, and most have not.

By Mika Horelli, Brussels

A remarkable moment occurred in British politics this week. Lord Spencer Livermore, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, told the House of Lords that it was his personal view that the United Kingdom would eventually re-enter the European Union, arguing that Brexit had inflicted lasting economic damage on growth. The statement would have been political heresy only a few years ago. Today it sounds increasingly like an acknowledgement of reality — which, in British politics, amounts to roughly the same thing.

The interesting question, however, is not whether Britain will return to the European Union. The interesting question is how it managed to leave in the first place.

The Long Road to a National Delusion

I moved to Brussels in 2017, less than a year after the Brexit referendum. Over the years that followed, I wrote hundreds of articles about Brexit, trade negotiations, customs arrangements, border disputes, regulatory divergence and the endless political drama surrounding Britain’s departure. At first, I approached the story with an obvious question: how could a mature democracy make such a self-destructive decision?

Eventually I realised that this was the wrong question.

Britons were not deprived of information. The information was available everywhere. Economists warned about the costs. Businesses warned about the costs. Universities warned about the costs. Civil servants warned about the costs. The problem was not that voters lacked facts. The problem was that millions preferred a more satisfying story.

That story had been under construction for decades.

The Man Who Invented Brussels

Before he became prime minister, Boris Johnson served as the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent from 1989 to 1994. His tenure saw him labelled as a pioneer of the “Euro myth” — what we now refer to more readily as fake news. He wrote stories headlined “Brussels recruits sniffers to ensure that Euro-manure smells the same,” “Threat to British pink sausages” and “Snails are fish, says EU.”

The Telegraph and right-wing Tories loved the stories. So did other Fleet Street editors, who found the standard Brussels fare tedious and began to press their own correspondents to follow suit. A self-reinforcing ecosystem emerged. Anti-EU stories attracted readers. Readers generated revenue. Revenue generated more stories.

The European Commission eventually devoted substantial resources to correcting myths and misinformation circulating in parts of the British press. The effort resembled trying to empty a swimming pool with a teaspoon. The stories were simply too popular.

The Convenient Villain Called Brussels

Britain was not unique in this habit. Across Europe, politicians routinely blame Brussels for decisions they themselves helped create. National governments negotiate legislation in the Council, vote for compromises, return home and then explain to voters that anonymous European bureaucrats imposed the outcome. The practice is widespread, including in my native Finland.

Britain simply elevated this habit into an entire political culture.

For decades, “Brussels” became a universal explanation for almost every domestic frustration. The remarkable thing was not that politicians lied. Politicians have always lied. The remarkable thing was how many people wanted to believe them.

Rule Makers Who Chose to Become Rule Takers

Perhaps the greatest irony of Brexit concerns regulation. One of the most common Brexit slogans was that Britain had become a “rule taker,” with regulations imposed from Brussels and sovereignty to be “taken back.”

Yet Britain was never merely following rules created by others.

Today the situation is very different. Any British company wishing to export food, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, machinery or medical devices into the European Union must still comply with EU regulations. The difference is that Britain no longer participates in writing them. When Brussels updates chemical safety standards, Britain adapts. When Brussels changes product requirements, Britain adapts. Brexit was sold as a revolt against becoming a rule-taker. Its lasting achievement was turning one of Europe’s most influential rule-makers into exactly that.

The Fishermen Who Won and Lost

No group better illustrates the tragicomedy of Brexit than Britain’s fishing communities.

The fishing industry accounted for a mere 0.03 per cent of the British economy, roughly half the size of the UK biscuit industry, yet it became totemic in the Leave campaign. Control of British waters was presented as proof that national sovereignty could be restored. Many fishermen enthusiastically supported Brexit.

Then reality arrived. New paperwork added costs, while border checks added time — a major problem when exporting fresh seafood, which perishes quickly. Health certificates became necessary. Trucks transporting shellfish encountered new barriers when crossing into European markets. For products whose value depends on arriving fresh, even small delays matter.

The promised liberation often looked remarkably similar to bureaucracy. In many cases it looked worse. The tragedy was almost literary: a small industry was elevated into a national symbol, achieved its political objective and then discovered that political symbolism and economic reality are not the same thing.

The Bus, Turkey and Other Useful Fictions

Perhaps the most famous Brexit slogan appeared on the side of a red bus: “We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead.” The figure ignored Britain’s rebate and the money flowing back through European programmes. Economists, journalists, and fact-checkers repeatedly pointed this out. The slogan survived anyway. It felt true.

Another successful campaign warned that Turkey was on the verge of joining the European Union and that millions of Turkish citizens would soon gain access to Britain. The claim ignored reality. Turkey was nowhere near membership. Several existing member states had already made clear they would block accession. The warning nevertheless proved politically effective. It appealed to emotion rather than evidence.

This was the genius of modern populism. Complex problems were transformed into simple stories. Economic stagnation was blamed on Brussels. Immigration became the fault of Brussels. Bureaucratic frustrations were blamed on Brussels. Reality is complicated. Populism is convenient.

When Democracies Stop Caring About Reality

Lord Livermore cited Office for Budget Responsibility data indicating that Brexit has reduced UK GDP by at least 4 per cent, with more recent estimates putting the figure between 6 and 8 per cent.

Britain did not collapse. Brexit supporters often point this out, and they are correct. The country did not collapse. It simply became poorer than it otherwise would have been. The costs are measured in lower investment, slower growth, reduced trade and lost opportunities.

The deeper lesson, however, is not economic. Brexit was an early warning. It occurred before TikTok transformed political communication, before generative artificial intelligence, before convincing deepfake videos, before algorithmic information bubbles became even more powerful. Yet the essential pattern was already visible. People increasingly consumed information that confirmed existing beliefs. Facts became secondary. Identity became primary. Shared reality began to fragment.

Democracy does not require agreement. It requires a shared understanding of what is true. Without that foundation, voters become vulnerable to manipulation by whoever tells the most emotionally satisfying story.

Reality Always Sends an Invoice

This month marks a decade since voters chose to leave the EU by 52 per cent to 48 per cent. A significant share of the electorate that voted in 2016 is no longer alive. At the same time, an entire generation of younger Britons has entered adulthood. One generation voted Britain out. Another increasingly wonders why.

Opinion polls now regularly show stronger support for closer relations with Europe than existed at the time of the referendum. The political class remains cautious, but demographic trends move in only one direction.

Former health secretary Wes Streeting has called Brexit a “catastrophic mistake” and said Britain’s future “lies with Europe — and one day back in the European Union.” Andy Burnham has said he wants Britain to rejoin the EU “in my lifetime.” Britain will almost certainly return to the European project in some form. What is already clear is that it will return from a weaker position than the one it voluntarily abandoned.

The lesson extends far beyond Britain. Every democracy now operates in an environment where misinformation travels faster than correction, where outrage is more profitable than accuracy, and where artificial intelligence makes fabrication cheaper than ever before. Brexit was not merely a British mistake. It was a warning.

The question for the rest of us is whether we are willing to learn from it before reality sends us an invoice of our own.

By Mika Horelli, Brussels

It is perhaps fitting that one of the more thoughtful interventions in the artificial intelligence debate this year came not from Silicon Valley or a Brussels policy seminar, but from the Vatican.

In his first major encyclical, Pope Leo XIV acknowledged the extraordinary possibilities of artificial intelligence while warning against its use as an instrument of domination, warfare, and control. The document was a surprisingly balanced piece of work. Neither technological enthusiasm nor technological panic. Simply a reminder that human dignity must remain more important than efficiency. Coming from an institution that has spent two millennia watching civilisations rise and fall, it was advice worth taking seriously.

That warning arrives at a peculiar moment. Artificial intelligence is no longer simply a technological phenomenon. It is beginning to reshape something far more fundamental than the labour market or the media industry. It is beginning to reshape reality itself.

Gunpowder was invented in China and spread across Eurasia through trade routes, conquest and imitation. Once military commanders grasped its value, states that refused to adopt it simply became vulnerable to those that did. The printing press enabled mass literacy, Protestant reformation and eventually the political revolutions of the eighteenth century. The inventors of the movable type press had no blueprint for any of that. Electricity, aviation, nuclear fission, the internet: each followed similar trajectories. Each arrived with incomplete understanding of its consequences. Each became irreversible long before those consequences were fully visible.

Artificial intelligence belongs to that tradition.

Many contemporary discussions still operate on an assumption that deserves scrutiny: that humanity can collectively decide whether AI should be permitted to develop further. That decision has already been made, not through deliberate democratic choice but through the accumulated weight of competitive pressures. Governments are investing billions. Corporations are racing to improve capabilities. Militaries across every major power regard AI as strategically essential. The technology exists, is improving rapidly, and is spreading to every domain where it can be applied.

That distinction matters enormously, because adaptation requires honesty about what is actually changing. And most of the public conversation about artificial intelligence is not honest about that. It is focused almost entirely on one question: which jobs will survive?

That question is important. It is not the most important question.

I have worked as a journalist for more than thirty years. I began reporting from Denmark in the mid-1990s, spent over a decade in the United States and have now spent the better part of a decade covering European affairs from Brussels. For most of that career, journalism followed a logic essentially unchanged since the mid-twentieth century. Reporters travelled to places where things were happening. They interviewed people who were involved. They gathered information, contextualised it and transformed it into stories that readers could use to understand their world.

Today that world is changing rapidly. Foreign correspondence appears less valuable to many news organisations than it did a generation ago. Information arrives instantly through digital networks. Editors increasingly expect fewer people to produce more content on shorter timelines.

Without AI tools, producing the Nordic Ledger blog in Continental English would be significantly harder. Not because a machine generates my ideas or my analysis. It does not. My opinions come from three decades of observation, from conversations with politicians and officials, from the specific experience of watching European institutions from the inside. But AI helps me refine my language, improve my structure, and compete in a publishing environment where native English speakers have an inherent advantage over those of us who learned the language later.

My Finnish-language newsletter, EU Mediaviikko, which covers European policy for a readership of more than 10k specialists in Finland, would be impossible in its current form without tools capable of processing large volumes of material from multiple European languages simultaneously. The newsletter synthesises reporting from French, German, Dutch, Italian and Spanish sources alongside the English-language press. No individual journalist could do that efficiently without assistance.

So, for me, artificial intelligence is simultaneously a threat and a tool. A disruptor and an enabler. A remarkable servant.

Which brings us to the question that is almost entirely absent from mainstream discussion about AI: what happens to reality?

As a journalist, I have spent my entire professional life working from a simple assumption that most people in democratic societies share without examining it. Facts exist independently of political preference. A politician either said something in a speech or did not. A missile either struck a building, or it did not. An election either produced one result or another. People can disagree profoundly about interpretation. They can argue about causes and consequences, support different policies and hold incompatible values. But a functioning democracy depends on a shared baseline: that objective reality exists, that it can be investigated, and that its findings can be communicated to citizens, who are then capable of making informed political judgements.

Artificial intelligence is beginning to challenge that assumption.

Not because machines are inherently dishonest. People have always been capable of lying, and propaganda is as old as organised politics. The difference is in scale, and the difference in scale is so large that it becomes a difference in kind.

For most of human history, producing convincing falsehoods at scale required significant institutional resources. Governments, intelligence services, television networks and large propaganda organisations possessed capabilities that ordinary individuals lacked. A forged photograph could be produced, but it required skilled technicians. A fabricated speech could be scripted, but distributing it required infrastructure. The asymmetry between those who could produce sophisticated disinformation and those who could not was a form of protection, imperfect but real.

Artificial intelligence has largely eliminated that asymmetry. Today, a single individual with moderate technical literacy can create fabricated photographs indistinguishable from authentic ones, clone voices from short audio samples, forge documents that pass visual inspection and produce video footage of events that never occurred. The tools required are cheap, widely available and improving every month. The required skills are declining as interfaces become more intuitive.

Some of what gets produced is still obvious enough to be dismissed. When political figures in various countries circulate absurdly altered digital images portraying themselves as saints, warriors or mythological heroes, most audiences recognise the performance for what it is. Transparent manipulation can even backfire; it signals desperation rather than strength.

A speech that never occurred, delivered in a politician’s authentic voice, discussing a policy position they never held. A military incident that never happened, depicted in footage indistinguishable from genuine battlefield photography. A senior official apparently accepting a bribe, captured in a recording that sounds entirely real. A fabricated diplomatic crisis, released strategically hours before a crucial election or a parliamentary confidence vote.

The technology is improving faster than society is developing the means to authenticate evidence.

Many policymakers respond to this situation with reasonable confidence that regulation will provide an answer. Transparency requirements matter. Labelling standards matter. Legislation requiring platforms to take responsibility for the content they amplify matters. The European Union has been more serious about this than most jurisdictions, and that seriousness is to its credit.

The uncomfortable reality is that not every significant actor in the global information environment shares democratic assumptions about truth, accountability and the purpose of public communication. Authoritarian governments have spent years refining methods of information warfare, and those methods have consistently targeted not specific beliefs but the capacity for belief itself.

Russia’s approach, refined over decades and applied aggressively since 2014, has been to create competing narratives in sufficient volume and with content contradictory enough that citizens in targeted countries simply become uncertain whether reliable information exists at all. The goal is not to persuade towards a specific position. The goal is epistemic paralysis: a population that no longer trusts any source, that treats every claim as equally suspect, and that consequently retreats from public engagement into cynicism or tribal loyalty.

China’s approach differs in method but converges on a similar outcome: comprehensive control over the narratives available to citizens, combined with sophisticated external influence operations that exploit the openness of democratic information environments.

A deepfake video released during a military confrontation can circulate globally before any verification process reaches a conclusion; by the time fact-checkers publish corrections, the initial footage has been seen by tens of millions and the corrections by hundreds of thousands. A fabricated statement attributed to a political leader can trigger immediate market reactions. An entirely fictional event can dominate social media long enough to shape public opinion before authentic reporting catches up.

The problem is not, at its root, misinformation. Human beings have always lived with misinformation.

The problem is that reality itself becomes contested territory. The battlefield shifts from geography to perception.

Here is what I think is the deepest danger, the one that deserves more attention than it is currently receiving.

When every image can be manipulated, every voice cloned and every video fabricated, a rational response is to increase scepticism across the board. Citizens begin to doubt authentic evidence alongside fake evidence. Genuine footage gets dismissed as deepfakes. Real recordings get labelled as AI-generated. The politician who actually committed the transgression benefits from the same uncertainty as the politician who was falsely accused.

Truth becomes negotiable. Not because people have abandoned the concept of truth, but because they have lost confidence in their ability to recognise it.

The internet gave humanity access to more information than any previous generation had. Artificial intelligence threatens to leave humanity less certain about what is true than any generation in the modern era.

For a journalist, that possibility is more alarming than automation. Jobs disappear, and new jobs are created; that is the history of technological change. Economic systems adapt, often painfully but eventually. But democratic societies cannot function indefinitely without a shared understanding of reality. Without some minimal common ground on what actually happened, political debate becomes pure competition between narratives, and the most compelling narrative wins regardless of its relationship to events.

Which brings me back to Pope Leo, and why his intervention deserves more than dismissal as an elderly institution’s anxiety about modernity.

The encyclical was not arguing that artificial intelligence is evil or that technological progress should be halted. It was making a more precise and more useful argument: that technology is not neutral, that the purposes to which it is put reflect choices, and that those choices carry moral weight.

Artificial intelligence is spreading wherever it can. No international treaty will stop it; the verification problems alone are insurmountable, and the competitive incentives for defection are overwhelming. No regulation will eliminate it. No government can force this particular technology back into any container, assuming such a container ever existed.

What remains genuinely undecided is its purpose.

Artificial intelligence can be used to extend human understanding: to accelerate scientific research, to improve access to education, to help journalists like me work across language barriers, to give people with disabilities capabilities they would otherwise lack, to assist doctors in diagnosis, to make governance more responsive to the complexity of modern societies.

It can also be used to industrialise deception at a scale and sophistication that would have seemed like science fiction a decade ago.

The technology does not choose. People choose. Institutions choose. Governments choose. And those choices, accumulated across millions of individual decisions and dozens of national jurisdictions, will determine whether artificial intelligence becomes one of the great enabling technologies of human civilisation or one of the mechanisms by which democratic societies lose confidence in their own capacity to know what is true.

The most important thing that could happen now is not a better regulatory framework, though better frameworks would help. It is a renewed commitment, at every level from individual citizens to national governments, to the principle that shared reality is not a luxury or an ideological preference but the foundation on which everything else depends. Science, democracy, rule of law, economic cooperation: all of it rests on the assumption that facts can be established and communicated.

We built that foundation over centuries. We are testing its resilience now.

By Mika Horelli, Brussels

One of the more impressive achievements of modern political culture is how thoroughly it has persuaded almost everyone that almost everyone else is an idiot.

The right looks at the left and sees a permanent fit of collective hysteria. The left looks at the right and sees moral decay in human form. Both sides accuse the media of running propaganda, while feeding themselves on the same diet of siloed feeds engineered to flatter whatever they already believed when they woke up. And somewhere underneath all this noise, ordinary people are still, against the odds, trying to think.

That last sentence will strike some readers as naive. It is not. After more than thirty years of reporting in Denmark, the United States, and Finland, and for the past nine years from Brussels, I have watched political eras turn over, ideologies rise and collapse, and journalism mutate from a slow newspaper culture into a real-time stream of feeling. Yet the thing that has surprised me most in recent years is almost embarrassingly modest.

It is an odd sentence to write. Of course the young can think; the claim that any generation cannot is one of the oldest and laziest in the European repertoire. Socrates supposedly complained about the youth of Athens, and every generation since has filed the same grievance with minor edits.

But if you took your picture of the world strictly from the current political conversation, you would conclude that an entire cohort had been quietly reprogrammed: that their personalities are now assembled from TikTok, Instagram, and a small set of tribal insignia, and that they spend their days either demanding revolution or building an identity around some online movement.

The reality is far more interesting, and far less marketable.

The age of tribal politics

Modern politics no longer runs primarily on ideas. It runs on identity. This is most visible in the United States, but it would be provincial to pretend the condition stops at the Atlantic; it is spreading comfortably across the whole of the Western world, Europe included.

People have stopped asking whether an idea is sound. They ask whether it belongs to them or to us. Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is the loudest example, and its power has very little to do with a coherent programme; it is an emotional experience of belonging, closer in its inner logic to loyalty than to analysis. The same reflex animates much of the European populist right, where naming the enemy reliably matters more than solving the problem. The enemy is flexible. The naming is the point.

History knows this machinery intimately. Authoritarian systems have always needed enemies, external and internal, and they are not fussy about who plays the parts. Sometimes the villains are Jews, sometimes communists, sometimes immigrants, sometimes “globalists,” sometimes the wrong sort of believer.

It works because it is a mercy. It is far easier to believe that someone else ruined the world than to accept that modern societies are intricate, contradictory, and frequently beyond anyone’s full control. Tribal politics offers the emotional relief of a clean answer, and the social media age rewards exactly that relief; the algorithms pay out for rage, simplification, and moral fury, while slow, qualified analysis loses, almost every time, to a man shouting.

A short detour through my own childhood

I am sixty-five, which means my political education began in a decade that liked to think of itself as morally serious. In the early 1970s, parts of the Finnish “peace movement” denounced American imperialism with real conviction, and they were not wrong to find things to denounce; what Washington was arranging in its own backyard, across Central and South America, deserved the European left’s contempt and received it in full.

What fascinated me, even as a boy who was supposed to be too young to notice, was the selective vision. The same activists who could see Chile with perfect clarity went conveniently blind when they turned much closer north and east. The Soviet Union had swallowed nearly all of its European neighbours and pressed them into the dictatorships it preferred to call “people’s democracies.” About this the peace movement was, on the whole, serenely quiet.

It was not an accident of mood. The World Peace Council, the flagship of this global peace offensive, was a Soviet front; founded in Prague in 1949, and, with a sense of irony that history apparently could not resist, headquartered for decades in Helsinki, a short walk from where I would later live.

By the late 1980s, the Council claimed to speak for movements in some 140 countries on a budget of around forty million dollars a year, of which roughly ninety per cent came from Moscow. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Council explained it, with admirable creativity, as a defensive response to Chinese and American aggression.

In 1981, Danish authorities expelled a Soviet diplomat for channelling money to a local affiliate running a campaign for a Nordic nuclear-free zone; the receipts, in other words, were not entirely metaphorical.

In the early 1970s, I was a small boy and no analyst. But I remember the bafflement; the sheer human capacity to shut one eye and climb aboard a colossal, plainly visible lie, provided the lie flattered the right side. I’m not sure whether I was an exception. I doubt it. But I could already tell, dimly, that there was a difference between thinking and reciting what the herd around me had agreed to think.

The quiet resistance

Which brings me back to the young people who have lately restored my morale. The striking thing is not that they exist; it is how invisible they are in a culture where the loudest extremes monopolise the attention.

Over the past few years, I have had long conversations with people in their twenties who grasp the differences between ideologies better than many parliamentarians.

They can separate populism from politics, moral posing from actual analysis, identity symbols from the structures those symbols are meant to stand in for. They do not think the way I do, and there is no reason they should; their world is not mine. I came of age watching the closing acts of the Cold War, the birth of the internet, the war on terror, the financial crisis, Brexit, and the slow, accelerating identity-fracture of American democracy. They begin somewhere else entirely.

What they have in common is harder to film. They do not build their identity around a political movement. They feel no obligation to perform, daily and publicly, their membership of the correct side. They do not believe that every problem will dissolve in a single great ideological cleansing. They ask questions; and in the present climate that has become a surprisingly rare skill.

I raised all this recently with a friend, who found the whole thesis faintly absurd. To him it was obvious that the young are, on average, considerably sharper than the generations that preceded them, and that there was nothing here worth marvelling at. He may well be right. And if he is, the implication is worth sitting with: perhaps the problem was never the young at all, but the portrait that a permanent culture war keeps painting of all of us.

Social media is a machine for making the most fanatical few appear to speak for an entire generation; it takes the angriest one per cent and broadcasts them as the face of the whole. The arithmetic is flattering to extremists and unfair to almost everyone else. In reality, most people have no appetite for life as permanent ideological warfare, and never did.

Why this is the more honest story

There is a temptation, when an older journalist writes about the young, to slide into either flattery or lament. I am trying to do neither. The point is not that this generation is uniquely virtuous, nor that the previous ones were uniquely foolish; my own decade produced plenty of intelligent people who chose, with open eyes, to believe a lie that suited them. The point is that independent thought has not disappeared. It has merely stopped governing the algorithms.

It is worth remembering, too, that the established political movements of parliamentary Europe still know how to do something the new populist formations mostly cannot: cooperate across party lines and listen, however grudgingly, to the people in the opposing camp. The old moderate parties, on both the left and the right, have generally learned that you do not get your aims through a parliament by performing your identity; you get them through compromise, through coalitions, through the unglamorous arithmetic of building a majority around an idea. They practise ideological politics, not identity politics, because, over decades, they have discovered that it is the only thing that actually delivers results.

The newer movements have not yet learned this. Many of them are still at the earlier, more thrilling stage, where naming the enemy feels like governing, and where a compromise looks like a betrayal rather than the mechanism by which anything at all gets done. Some of them will learn it, as their predecessors did; the discipline of having to deliver tends to be an effective teacher. Others will simply discover that fury is easier to win with than to govern with.

That habit of compromise is unglamorous, and it does not trend. It is also, more or less, what has kept the continent governable.

So the young people I keep meeting can still read history, compare ideologies, recognise propaganda, and distrust the answer that arrives too quickly and too clean. They understand that the world does not divide neatly into good tribes and evil ones. And, most importantly, they understand that questioning your own side is not treason; it is the minimum entry requirement for thinking at all.

That deserves far more attention than it gets, because the entire architecture of Western public debate is currently built on the opposite assumption: that everyone has already chosen a tribe, that the choice is permanent, and that the only remaining question is how loudly you are willing to defend it. The quiet majority keeps declining the invitation. We should probably start writing about them as though they were the story, rather than the static between the shouting.

By Mika Horelli, Brussels

I grew up in a Nordic Lutheran culture where religion was rarely loud. People went to church for weddings, funerals and sometimes at Christmas. Faith existed mostly as a quiet background presence. Perhaps that is why I have never fully understood the logic of forcing another human being to believe in God.

This week, Pope Leo XIV did something historically unusual. He apologised openly for the Vatican’s role in legitimising slavery and for centuries of silence surrounding it. The apology itself mattered. Institutions rarely confess willingly that they once sanctified injustice.

The Pope acknowledged that fifteenth-century papal decrees granted European rulers the authority to conquer and enslave “infidels”. One papal bull issued in 1452 explicitly authorised the Portuguese crown to “subjugate” non-Christians and reduce them to perpetual slavery. For centuries, these decrees formed part of the moral architecture of European colonialism.

It was a remarkable moment precisely because it stripped away one of history’s most persistent illusions: the idea that power and faith naturally belong together.

Power seeks obedience. Faith, at least in theory, seeks conviction. Those are very different things.

That distinction sounds obvious until one examines how much of human history has been built on ignoring it.

For centuries, rulers, churches, and empires behaved as though genuine belief could somehow be extracted through violence, intimidation and fear. Convert or die. Accept the correct doctrine or lose your property. Attend the approved church or become an enemy of the state. Entire civilisations organised themselves around this logic.

The absurdity becomes clearer when reduced to its basic form. If a soldier stands at your door holding a sword and asks whether you believe in the correct God, your answer reveals far more about your desire to stay alive than about your spiritual convictions.

Yet societies repeatedly confuse submission with faith. Or perhaps they did not confuse it at all. Because once religion is viewed not as spirituality but as a technology of power, history suddenly becomes easier to understand.

Empires never needed sincere believers in large numbers. They needed social conformity, predictability and legitimacy. Religion often provided all three at once. A ruler claiming divine authority no longer governed merely through armies or taxation. He governed through eternity itself.

The Catholic Church was hardly unique in this regard. Islamic empires fused political and religious authority for centuries. Protestant Europe persecuted Catholics and vice versa. The Russian Orthodox Church now openly blesses Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a holy struggle against a decadent West. Hindu nationalism in India increasingly merges religious identity with state power. In Iran, dissent becomes not merely political rebellion but defiance against God.

The methods differ. The logic remains remarkably stable.

What disappears first in such systems is usually not religion but honesty. People learn quickly that survival requires performance. Public rituals multiply. Genuine conviction becomes impossible to distinguish from fear, opportunism or social pressure. Eventually, even leaders themselves begin performing belief theatrically because the system demands it.

The Soviet Union demonstrated the same mechanism in reverse. There, the state attempted to impose atheism with religious intensity. Churches were closed, clergy persecuted, and official ideology elevated into sacred truth. Portraits of Lenin replaced icons; political doctrine replaced theology. The structure remained strangely familiar.

That is because authoritarian systems do not truly care what people believe internally. They care whether citizens publicly comply.

This is also why genuinely religious people often make authoritarian leaders uncomfortable. Real faith entails moral obligations that sometimes take precedence over the state. A sincere Christian may eventually ask inconvenient questions about greed, corruption, cruelty or war. A sincere Muslim may question the injustice committed by rulers claiming divine legitimacy. A sincere believer cannot always be fully controlled.

Modern America offers one of the more fascinating examples of religion transforming into political theatre.

The United States remains deeply religious by Western standards. Politicians still speak constantly about God, prayer and Christian values. Public declarations of faith function almost like patriotic rituals. Open atheism remains politically dangerous in presidential politics in ways that would seem bizarre across much of Europe.

And yet much of American political Christianity now appears almost entirely detached from the teachings it claims to defend.

One of the more surreal developments has been the rise of prosperity theology inside American megachurch culture: the idea that wealth itself reflects divine favour. In this interpretation, extreme inequality ceases to be a moral problem and becomes evidence of God’s blessing. Jesus, who spoke repeatedly about poverty, greed and the dangers of wealth, begins sounding less like a religious teacher and more like a celestial business consultant.

From a European perspective, the devotion of parts of the American religious right toward Donald Trump can appear almost surreal. Trump’s public behaviour often seems less like an attempt to follow the Ten Commandments than an attempt to break each of them loudly enough for television cameras to capture the moment properly.

The alliance between sections of the American religious right and Trump remains one of the stranger spectacles of modern democratic politics. A man whose public life has revolved around serial dishonesty, adultery scandals, humiliation rituals, vindictiveness and greed has nevertheless been embraced by millions as a defender of Christian civilisation.

When Pope Leo XIV recently described the war in Iran as the product of a “delusion of omnipotence” leading to “absurd and inhuman violence”, and added that a disciple of Christ “is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs”, J. D. Vance publicly warned the pontiff to “be careful” and suggested that the Vatican should “stick to matters of morality”.

The phrasing was instructive. A war in which Iranian cities were bombed and civilian infrastructure threatened did not, in Vance’s reading, qualify as a matter of morality at all. The U.S. bishops’ doctrinal office found this awkward enough to issue a public correction, reminding American Catholics that the pope speaking on a war of aggression is not offering an op-ed but exercising his ministry as the Vicar of Christ.

There was something almost darkly amusing in watching an American vice-president lecture the head of the Catholic Church about which subjects Christianity is permitted to cover.

But perhaps this is precisely what happens once religion becomes primarily a tribal identity marker rather than a spiritual discipline.

Still, none of this means religion itself is meaningless or fraudulent.

My own grandmothers were quietly religious Lutheran women in Finland. Their faith was never aggressive. They did not attempt to convert strangers or build political movements. Religion gave structure to life and, especially in old age, comfort in the face of death.

I suspect many secular Europeans underestimate how psychologically important that comfort can be.

It is easy to mock such beliefs intellectually. It is much harder to dismiss them sitting beside someone approaching the end of their life.

I have never wanted to take that consolation away from anyone.

Nor do I find it strange that human beings search for meaning beyond themselves. In many ways, it would be stranger if they did not.

What disturbs me is something else entirely: the long historical tradition of using religion as camouflage for domination, cruelty and hypocrisy.

When churches bless slavery, when clerics sanctify invasions, when politicians wrap naked greed in theological language, religion stops functioning as a path toward moral reflection and becomes something much uglier: an instrument for organising obedience.

That is why Pope Leo XIV’s apology mattered. Not because it erased history. It did not. Not because the Catholic Church suddenly became innocent. It never was.

It mattered because institutions built on moral authority rarely admit openly that they once helped legitimise profound injustice. Leo acknowledged that the church took centuries to recognise slavery as fundamentally incompatible with human dignity. He called this “a wound in Christian memory”.

There was something unusually human in that admission.

Especially because the Pope linked that history to artificial intelligence and what he called emerging forms of technological exploitation. His warning was subtle but unmistakable: societies repeatedly justify new systems of domination long before they understand their moral consequences.

The tools change. The rationalisations evolve. Human beings continue searching for ways to legitimise power.

And perhaps that is why truly sincere believers often remain quieter than those who use religion most loudly in politics. Genuine faith rarely requires armies, censorship or prison sentences to sustain itself.

Fear does.

By Mika Horelli, Brussels

I learned to read unusually early. I was around five years old when letters suddenly stopped looking like mysterious decorative symbols and began turning themselves into worlds.

Soon afterwards, I developed what can only honestly be described as an addiction. Not to sugar. Not to television. Not even to comics.

To books.

And not children’s books for very long. I quickly moved on to adult books, newspapers, encyclopedias, history, politics, and anything I could get my hands on. I still remember the peculiar intoxication of discovering that entire civilisations, wars, ideologies, catastrophes and distant cities could suddenly exist inside your own head while sitting alone in my quiet room in Puotila, Finland.

My parents, however, belonged to a generation that still carried older anxieties about reading. Too much reading, they believed, could damage a child’s eyes.

Which meant that at some point, my reading itself became something semi-illicit. I remember hiding under blankets with a flashlight after bedtime, secretly continuing books long after I was supposed to be asleep. There was something almost comical about it: a child behaving like a smuggler because he wanted to consume more literature.

Children must be protected. Access must be restricted. Harmful influences must be delayed. Development must be safeguarded.

And perhaps some of those concerns are perfectly justified.

But I cannot entirely suppress the suspicion that future generations may look back on at least part of this debate the same way we now smile at parents who once worried that excessive reading might destroy children’s eyesight.

Because history has a remarkably repetitive habit: every major technological leap in information produces both genuine progress and a wave of moral panic.

And almost every generation assumes its panic is finally the rational one.

When writing itself began replacing oral traditions, even that transformation produced anxiety. Socrates famously worried that writing would weaken memory and create only the illusion of wisdom. Why remember anything if information could simply be written down?

More than a thousand years later, in the fifteenth century, the printing press arrived; the reaction was not universal celebration of enlightenment and human advancement. It was fear.

And not irrational fear, either. The printing press genuinely destabilised Europe. It weakened centralised control over information. Religious authority fractured. Political dissent spread faster than rulers could contain it. Heresies multiplied. Pamphlets travelled. Revolutions followed.

The Catholic Church eventually created the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of forbidden books first published in 1559. Monarchies introduced licensing systems for printers. Entire states realised that once information became reproducible at scale, control itself became fragile.

In the Soviet bloc, the logic evolved even further. In Ceaușescu’s Romania, every typewriter had to be registered with the police, and owners were required to submit annual typeface samples so that anonymous political texts could later be traced back to individual machines. Similar controls existed in the Soviet Union. Copying machines were tightly restricted. Underground literature circulated almost like contraband.

In other words, the printing press and its descendants did exactly what their critics feared. They disrupted the existing order.

And yet they also became foundational technologies of modern civilisation.

This pattern repeats so consistently throughout history that one begins to wonder whether technological panic itself is simply part of the adaptation mechanism.

Novels were once accused of corrupting women and youth. Newspapers were blamed for mass hysteria. Radio became propaganda machinery. Television supposedly destroyed attention spans. Video games allegedly produce violence. The internet arrived first as a democratic utopia and later mutated into a nervous breakdown for civilisation.

Both assessments contained truth.

The internet genuinely democratised knowledge. A teenager in suburban Finland suddenly gained access to more information than most world leaders possessed a century earlier.

For centuries, spreading misinformation at scale required institutions, money, printing infrastructure or state power. Today, it requires little more than a smartphone and emotional manipulation optimised for algorithms.

Humanity built the largest information system in history and then appeared mildly surprised when it also became the largest distribution system for paranoia, conspiracy theories, propaganda and industrialised outrage.

And here it becomes important not to romanticise technological freedom too naively. Unlike the printing presses of earlier centuries, today’s information infrastructure is not merely decentralised chaos. It is also a privately engineered architecture.

That matters enormously. The problem is not simply that people say terrible things online. Human beings have always done that.

The deeper problem is that outrage, tribalism and emotional conflict have become economically profitable at a planetary scale.

The algorithm does not necessarily reward what is true, intelligent or socially constructive. It rewards what keeps human attention locked onto the screen. Fear works. Anger works. Humiliation works. Identity conflict works exceptionally well.

And once entire business models depend on maximising emotional activation, societies themselves begin drifting toward permanent psychological agitation.

Europe, to its credit, has understood this earlier and more clearly than much of the United States.

American technology billionaires often portray European regulation of hate speech, algorithmic transparency and platform accountability as some kind of authoritarian attack on free speech. But that framing is deeply misleading.

The issue is not whether people should be allowed to disagree.

The issue is whether private corporations should be allowed to industrialise social destabilisation without accountability simply because polarisation happens to be profitable. That distinction matters.

Ironically, many of the same voices that describe European digital regulation as “censorship” would probably have understood perfectly well why societies once regulated monopolies over railroads, broadcasting or financial systems.

Information infrastructure is infrastructure. And infrastructures shape civilisations.

Every technological revolution creates two simultaneous realities: a genuine expansion of human capability and a genuine expansion of human risk.

The current panic around social media restrictions illustrates this contradiction beautifully. Of course, there are serious questions about mental health, addiction mechanics, algorithmic manipulation and attention fragmentation. Pretending otherwise would be intellectually dishonest.

But there is also something faintly amusing about adults imagining they can successfully prohibit digitally native teenagers from accessing digital environments.

My generation hid books under blankets. Later generations hid magazines, music, VHS tapes, video games and internet access.

Today’s teenagers use VPNs before some European ministers fully understand what VPNs actually are. There is a certain tragicomic quality in watching bureaucratic systems attempt to regulate technologies that evolve faster than legislation itself.

And yet this does not mean regulation is useless. It means the objective matters enormously. Are we trying to create digitally resilient citizens? Or are we simply trying to delay reality long enough to feel psychologically comfortable ourselves?

Those are not the same project.

What makes the AI revolution particularly different is that this time the technology does not merely distribute information faster. It increasingly participates in cognition itself. That changes everything.

Which sounds terrifying until one remembers that civilisation has advanced precisely through such outsourcing. Humanity progresses by externalising labour; first physical labour, then informational labour.

The real question is not whether machines will perform more cognitive tasks. They will.

The real question is whether humans will use the freed capacity for higher-level thinking, creativity and judgment, or merely sink deeper into passive consumption. History offers evidence for both possibilities.

And then there is the darker dimension. Because while Europe debates screen-time limits, the United States, China and Russia increasingly integrate artificial intelligence into military systems, cyberwarfare, surveillance and strategic decision-making.

The same technology that can help a student summarise a philosophy book can also optimise autonomous targeting systems, or manipulate entire populations through hyper-personalised propaganda.

Still, despite all this, I remain fundamentally unable to join the camp that sees technological development itself primarily as civilisational decline. Partly because I remember the boy under the blanket with the flashlight.

Had adults fully controlled my access to information based on the fears of their own era, much of my intellectual life might never have developed the way it did.

Curiosity rarely thrives within systems built primarily around fear.

And perhaps that is ultimately the central tension of every information revolution: humanity desperately wants the benefits of expanded knowledge without the chaos it inevitably produces.

Unfortunately, history suggests the two usually arrive together. The future will almost certainly contain forms of misinformation, manipulation and cognitive dependency we barely understand today.

But it may also contain extraordinary new forms of creativity, learning, scientific discovery and human collaboration.

Civilisations rarely move forward cleanly. They stumble forward noisily, irrationally and anxiously, while each generation insists the previous world was somehow more authentic.

Usually, it was simply more familiar.

By Mika Horelli, Brussels

The strongest critics of the decadent West often seem remarkably eager to live inside it.

That peculiar contradiction has followed Russia’s ruling elite for centuries. Russian officials denounce Europe as spiritually empty while buying apartments in Paris. They describe America as a collapsing empire while sending their children to New York universities. They warn ordinary Russians about Western moral corruption while quietly trusting Western hospitals, banks, schools, and legal systems with the most valuable parts of their own lives.

The irony has become so obvious that it almost no longer registers as hypocrisy. It has hardened into something more disturbing: a political culture in which nobody even seriously pretends that consistency matters anymore.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spent years lecturing the world about American aggression and European decadence. Yet his daughter, Ekaterina Lavrova, grew up largely in the United States while Lavrov served as Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York during the 1990s and early 2000s. She reportedly attended school in Manhattan, later studied at Columbia University, and by several accounts became far more culturally American than Russian during her formative years.

The same pattern appears around Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. While Peskov regularly appears on Russian state television defending “traditional Russian civilisation” against Europe’s moral decline, his daughter Elizaveta Peskova spent years studying in Paris. She posted glamorous social media photographs from France, spoke openly about her affection for European life, and eventually secured an internship with the European Parliament in Brussels through French MEP Aymeric Chauprade.

It was one of those moments when modern authoritarianism accidentally becomes performance art. Russian television spent years warning viewers that Europe was collapsing into chaos, degeneracy and anti-Russian hysteria. Meanwhile, the daughter of the Kremlin’s own chief spokesman was drinking coffee in Parisian cafés and networking inside the institutions of the European Union itself. At some point, satire simply gives up and retires from the profession.

Then there are the daughters of Vladimir Putin himself: Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova. Putin has guarded his family life with near-pathological secrecy, yet enough information has emerged over the years to sketch the outlines of a familiar story. Katerina reportedly spent part of her childhood in Germany while Putin worked in Dresden during the Soviet era. Both daughters have been linked over time to Western educational networks, European travel and extensive interactions with institutions outside Russia.

This matters because Putin’s entire ideological project increasingly rests on the notion that Russia represents a separate civilisation standing against the corrupt liberalism of the West. The Kremlin speaks not merely about geopolitics anymore, but about morality itself. Russia, according to official rhetoric, protects tradition, faith, masculinity, patriotism and spiritual depth against a decaying Europe obsessed with gender ideology and moral relativism. Yet the people running this civilisational struggle consistently behave as though Europe remains the safest, richest and most desirable place on earth.

One eventually arrives at an uncomfortable conclusion: perhaps they never believed their own rhetoric in the first place. That possibility changes everything. Because the deeper one looks into modern Russian power structures, the less the system resembles ideological conviction and the more it resembles organised cynicism. The propaganda increasingly appears to be designed not to persuade elites but to manage the population emotionally. Nationalism becomes less a worldview than a governing technology.

The remarkable thing is not merely that Russian elites lie. Political elites everywhere lie. The remarkable thing is the almost serene indifference toward the visibility of the lie itself. Everybody knows. Russian citizens know. The elite know. The elite know the citizens know. The citizens know the elite know they know. And still the theatre continues without interruption.

That may be the most revealing feature of modern authoritarianism. In older systems, propaganda aimed to replace reality. Soviet ideology at least attempted to construct a coherent worldview. Contemporary Russian propaganda often seems less concerned with credibility than with demonstrating power. The goal is not always to make people believe obvious falsehoods. The goal is to prove that truth itself has become negotiable.

In that sense, the children of the Russian elite studying in London or Paris are not embarrassing exceptions to the system. They are proof of how the system actually works.

And historically, this pattern is not remotely new. Nineteenth-century Russian aristocrats often spoke French more fluently than Russian. The elite of St Petersburg vacationed in Baden-Baden, hired French tutors and treated Paris as the cultural capital of civilisation. In War and Peace, entire conversations among Russian aristocrats unfold in French, and Tolstoy was not exaggerating. Russia has spent centuries simultaneously worshipping and resenting Europe. The country’s intellectual history is filled with this tension. The famous nineteenth-century conflict between the Westernisers and the Slavophiles revolved around a single unresolved question: was Russia fundamentally European, or a separate civilisation entirely? That debate never truly ended. It merely evolved into new forms.

The Soviet Union inherited the same contradiction. Communist officials condemned capitalist decadence while maintaining special stores stocked with imported Western goods. Party elites enjoyed foreign travel privileges unavailable to ordinary citizens. Soviet citizens queued for basic products while nomenklatura families quietly consumed French cognac, German electronics and Italian fashion behind closed doors. The current Russian elite simply modernised the arrangement. Now the children attend schools in Switzerland rather than merely shop in restricted Soviet boutiques.

Western sanctions imposed after 2022 have considerably complicated the arithmetic of this arrangement. Frozen assets, closed airports, and reputational pressure have made the most coveted addresses in London, Paris and Monaco considerably less accessible than before. The elite has adapted with characteristic pragmatism. Dubai has become a favoured relocation point; Abu Dhabi and Doha have welcomed Russian capital with few of the moral objections that embarrass European hosts. The geography has shifted, but the underlying logic has not. What unites a penthouse on the Palm Jumeirah with a former apartment on Avenue Foch is the same quiet conviction: anywhere is preferable to the traditional-values paradise that official Russia so loudly advertises to its own citizens.

What makes the present version especially fascinating is the almost total collapse of moral embarrassment. One watches senior Russian officials denounce Europe as morally diseased while knowing perfectly well that their own sons and daughters often prefer living precisely there. How do people psychologically manage such contradictions? Part of the answer probably lies in power itself. Wealth and power isolate individuals from ordinary moral feedback. Over time, consistency becomes less important than utility. Truth becomes situational. Public morality becomes a costume worn for political purposes rather than an organising principle of private life.

But that explanation alone feels insufficient. There is also something broader and perhaps more universal here. Liberal democracies like to imagine that honesty, institutional trust, and ethical consistency are natural human conditions. History suggests otherwise. Under enough pressure, or enough temptation, humans adapt to contradiction with astonishing speed. Corporate executives lecture the public about sustainability while avoiding taxes through offshore structures. Politicians praise equality while cultivating private privilege. Entire industries manufacture public narratives that often bear little resemblance to reality. Russia simply strips away the cosmetic layer more quickly and openly than most societies do.

That may be why the spectacle feels so unsettling from the outside. The system no longer even attempts to reconcile morality with behaviour. It merely manages the contradiction aggressively enough to survive.

And yet there remains something uniquely Russian in the historical depth of this duality. For centuries, Russian political culture has trained people to live simultaneously in two realities: the official and the private. Publicly, one repeats the approved narrative. Privately, one navigates the world as it actually exists. Soviet citizens had mastered this psychological split long before the Internet age. Everybody understood that official ideology contained enormous theatrical elements, yet participation remained necessary for survival and advancement. Modern Russia appears to have transformed this habit into a permanent governing philosophy.

Perhaps the clearest summary of the entire system is this: Russia’s ruling elite never truly wanted to destroy the West. It wanted access to the West without submitting to Western constraints. Western wealth, Western property rights, Western education, Western healthcare, Western luxury and Western stability, but without democratic accountability, independent courts, free media or limitations on political power at home.

And that is why the story of Russian elites living Western lives while condemning the West matters far beyond Russia itself. It reveals how thin the civilisational veneer often becomes once power, money and security enter the equation. The truly unsettling question is not whether Russian elites lie. The unsettling question is how easily human beings learn to live in systems where everybody knows the lie exists and eventually stop expecting anything else.

By Mika Horelli, Brussels

There are historical moments that people fail to recognise while they are happening. Not because the evidence is hidden, but because accepting the evidence would force them to rethink too many assumptions about themselves.

The rise of China belongs to that category.

In much of the Western imagination, China still occupies a strangely outdated role. It is presented as a giant subcontractor, a factory civilisation that assembles products designed elsewhere, appropriates Western innovation, manipulates trade, and floods global markets with cheap goods. Even many people who acknowledge China’s economic power continue to speak of it in psychological terms, as if it were still a developing country that happened to grow very large.

The problem is that reality no longer resembles that picture.

I understood this in a way I hadn’t before during my honeymoon visit to Shanghai in the spring of 2018. I remember walking through the city with a strange sensation that I had somehow travelled into the future. Not into a science fiction future, but into something more unsettling: a functioning large-scale modernity operating at a speed Europe no longer seemed capable of.

Payments happened seamlessly through phones everywhere. Infrastructure expanded in real time. High-speed trains moved with astonishing precision. Entire districts appeared to have been conjured into existence between visits. The city felt less like an emerging economy than like a prototype of a different era.

Meanwhile, much of Europe was still arguing about whether contactless payments were safe.

This is what many Western discussions about China continue to miss. The world’s industrial centre of gravity has already shifted. The debate now revolves mainly around whether Western political psychology is capable of catching up with that fact.

The historical parallel that comes to mind is not the Soviet Union. It is Japan.

In the 1970s and 1980s, American car manufacturers and large parts of the public treated Japanese cars with open condescension. In Finland, too, Japanese vehicles were often mocked as “rice bags,” cheap little machines that could never rival the engineering prestige of Detroit or Germany.

Then something deeply inconvenient happened.

Japanese cars turned out to be better.

Not more glamorous. Not more patriotic. Not culturally superior. Simply better engineered in ways ordinary consumers could measure in everyday life. They broke down less often. They consumed less fuel. They lasted longer. While parts of the American car industry continued producing vehicles whose reliability became a running joke, Toyota and Honda quietly built reputations for durability that reshaped global markets.

American automotive patriotism was not defeated by ideology. It was defeated by quality.

Something similar is now happening with China, except on a vastly larger scale.

The irony is that Western companies themselves helped build this reality. For decades, production was outsourced to China because it was cheaper, faster, and more efficient. Western executives assumed that manufacturing itself was ultimately secondary. The important things, they believed, would remain safely Western: design, innovation, intellectual property, strategic control.

This assumption now looks like the founding error of an entire era.

If a country spends thirty years manufacturing the world’s most advanced products, mastering supply chains, educating millions of engineers, building ports, refining minerals, scaling industrial ecosystems, and learning every layer of the process from the inside, it eventually stops being merely the place where things are assembled.

It becomes the place where the future gets built.

Today, much of the green transition depends heavily on China. Solar panels, battery technologies, rare earth processing, electric vehicle supply chains, industrial robotics, consumer drones, and countless electronic components are dominated by Chinese production capacity.

Western consumers still see Western logos. The industrial reality behind those logos increasingly points elsewhere.

The iPhone may be designed in California, but its physical existence depends on an ecosystem deeply rooted in China. The same applies to countless products presented to consumers as symbols of Western innovation.

It is perhaps the era's defining irony: much of the merchandise bearing the Make America Great Again slogan was made in China.

Even the current rhetoric about “bringing production back home” contains a remarkable contradiction. Europe and the United States are indeed building new factories. Politicians proudly announce industrial reshoring projects and strategic autonomy plans.

But many of the robots operating inside those factories come from China.

The batteries come from China. The solar infrastructure comes from China. The processed minerals come from China. Significant parts of the industrial machinery ecosystem come from China.

The West is now attempting to regain industrial independence using Chinese industrial infrastructure.

That sentence alone explains much of the geopolitical confusion of our era.

Last week offered an almost theatrical illustration of the new balance of power. Donald Trump travelled to Beijing. This week, as this article goes to the public, Vladimir Putin is arriving.

Officially, neither visit represents submission. Great powers never describe their own behaviour that way. Every summit is framed as a meeting of equals. Every handshake is presented as strategic confidence.

Yet from the outside, the symbolism was difficult to miss.

The President of the United States arrived in Beijing because America’s economic relationship with China remains inescapable despite years of tariffs, rhetoric, and strategic hostility. The President of Russia is now arriving because Russia now survives on Chinese markets, technology, and geopolitical protection.

The two most disruptive revisionist leaders of the current international order both ended up in the same place.

Beijing.

This does not mean China “rules the world” in the simplistic Cold War sense. The United States still possesses unmatched military projection capabilities, enormous financial influence, and cultural reach. China also carries enormous internal risks: demographic decline, debt problems, property bubbles, political rigidity, and growing international suspicion.

But history does not wait for perfect systems.

One of the more uncomfortable illusions in Western discourse is the belief that authoritarian systems cannot sustain technological or industrial superiority because liberal democracies are supposedly always more innovative in the long run. There is some historical logic behind this argument. The Soviet Union stagnated precisely because central control eventually suffocated adaptability.

China, however, is not the Soviet Union.

It is something far more complicated. A hybrid system that combines authoritarian political control with aggressive state-backed capitalism, long-term industrial planning, huge engineering capacity, and extraordinary strategic patience.

In a Bloomberg interview published this week, Singaporean diplomat and scholar Kishore Mahbubani argued that the West fundamentally misunderstands China’s rise because it continues viewing it through outdated ideological assumptions. His central argument is that China cannot realistically be “stopped” — and that the West’s entire framing of the question reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of Chinese civilisation.

Mahbubani is correct about one thing above all.

Western elites still often speak as though China’s success were somehow temporary, artificial, or illegitimate. As though history itself had made an administrative error that will eventually be corrected.

Meanwhile, China continues building.

Europe, by contrast, increasingly resembles a continent trapped between nostalgia and regulation. Brussels produces excellent strategy papers explaining why European competitiveness is declining. The reports are intelligent, detailed, and frequently accurate. Then, twenty-seven member states spend years disagreeing about implementation while industrial capacity slowly erodes.

America has chosen a different form of dysfunction. Under Trump’s second presidency, the United States remains enormously powerful while simultaneously appearing determined to exhaust itself through permanent internal conflict. Political theatre dominates public life with such intensity that long-term strategic thinking often feels almost impossible.

China watches all this. And waits.

One of the most revealing aspects of modern Western discourse is how frequently China is still discussed as though it were merely a geopolitical problem rather than a civilizational-scale competitor.

The language itself reveals the denial.

Chinese electric vehicles are described as “cheap.” Chinese AI models are described as “copycats.” Chinese technology firms are discussed as though their success must somehow derive primarily from theft rather than competence.

Yet this explanation becomes harder to maintain every year.

At some point, an industrial civilisation producing world-class infrastructure, advanced robotics, competitive AI systems, sophisticated manufacturing ecosystems, high-speed rail networks, and increasingly dominant green technologies stops being a copy.

It becomes the thing others are trying to catch.

None of this means liberal democracy is doomed or that authoritarianism represents humanity’s future. It means something more unsettling.

The post-Cold War assumption that economic modernisation would automatically Westernise the world proved false.

China modernised without becoming Western.

And perhaps the deepest psychological shock for the West is not that China became rich, powerful, or technologically sophisticated. It is that China did all this while remaining unmistakably China.

The old Western assumption was that history had a final destination and that destination looked broadly American or European.

History appears to have disagreed.

“The defining geopolitical fact of the 21st century may not be that China rose. It is that the West kept talking about China as if it still hadn’t.”

Democracy is supposed to punish failure. Elections are meant to remove leaders who damage their countries, lie to voters, or govern disastrously. Yet modern politics increasingly suggests the opposite. The architects of Brexit remain influential in Britain, Donald Trump returned to the White House after years of scandal and chaos, and the son of a former dictator now governs the Philippines.

This is not simply a story about populism. It is a story about memory. As media fragments into ideological tribes and politics becomes a form of identity, voters no longer judge leaders primarily by outcomes. They judge them by belonging. The consequences for democratic accountability are becoming impossible to ignore.

By Mika Horelli, Brussels

This year marks ten years since the Brexit referendum. When Britain voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, much of Europe reacted with the kind of disbelief normally associated with financial crashes or royal scandals. Nobody quite understood whether they were witnessing a temporary political psychosis or the beginning of something larger.

I moved to Brussels as a freelance journalist in 2017, directly into the aftermath of that decision. During the years that followed, I wrote hundreds of articles about Brexit, European politics, trade negotiations, border disputes, British identity crises, and the strange theatre of Westminster, trying to explain to itself what exactly it had done.

This is no longer particularly controversial outside Britain’s more ideological political circles. By 2025, several major economic studies estimated that the British economy had become between 6 and 8 per cent smaller than it would likely have been without Brexit. Investment levels suffered. Small exporters abandoned EU markets under the weight of paperwork and customs bureaucracy. Labour shortages hit sectors ranging from logistics to agriculture to hospitality.

Britain’s fishing industry became an especially dark little comedy inside the larger tragedy.

Fishing communities overwhelmingly supported Brexit. For years, they had been told that liberation from Brussels would restore sovereignty over British waters and revive coastal economies. Instead, many found themselves trapped in export chaos, health certification requirements, transport delays, and collapsing access to European markets. Fish, unfortunately, has little interest in patriotic symbolism while waiting in customs queues.

The deeper irony was always obvious from Brussels.

Britain’s most valuable export was never simply fish, steel, or financial services. Its greatest strategic advantage was access to the English-language European single market. London functioned as America’s gateway to Europe, Asia’s gateway to Europe, and often the world’s gateway to Europe. Once Britain voluntarily abandoned that role, multinational companies quietly began relocating operations elsewhere inside the EU.

This should not have surprised anyone. Yet somehow it did.

And still, remarkably, the political architects of Brexit survived perfectly well.

Nigel Farage remains one of Britain’s most influential political figures in 2026. His Reform UK movement continues attracting frustrated voters from both Labour and the Conservatives. Boris Johnson still retains a strange celebrity aura despite leaving behind political chaos, scandals, and substantial economic damage that will occupy historians for decades.

This is where the story stops being about Britain alone.

Increasingly, that connection appears dangerously weak.

In the United States, Donald Trump returned to the presidency despite impeachment proceedings, criminal investigations, endless scandals, and a first administration that often resembled an online argument accidentally placed in charge of a superpower. His approval ratings fluctuate constantly, yet his core support remains astonishingly durable.

Many Europeans still struggle to understand this because they continue analysing Trump as if he were a conventional politician.

He is not. For millions of supporters, Trump functions less as a political leader than as a cultural identity. Supporting him is not primarily about tariffs, taxation, foreign policy, or even economic outcomes. It is about belonging to a tribe that sees itself at war with liberal elites, institutions, universities, media organisations, and increasingly with reality itself.

This is not uniquely American. It has become one of the defining features of democratic politics across much of the world.

In the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. became president despite his father’s dictatorship remaining synonymous with corruption, repression, torture, and the theft of billions in public wealth. Only a few decades earlier, the Marcos era had supposedly become a permanent warning about authoritarianism. Instead, an entire generation grew up without direct memory of the dictatorship itself. Nostalgia, disinformation, family branding, and social media gradually transformed history into something softer and less threatening.

The rehabilitation of the Marcos name did not happen because Filipinos suddenly discovered that dictatorship was pleasant. It happened because political memory eroded. That erosion is becoming one of the central political facts of our time.

That world has largely disappeared. Modern media ecosystems are fragmented into ideological microclimates governed by algorithms, outrage, and emotional reinforcement. People increasingly consume information not to understand the world, but to confirm what they already wish to believe about it.

This changes politics fundamentally. A politician caught in a lie once faced potential humiliation because the audience broadly agreed on what constituted reality. Today, exposure often changes nothing. Sometimes it even strengthens loyalty.

Brexit offered spectacular examples of this transformation. The Vote Leave campaign’s promise to redirect £350 million a week — Britain’s claimed weekly EU contribution — into the National Health Service collapsed almost immediately after the referendum. It barely mattered. The pledge had already fulfilled its emotional purpose.

Similarly, Trump’s false claims regarding the 2020 election persisted despite years of investigations, court rulings, testimony, and factual rebuttals. Tens of millions still believe them. Not necessarily because the evidence is persuasive, but because abandoning the belief would require abandoning the tribe attached to it.

Modern politics increasingly resembles football fandom mixed with religious affiliation. The team matters first. Facts negotiate later. This creates a serious problem for democratic accountability because democracies are structurally slow. They depend upon institutional trust, procedural legitimacy, and long-term memory. Social media culture operates in the opposite direction. Attention spans collapse into the permanent present tense. Outrage cycles last hours. Political scandals disappear beneath the next algorithmic avalanche before consequences fully materialise.

Silvio Berlusconi understood this early. So did Trump. So does Farage.

There is also something psychologically comforting about political amnesia. Accepting that one supported catastrophic policies is deeply unpleasant. It is easier to reinterpret failure than to confront personal misjudgment. Entire electorates, therefore, develop elaborate emotional mechanisms for protecting themselves from political embarrassment.

Brexit becomes “unfinished.” Economic decline becomes someone else’s fault. Institutional chaos becomes sabotage by enemies. Every failed promise merely requires one final election victory to finally succeed properly this time.

Authoritarian movements have always exploited this human tendency. What is new is the speed and efficiency with which modern media systems amplify it.

Europeans sometimes comfort themselves by imagining these problems belong mainly to America or Britain. That confidence feels increasingly misplaced. Across Europe, parties built on emotional identity politics continue to gain support even when their economic proposals remain incoherent or their previous records are deeply questionable.

Winston Churchill’s famous observation that democracy is the worst system except for all the others remains true. The problem is that many democracies quietly assumed voters would behave more like careful auditors than emotional human beings.

They do not. People vote through memory, fear, belonging, resentment, nostalgia, status anxiety, cultural symbolism, and, increasingly, algorithmically curated emotional realities.

That does not mean democracy is doomed. But it does mean that democratic societies may have profoundly underestimated how fragile political accountability becomes once shared reality begins to collapse.

Democracy’s greatest vulnerability may not ultimately be populism, polarisation, or even disinformation. It may simply be humanity’s astonishing ability to forget.

By Mika Horelli, Brussels

I am writing this on Europe Day in Brussels, a day when Europeans are supposed to remember the value of this globally unique union of democratic states. Quite a few seem to have forgotten. I am writing these lines inside À l’Imaige Nostre-Dame, one of Brussels’ oldest surviving estaminets, hidden at the end of a narrow alley near the Grand-Place. According to local lore, the building’s underground rooms once served as detention cells for prisoners awaiting public execution nearby.

But enough about the scenery and the ghosts of old Europe. The subject I actually wanted to write about today is the growing frustration many people feel toward democracy itself.

The Chinese political commentator Eric X. Li once summarised the difference between the United States and China in a phrase that survived online for years precisely because it irritated people: in America, you can change the party but not the policy; in China, you can change the policy without changing the party.

The statement is intentionally provocative. That is exactly why it works.

Many people in Western democracies recognise the feeling immediately. Governments change, elections come and go, party logos are replaced on ministerial limousines, yet many of society’s largest problems seem to continue almost untouched.

Housing prices continue climbing. Public debt grows regardless of ideology. Immigration remains politically unresolved decade after decade. Bureaucracy expands almost independently of election results. The ordinary voter begins to suspect that politics resembles theatre more than power.

Legislation passes through committees, parliaments, courts, ministries, regional administrations, lobby groups, journalists and elections. A single electoral victory does not give leaders the right to remake society overnight, because the entire architecture exists to prevent power from concentrating in a single individual or faction.

Democracy is not slowed by accident. Democracy is slow on purpose. This increasingly appears problematic in a civilisation that compares politics to technology. Applications update instantly. Algorithms evolve daily. Online retailers deliver products within hours. Against this backdrop, democratic governance can appear like an ageing machine coughing through mountains of paperwork while the rest of the world accelerates.

Authoritarian states understand this psychological advantage perfectly.

China builds high-speed rail networks, industrial zones and entire cities at speeds Europe cannot match. Gulf monarchies construct futuristic megaprojects without years of legal appeals or parliamentary deadlock. Donald Trump’s continuing political appeal in the United States rests heavily on the same emotional promise: I alone can fix this quickly.

That distinction matters enormously. The danger begins when democratic slowness becomes psychologically associated with weakness itself. At that point, the concentration of power no longer appears threatening. It begins to appear efficient.

From a European perspective, many people still struggle to understand how the United States could have twice elected a figure like Donald Trump to the presidency, a political salesman whose most recognisable trademarks are narcissism, spectacle and habitual dishonesty. But perhaps Europeans should not be entirely surprised. Societies eventually receive what enough citizens decide they are willing to tolerate.

This phenomenon is hardly new. In Europe of the 1920s and 1930s, parliamentary democracy increasingly appeared chaotic, fragmented, and incapable of solving the economic crisis. Benito Mussolini promised efficiency and national discipline. Adolf Hitler promised restored order, pride and decisiveness. The Soviet Union marketed itself internationally as a system capable of implementing enormous projects without the “inefficiency” of bourgeois democracy.

At first, many educated Europeans admired these systems. That is the uncomfortable part that history often sanitises afterwards. Fascism and authoritarian socialism did not initially present themselves as horror. They presented themselves as modernity. They looked dynamic compared to exhausted parliamentary systems paralysed by endless compromise.

The outcome is well known. Once the concentration of power crosses a certain threshold, the logic of society itself begins to reverse. In democracies, leaders are theoretically elected to serve citizens. In autocracies, citizens gradually become instruments serving the state and its ruler.

The British historian Lord Acton described the mechanism in the nineteenth century with a sentence that survives because every century keeps rediscovering its truth: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

This is precisely why democratic slowness also functions as a safety mechanism. Opposition parties, courts, journalists, civil servants, regional governments, and elections do not merely slow decision-making; they also shape it. They prevent individual leaders from transforming entire societies at the whim of personal impulse. The system frustrates power intentionally because unrestricted power eventually stops tolerating correction.

None of this sounds especially inspiring. Most of the time, it simply looks irritating.

In Brussels, one sees this constantly. The European Union is frequently criticised as bureaucratic, slow and technocratic. The criticism is partially justified. But the same slowness emerges because twenty-seven sovereign countries attempt to reconcile competing interests without allowing any single member state to dictate outcomes entirely to the others.

The alternative would look more efficient only temporarily.

Vladimir Putin can, in theory, make decisions faster than any European leader. Yet the same concentration of authority has produced a system in which officials fear reporting unpleasant realities upward, in which the media cannot publicly correct governmental failures, and in which the state gradually comes to believe its own propaganda.

That contradiction was visible once again today in Moscow during Russia’s Victory Day celebrations. Putin stood beneath the symbols of Soviet triumph while presiding over a country that has gained neither victory nor a convincing future from its war in Ukraine. Even the parade itself reflected the limits of authoritarian power projection. The massive displays of tanks and artillery that once symbolised Soviet and Russian military might have been noticeably reduced in recent years, in part because so much equipment has been consumed on the battlefields of Ukraine. The spectacle remained; the confidence behind it looked increasingly thinner.

The Soviet Union looked permanent until it collapsed with astonishing speed. Modern Russia projects strength abroad while simultaneously depending internally on fear, censorship and manufactured narratives. China’s system appears extraordinarily effective during periods of growth, yet it also concentrates immense political risk into structures where public dissent becomes dangerous and independent correction mechanisms remain weak.

Democracies, by contrast, expose their conflicts continuously and publicly. Their arguments are visible. Their dysfunction is televised daily. Their scandals dominate headlines. Ironically, this transparency itself contributes to the perception that democracy is failing, even when the ability to criticise power openly remains one of democracy’s defining strengths.

Part of the current Western crisis is therefore psychological. Democracy has become a victim of its own success. Europeans born after the Second World War inherited decades of relative stability, prosperity and institutional continuity so unprecedented that many gradually stopped recognising them as historical achievements at all.

Stability became boring. Predictability became invisible. The generations that rebuilt Europe after 1945 understood something viscerally that many modern Europeans know only academically: democracy is not humanity’s natural default condition. Most of human history was dominated by monarchies, empires, dictatorships, tribal hierarchies, or systems in which ordinary people had almost no meaningful influence over power.

Democracy survived because societies consciously chose to tolerate its frustrations in exchange for protection against something worse.

Now, however, Western societies increasingly inhabit an emotional climate shaped by permanent acceleration. Social media rewards outrage over patience. Political movements promise instant solutions to structurally complex problems. Citizens accustomed to immediate digital gratification begin expecting similar responsiveness from governments.

Political reality does not function that way. A society of 450 million people cannot be governed like a smartphone application update. Large democratic systems move slowly because millions of competing interests, rights and legal protections move slowly.

Yet impatience has become politically powerful. Across Europe and North America, populist movements increasingly frame democratic safeguards themselves as obstacles. Courts become enemies. Independent media becomes “the people’s enemy.” Civil servants become part of a “deep state.” Elections remain acceptable only when they produce the desired outcome.

The underlying message remains remarkably consistent: democratic institutions are preventing the nation from acting decisively.

That is precisely the moment democracies become vulnerable. History demonstrates repeatedly that populations rarely abandon democratic norms because they suddenly hate freedom. More often, they become convinced that freedom has become inefficient.

The irony is brutal. Democracy’s safeguards appear unnecessary precisely when they function well. Citizens stop seeing institutions as protective barriers and begin seeing them merely as annoying obstacles slowing progress.

Only later does the realisation arrive that these obstacles were often the last protections preventing societies from sliding into something far darker.

The European Union itself emerged from a continent that had already experienced where the cult of decisive leadership ultimately leads. The entire post-war European project was built around deliberately dispersing power: between institutions, between member states, between courts and parliaments, between national sovereignty and supranational compromise.

It was inefficient by design. And perhaps that is the point modern democracies need to remember again. The purpose of democracy is not maximum speed. The purpose is to prevent societies from granting unlimited power to individuals who inevitably come to believe that the state exists for them rather than the other way around.

Democracy often feels noisy, frustrating and painfully slow. History suggests the alternatives eventually become much worse.

Why do some of Europe’s most stable democracies still rely on an institution built on birth rather than choice? From a Finnish republican perspective, monarchy looks like a contradiction. Yet living inside one reveals a different logic. This column traces how monarchy functions not as power, but as continuity, diplomacy, and shared ritual.

By Mika Horelli, Brussels

King Charles III’s visit to the United States this week is a reminder that the monarchy has not faded into irrelevance. Its influence does not come from authority, but from the peculiar credibility of a role that stands outside electoral politics.

I grew up in a republic where monarchy belonged to another era. It was something one encountered in history books or on television, usually framed as spectacle or nostalgia. Kings and queens were part of Europe’s past, not its present.

Then I moved to Denmark in 1995. Denmark was, in every meaningful sense, a modern Nordic democracy. It was pragmatic, egalitarian, and politically unpretentious. Yet it was also a constitutional monarchy. The head of state did not campaign, did not debate, and did not stand for election. The position was inherited.

At first, the contradiction seemed obvious. How could a society built on equality accept a structure that placed one family permanently above others?

I did not find the answer in political theory. I found it in an opera house.

I was attending a performance of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman in Copenhagen. The opera itself felt endless, but something else caught my attention before it even began. Word spread quietly through the audience that Queen Ingrid, the widowed queen and mother of Margrethe II, was arriving.

Everyone seemed to know what would happen next. The orchestra acknowledged her presence. The audience rose. The gestures followed a pattern that required no explanation. It was not theatrical in the sense of being artificial. It was a ritual in the sense of being shared. The sequence unfolded with an ease that suggested it had been internalised long ago.

I remember sitting there, slightly out of place, trying to understand what I was witnessing. It was not a submission. It was not even admiration in the conventional sense. It was something closer to recognition.

A republic teaches you that legitimacy comes from choice. A monarchy teaches you that legitimacy can also come from continuity.

That moment did not convert me into a monarchist. It did something more unsettling. It made me realise that my earlier assumptions had been incomplete. Monarchy, in countries like Denmark, is not primarily about power. It is about presence.

Queen Margrethe II embodied this in a way that few elected leaders ever can. She did not govern. She did not legislate. Yet she was widely regarded as a unifying figure. Surveys in recent years consistently showed strong support for the Danish monarchy, often at or above three-quarters of the population. When Frederik X succeeded her, he inherited not authority, but trust.

That distinction matters.

In a republic, trust must be built and rebuilt with each election cycle. In a monarchy, it accumulates over generations, but it can also be lost just as quickly.

The British case illustrates a different version of the same dynamic. The monarchy remains contested, but it is far from marginal. King Charles III operates in a political environment where every gesture is scrutinised, yet his role allows him to engage in diplomacy in ways elected politicians cannot.

His visit to the United States made that visible. A politician arrives with an agenda. A monarch arrives with a history.

The difference is subtle, but in diplomacy it is decisive. A head of state who does not depend on voters can speak in a less transactional register. The message may be limited, carefully calibrated, and often indirect. But it carries a certain weight precisely because it is not tied to immediate political gain.

This is one of the reasons constitutional monarchies persist in Western Europe. They provide a layer of representation that is detached from day-to-day political conflict. They offer continuity in systems that are otherwise defined by change.

None of this resolves the underlying contradiction. Monarchy is, by definition, unequal. It assigns status at birth. It stands in tension with the democratic principle that positions should be open to all.

There is no elegant way to reconcile this. Societies that maintain monarchies have simply chosen to live with the contradiction. They treat it as a trade-off.

Citizens accept a visible exception to equality in exchange for a form of stability that is difficult to replicate.

This arrangement works only under strict conditions. The monarch must remain politically neutral. The royal family must embody restraint. The institution must justify its existence through conduct rather than power. When those conditions are met, a monarchy can appear almost invisible. It becomes part of the state’s background architecture. When they are not, the effect is immediate.

Norway offers a revealing counterpoint. For decades, the Norwegian monarchy was among the most stable and respected in Europe. It was seen as modest, accessible, and firmly anchored in national identity. That image has been shaken in recent years.

The most damaging controversies have centred not on the monarch himself, but on the extended royal family. Crown Princess Mette-Marit’s son, Marius Borg Høiby, has been the subject of serious criminal allegations, including cases involving violence and drug-related offences. The details matter less than the pattern. What might in another context be treated as the behaviour of a private individual becomes, in a monarchy, a question about the institution itself.

In a republic, scandal can be contained. In a monarchy, it spreads. This is the structural vulnerability of hereditary systems. The institution and the family are inseparable. There is no mechanism to replace one without affecting the other.

Public opinion in Norway has reflected this tension. Support for the monarchy has declined, and the debate has shifted from abstract principles to concrete doubts. The question is no longer whether monarchy fits democratic theory. It is whether this particular monarchy continues to deserve trust.

This is where the contrast with Denmark becomes instructive. Denmark demonstrates how a monarchy can function when the balance holds. Norway shows what happens when it begins to slip.

Neither case is definitive. Monarchies have proven resilient over time. They can absorb criticism and recover from setbacks. But they do not have the same margin for error as elected systems. Their legitimacy is narrower, and therefore more fragile.

Living in Denmark forced me to confront this reality firsthand. It is easy to dismiss monarchy as an anachronism when viewed from a distance. It is harder to do so when one sees how it operates within a functioning democracy.

I remain, at heart, a product of a republic. I do not find the idea of inherited status particularly appealing. It sits uneasily with the values I was raised with. But I no longer see monarchy as simply irrational.

It is a political compromise of a different kind. Not a relic that has somehow survived modernity, but an adaptation that has found a niche within it.

A monarchy does not compete with democracy. It coexists with it, under conditions that are more demanding than they appear. That is perhaps the most surprising lesson.

The endurance of monarchy in Western Europe does not prove that it is superior to republican systems. It shows that democratic societies are more flexible than their theories suggest. They are willing to tolerate contradictions, as long as those contradictions serve a purpose.

From the outside, the monarchy appears to be a decorative remnant. From the inside, it looks more like a carefully managed exception. And like all exceptions, it only lasts as long as people continue to accept it.

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What happens when the political firewall is no longer a barrier but a bargaining tool? Europe’s cordon sanitaire was meant to isolate anti-system actors, yet today their influence is visible in concrete laws across the continent. This is not only a story of the right; the same logic operates on the left when majorities are thin. The result is a shift from policy-driven politics toward identity-driven confrontation — a change that reshapes not just outcomes, but the rules of the game.

By Mika Horelli, Brussels

Europe still speaks of political boundaries as if they were fixed. In practice, they are constantly renegotiated. The erosion of the cordon sanitaire reveals less about the extremes than about how the centre now governs.

The cordon sanitaire entered politics as a borrowed concept from public health: a line drawn to contain something dangerous. In Belgium in the late 1980s, parties agreed to isolate the far right. France followed with its “Republican front,” and in Germany, exclusion became part of the post-war political identity. The principle was simple: democratic systems defend themselves by denying power to those who challenge them.

For a time, it seemed to work. Parties were kept out of government, even when they commanded significant electoral support. Yet the contradiction was always there. The firewall could exclude parties, but not the issues that brought them votes.

That contradiction is now written into law across Europe.

I watched it take shape in real time. Living in Copenhagen from 1995 to 1999, I had a close view of something that most European observers were then still inclined to dismiss as a local curiosity: the rise of Pia Kjærsgaard. She had just founded the Danish People’s Party in October 1995, having broken away from the older Progress Party. She was building it with a methodical patience that belied her combative public style. The mainstream parties still treated her as someone to be contained. What they failed to see was that containment was, in practice, already failing: the issues she raised were finding audiences, and the audiences were growing.

Denmark understood the cordon sanitaire’s limits earlier than most. The Danish People’s Party never needed cabinet seats to shape policy. The “24-year rule” restricted family reunification; the “integration benefit” lowered support for newcomers; asylum policies tightened to levels that would once have seemed politically impossible. Over time, both centre-right and centre-left governments adopted variations of the same approach.

In the European Parliament, the 2024 migration and asylum reform illustrates how influence travels without formal alliances. The package tightened border procedures, expanded detention, and strengthened return mechanisms, positions long associated with right-wing populist groups. The legislation was passed under mainstream leadership, but only by building majorities that extended beyond the traditional centre. The line held rhetorically. In practice, it shifted.

The same dynamic appeared in environmental policy. During negotiations on the Nature Restoration Law, key provisions were diluted after the European People’s Party aligned with right-wing groups in decisive votes. The law survived, but in a form that reflected new political arithmetic rather than earlier ambition.

Sweden followed a different timeline but reached a similar outcome. After years of isolation, the Sweden Democrats became indispensable to a centre-right government. Migration laws tightened; temporary residence replaced permanent residence; family reunification became harder; and criminal policy hardened. What had once been unthinkable became routine administration.

Germany still defends the cordon sanitaire as a principle, yet even there, the pressure is visible. In January 2025, Friedrich Merz brought a migration motion to the Bundestag that passed only with AfD support, the first time since the post-war consensus was established that a major parliamentary vote had depended on the far right. The backlash was significant, but the vote itself stood. At the local level, Christian Democrats have increasingly relied on AfD support in individual votes.

My native country, Finland, offers a quieter but revealing example. The current government, led by the National Coalition Party with the Finns Party as a key partner, has tightened immigration and citizenship rules, raised income thresholds, introduced stricter residence requirements, and narrowed access to social security. These changes align closely with the Finns Party’s long-standing positions.

At the same time, Finland’s economic reality points in the opposite direction. An ageing population and labour shortages have made work-based immigration a widely acknowledged necessity, confirmed repeatedly in government reports and by business organisations. The contradiction is not hidden; it is managed.

This is where the logic of the cordon sanitaire becomes visible in its modern form. It is not about exclusion or inclusion. It is about leverage. Parties at the margins shape outcomes because they are needed, not because they govern.

And the pattern does not stop at the right.

In Spain, centre-left governments have depended on support from Podemos and other anti-establishment actors. Housing laws introducing rent controls and stronger tenant protections reflect these alliances; labour reforms have shifted toward more rigid protections for workers. In France, legislative battles during Emmanuel Macron’s presidency forced the government to navigate between pressures from both the far right and the radical left. The pension reform of 2023 was pushed through by decree precisely because no stable majority was available in either direction, a sign of how comprehensively the centre had lost its room for manoeuvre.

A similar dynamic has been visible in Portugal, where Socialist governments relied on parliamentary support from the Left Bloc and the Communist Party. Budget agreements included higher minimum wages, expanded public sector protections, and reversals of earlier austerity measures. These policies were not simply ideological choices; they were the price of maintaining a governing majority.

What connects these cases is not ideology but the transformation of politics itself. Traditional conflicts were built around policy: taxation, welfare, and regulation. Today, they are increasingly framed around identity: who belongs, who decides, who is to blame.

Once politics moves onto that terrain, compromise becomes structurally harder. Opponents are no longer rivals within a shared system; they become representatives of fundamentally different things. The Finnish (outdated) saying that “issues argue, people do not” captures a political culture now under strain in many European democracies. Where the idiom once described a norm, it now reads more like an aspiration. Now people argue, and often in ways that make cooperation politically costly.

This is the bigger risk behind the erosion of the cordon sanitaire. When mainstream parties draw on support from actors who thrive on identity-driven confrontation, they import that logic into the system itself.

The result is a gradual hardening of politics across the spectrum. The centre does not simply shift left or right; it adapts to a new environment where pressure comes from actors who do not operate by the same norms. Legislative outcomes reflect that pressure, not through dramatic ruptures, but through incremental adjustments that accumulate over time.

There is a temptation to see this as a failure of discipline, as if the problem lies in individual leaders or tactical choices. The reality is more structural. Fragmented party systems, volatile electorates, and declining trust in traditional institutions create constant pressure to secure majorities. In that environment, the extremes do not need to win. They need to matter.

And they do.

The cordon sanitaire still exists in speeches, party statutes, and political self-descriptions. But in law, in votes, and in the everyday mechanics of governing, it has already been crossed many times — by the right and by the left.

What remains is not a firewall, but a landscape shaped from its edges.

By Mika Horelli, Brussels

There are moments when a technological shift stops feeling like a story about gadgets and starts looking like a story about civilisation.

I found myself thinking this after reading two recent pieces in the major Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. One reported that Val Kilmer, who died last year, will return to the screen in an AI-generated form, with the co-operation of his family and the help of archival material. The other took readers inside a robot training centre in Beijing, where humanoid machines are being taught to perform delicate manual tasks once thought stubbornly human.

At first glance, these looked like separate curiosities. They were not. They described the same threshold from two directions.

One was about representation. A machine can now reproduce a human presence convincingly enough to place a dead actor back on screen. The other was about action. A machine is learning to grasp, fold, sort and manipulate the physical world with increasing precision. Put together, the message was hard to miss. The boundary that once protected human uniqueness is not vanishing in theory. It is vanishing in practice.

I have seen an earlier version of this problem up close. Around twenty years ago, I visited Lucasfilm’s studios in San Francisco. At the time, digital technology could already create convincing alien creatures and other fantastical beings for the Star Wars universe. What it still struggled to do was to create a fully believable digital human.

That, we were told, was the harder challenge. The reason was simple and persuasive. Human beings know the human face too well. We notice the smallest deviation instinctively. A deadness in the eyes, an unnatural rhythm in a gesture, something slightly wrong in the texture of skin. A fantasy creature can survive stylisation. A human double cannot. It has to cross a much narrower bridge.

That bridge has now been crossed. Not perfectly in every instance, and not without ethical and artistic disputes, but crossed far enough that the old reassurance no longer works. For years, it was still possible to say that machines could imitate some parts of life but not us, not really. That distinction is becoming harder to defend. Machines can now imitate our voices, our faces, our writing and, increasingly, our movements. Once that happens at scale, the question is no longer what technology can assist us with. The question becomes what remains meaningfully ours.

The old comfort is running out

For a long time, discussions about AI were framed in the language of assistance. These systems would help doctors, teachers, lawyers, and journalists. There was some truth in that. There still is.

As my readers know, I use AI myself as a tool, and I know from direct experience that it can be genuinely useful. I also know that it still makes factual errors, fabricates details and smooths over gaps in understanding with unnerving confidence. It remains something that must be checked, challenged, and supervised.

But that is no longer the whole story.

The more consequential shift lies in replacement. In more and more sectors, the attraction of AI is not that it helps a human worker. It is that it reduces the need for one. The same is beginning to happen in the physical economy through robotics. Once machines can process information and manipulate the world, the logic reaches far beyond office software or chatbots. It starts to reorganise the meaning of labour itself.

This is why the change now feels larger than an ordinary technological upgrade. It involves both cognitive and physical work simultaneously. It is one thing to automate parts of accounting, legal review or routine writing. It is something else to combine with machines that can sort goods, operate production lines, assist with logistics, move objects in warehouses, or eventually operate in care settings and households.

Historically, industrial change displaced certain jobs but created others. Agriculture gave way to factories. Factories gave way to services. Painful transitions were followed by new forms of mass employment. That pattern still shapes the instinctive optimism with which many people talk about AI. They assume, as before, that new occupations will emerge and absorb those displaced.

That assumption deserves much more scepticism than it usually gets.

Work is being decoupled from value

Modern capitalism was built on a basic premise. Human labour is scarce, and wages are the means through which most people take part in economic life. Work is not only how goods and services are produced. It is how households survive, how taxes are collected and how political stability is maintained.

Artificial intelligence and robotics begin to unsettle that arrangement.

If a machine can perform a task faster, more cheaply and with acceptable accuracy, markets will tend to favour the machine. This is not primarily a moral drama. It is arithmetic. Employers do not need a machine to do everything better than a person. They only need it to do enough, cheaply enough, consistently enough, to make fewer human workers necessary.

That logic is already visible in knowledge work. Drafting, summarising, coding, customer support, translation, basic design, and routine analysis all fall under the automation zone. Some parts of journalism do too. The threat is not merely that machines will produce text. They will produce text that is good enough for institutions that value output volume more than originality or depth.

The risk here is not only economic. It is epistemic.

If journalism becomes a system in which machine-generated content increasingly feeds on earlier machine-generated content, the result is a hall of mirrors. Language survives, form survives, even plausibility survives. What weakens is contact with reality. Reporting worthy of the name still depends on going somewhere, speaking to people, checking what others missed and noticing what does not fit. Machines can process the archive. They do not replace the act of entering the world and returning with something genuinely new.

That is why some human roles will remain essential. The problem is that ‘essential’ does not mean ‘numerous’.

The illusion of permanence

The platform economy should already have taught us something about the nature of temporary labour arrangements. For a while, ride-hailing and delivery services looked like a durable new layer of employment. In reality, they were often a waiting room. They made sense only for as long as human labour remained the cheapest adaptable option. Once autonomous driving, delivery robots, machine vision and warehouse robotics mature further, even this harsh and precarious world of gig work begins to look transitional.

The same applies to manufacturing. For decades, globalisation has shifted production to countries with lower labour costs. Automation weakens that logic. If factories rely increasingly on robots rather than people, the value of low wages declines. Production can move closer to consumers, strategic allies or politically safer territories. That turns automation into more than a labour story. It becomes a geopolitical story as well.

This is why China’s rapid push into robotics matters so much. It is not simply about building clever machines. It is trying to position itself at the centre of the industrial ecosystem that will shape the physical workforce of the future. If that succeeds, the consequences will reach far beyond Chinese factories. They will affect supply chains, trade patterns, strategic dependencies and the geography of power.

And behind all this lies a ruder truth that many polite conversations still avoid. Human beings are expensive. They need salaries, rest, protection, healthcare, pensions and meaning. Machines need capital, maintenance and electricity. In a system organised around cost reduction and competitive pressure, the preference is obvious.

Lenin is often quoted as saying that capitalists will sell the rope with which they are hanged. The line is theatrical, but it contains a bleak insight. Economic systems built to maximise short-term efficiency do not automatically preserve the social foundations on which they depend. They can hollow them out quite efficiently.

What remains human

The standard answers come quickly. Creativity. Care. judgment. Craft. Intuition. Some of this is true. Some of it is self-soothing.

There will remain work that depends on trust, accountability, emotional intelligence, improvisation in unstable environments and the sort of embodied understanding that cannot easily be standardised. There will remain forms of original reporting, original art and genuinely relational care that people continue to value precisely because they are human. But these islands of human necessity are unlikely to absorb everyone displaced from routine office work and routine physical labour.

That is where the real political question begins.

What happens to a society built around wages when wages are no longer the main route through which large numbers of people can support themselves? What happens to taxation, pensions, welfare states and social legitimacy when economic output increasingly comes from systems owned by relatively few actors and operated by relatively few workers?

At that point, debates that once sounded utopian or eccentric stop looking optional. Basic income, new models of redistribution, taxes on capital and automation, and a more serious reconsideration of what counts as socially valuable activity move toward the centre of politics. Not because intellectuals find them fashionable, but because the underlying structure begins to force the issue.

The Industrial Revolution produced immense wealth and immense dislocation. This transformation has the same shape, but it is arriving faster and on a broader front. It touches not only factories but also offices, not only manual routines but also language, identity, and representation itself.

That is why those two newspaper articles stayed with me. One showed a dead actor returning through code. The other showed machines learning the delicate grammar of the human hand. Together, they reveal the same thing. We are entering a phase in which the old distinction between what technology merely supports and what it replaces no longer holds for very long.

Once that becomes ordinary, the real upheaval begins.

By Mika Horelli, Brussels

Over the past few days, images from Budapest have been hard to ignore. Jubilant crowds, flags, and a sense of history snapping back into place after sixteen long years. At first sight, it looks like a democratic fairy tale: Viktor Orbán is out, Hungary is “back in Europe,” and Brussels can finally breathe easier.

But behind the headlines and the symbolism lies a darker truth. Orbán’s defeat does not mark the end of Hungary’s illiberal experiment. It marks the beginning of a long, exhausting and profoundly unglamorous phase: dismantling a system carefully built to survive even electoral defeat.

Orbán’s Quiet Coup

From the start, Orbán’s project was not just to govern Hungary as a conservative prime minister. It was to remodel the state so that power would flow reliably towards one party and, ultimately, one man. There was no dramatic coup. No tanks in the streets. The tools were ballots, laws and appointments.

The first front was constitutional. Armed with a two‑thirds parliamentary majority, Fidesz pushed through a new constitution in 2011. It was written not as a neutral framework for shifting majorities, but as an ideological fortress. Policy choices on family, nation, religion and budget discipline were elevated to near‑untouchable constitutional principles. Changing them now requires supermajorities that the new government does not have.

Equally important, the new basic law clipped the wings of the Constitutional Court. The court’s jurisdiction was narrowed in key areas, and its role as a check on majoritarian overreach was deliberately weakened. Over time, the court’s membership was filled almost entirely with judges loyal to Fidesz. Institutionally, the court still exists. Politically, it has been hollowed out.

The second front was the electoral system itself. Orbán understood that in a fragmented multi‑party landscape, the way votes translate into seats can be worth more than a thousand campaign speeches. Electoral districts were redrawn. Rules were tweaked so that even a modest plurality of votes could be converted into an overwhelming majority in parliament. The result was a structural “seat bonus” for Fidesz: a system that looks competitive on election night, but behaves like a one‑party state in the legislature.

The Capture of the Public Sphere

Illiberal projects stand or fall with their grip on the public sphere. Orbán did not need to abolish free speech. He simply changed the economic and regulatory conditions under which speech takes place.

Media regulation offered one set of levers. A new media authority and a politically stacked Media Council were given sweeping powers to distribute frequencies, issue licences and impose fines based on vaguely defined standards of balance and decency. Public broadcasting was consolidated under a single management structure aligned with the government. Formally, these bodies fulfilled technocratic functions. Substantively, they could reward friends and punish critics.

At the same time, the financial plumbing of the media market was redirected. State advertising, from ministries, agencies, and state‑owned companies, flowed generously to pro‑government outlets and dried up elsewhere. Independent newsrooms saw their advertising base erode, not because audiences vanished, but because the state rewrote the rules of commercial survival.

Ownership completed the triangle. Businessmen with close ties to Fidesz acquired influential outlets; editorial lines softened or flipped. Others, once pillars of critical journalism, were abruptly closed under the guise of economic necessity. No one needed to send censors into the newsroom. Market pressure, licensing decisions and owners’ expectations did the job.

The same logic extended beyond the media. Access to EU funds and public contracts became intertwined with political loyalty. Success in construction, energy or regional development increasingly depended on proximity to the ruling party. A new class of loyal oligarchs emerged; men whose fortunes illustrate how quietly a political project can burrow into a country's economic fabric.

Lawfare as a System

One of the most striking features of Orbán’s Hungary has been the normalisation of “lawfare”: the use of nominally legal tools to achieve plainly political ends.

Judicial “reforms” lowered judges’ retirement ages, opening the door to wide‑ranging personnel changes at the top of the judiciary. New courts and administrative bodies were created, often with mandates and procedures finely tuned to the government’s needs. Formally, the changes could be defended as modernisation. Functionally, they shifted control over sensitive cases into friendlier hands.

Civil society organisations were targeted with laws on foreign funding, transparency and registration that framed them as potential agents of outside interference. The goal was less to ban them outright than to stigmatise them, tie them down in paperwork and make donors think twice. Here, too, the method was not overt repression but an accumulation of small frictions that make independent activity costly and risky.

Crucially, none of this looked like the old authoritarianism. The courts remained open, elections were held, and NGOs continued to operate. But the overall balance of incentives changed. Those who played by the government’s informal rules prospered. Those who did not discover that the law could be remarkably creative in making life difficult.

Poland’s Slow‑Motion Restoration

Hungary is not the only country wrestling with the legacy of an illiberal turn. Poland offers a sobering glimpse of how difficult it is to restore checks and balances once they have been deliberately weakened.

When Law and Justice (PiS) came to power in 2015, it moved quickly against the Constitutional Tribunal, appointing judges in defiance of previous parliamentary decisions and ignoring adverse rulings. Disciplinary chambers within the judiciary were used to intimidate judges who insisted on applying constitutional or EU law. The prosecution service was placed more firmly under political control.

Public media were methodically turned into a government mouthpiece, with management purges and programming shifts that left little doubt about their new role. Independent outlets were besieged with lawsuits and regulatory harassment. Civil rights, from reproductive freedom to LGBT+ protections, became battlegrounds in a broader culture war.

When Donald Tusk’s coalition finally ousted PiS, it inherited institutions that were democratic on paper but packed with loyalists on multi‑year mandates. The new government faces a dilemma. Move aggressively to undo PiS‑era appointments, and you risk reinforcing the perception that institutions are merely spoils of political war. Move cautiously, and the old networks remain in place, quietly obstructing reform.

Public broadcasting illustrates the dilemma. Simply changing the law does not instantly produce a culture of editorial independence in organisations where fear and loyalty have been the operating principles for years. Attempts to reset management provoke legal challenges, protests and accusations of “politicising” the media, often from those who spearheaded its earlier capture.

The courts are even more complex. Every attempt to reverse unconstitutional appointments or disciplinary regimes must navigate domestic law, EU requirements and the practical need for courts to function day‑to‑day. Every move is litigated immediately, both in the legal and political senses. Tusk’s government cannot just pull a lever labelled “back to normal.” It must improvise a path back towards normality while large parts of the machinery resist.

Hungary’s new leaders will face similar traps. The more enthusiastically they dismantle Orbán’s legacy, the easier it will be for his supporters to claim persecution and martyrdom. The more cautiously they proceed, the greater the risk that the illiberal architecture ossifies into a semi‑permanent feature of Hungarian democracy.

The Autocrat as Saviour

Illiberal leaders rarely present themselves as strongmen in the classic sense. They come as saviours. They do not promise more power for themselves, but more protection for “the people” – from enemies at the border, in Brussels, in the courts, in the media.

Orbán has refined this persona to an art form. In the last campaign, he insisted, up to the final days, that only he could keep Hungary out of the war in Ukraine, that any opposition victory would mean young Hungarians sent to die on the eastern front. He framed European criticism of his policies not as a clash over the rule of law, but as an attack on Hungarian sovereignty itself, with “Brussels” cast as a faceless occupier. In this story, Orbán is not dismantling democracy; he is defending the nation from foreign liberal overreach.

Law and Justice in Poland used a similar script. PiS depicted itself as the lone defender of a Catholic, patriotic Poland besieged by decadent Western liberals, German interests and an overreaching European Union. Judicial reforms, media takeovers and culture‑war legislation were packaged as acts of national self‑defence, necessary to wrest the country back from corrupt post‑communist elites and foreign influence. Here, too, the leader does not seize power; he merely “restores” the rightful order that others betrayed.

This saviour narrative reaches its most grotesque form in the United States. Donald Trump has long claimed a unique, almost mystical ability to fix what others cannot – “I alone can solve it” was the slogan distilled to its essence. This week, he pushed the metaphor to the edge of blasphemy, circulating an image of himself depicted as Jesus healing the sick. The message could hardly be clearer: opposition is not just wrong or misguided; it is sacrilegious. Loyalty to the leader is framed not as a political choice, but as a moral obligation.

What unites Orbán’s talk of keeping Hungary out of war, PiS’s crusade against a supposedly hostile West and Trump’s self‑portrait as a miracle worker is the same underlying move. By presenting themselves as the last barrier against chaos, war or moral collapse, they seek to make democratic alternation itself look dangerous. If only one man can save the nation, then any election that removes him must, by definition, be a threat.

The Orbanisation of America

While Central Europe struggles to unwind its illiberal experiments, parts of the American right look to Budapest as a source of inspiration, not warning.

Orbán has been feted at conservative conferences in the United States. Influential commentators have praised Hungary as a model for defending “traditional values” against liberal cosmopolitanism. The message is not subtle: if you want to win the culture war, study the Hungarian playbook.

The transatlantic exchange is less about copying specific laws than about internalising a set of strategic intuitions. The lesson many draw from Orbán is simple: do not rely on the temporary possession of executive office. Lock in your project by controlling the judiciary, the security apparatus, the electoral system and the flow of information. Use law and administration, not just rhetoric, to reshape the political field.

Donald Trump’s first term already contained flashes of this mentality: relentless attacks on institutional legitimacy, a focus on judicial appointments as a generational project, and efforts to brand critical media as enemies of the people. A second term, informed by Hungary and Poland’s examples, would likely be more disciplined. The aim would be not just to wield power, but to entrench it.

This is where Hungary’s “Year Zero” intersects with American politics. As Budapest tries to claw back judicial independence, media pluralism, and constitutional restraint, Washington flirts with dismantling them.

Drawing New Lines

What, then, does it mean to say that Hungary is at Year Zero?

It does not mean that the slate is clean. Quite the opposite. The past sixteen years have left a dense sediment of legal provisions, appointments, informal networks and learned behaviours. Much of this cannot be simply swept away without further damaging the very idea of stable institutions.

Nor does Year Zero mean that the new government can afford to devote all its energy to institutional housekeeping. Hungarians still expect results on inflation, wages, public services, and corruption. Every hour spent on redrafting the media law is an hour not spent on fixing hospitals or schools. If the purging of Fidesz’s legacy starts to look like an elite obsession, detached from everyday concerns, popular support will erode quickly.

What Year Zero should mean is clarity. Clarity about the nature of the task and about the stakes. Hungary does not just need a different set of people in high office. It needs to redraw the boundary lines between parties and state, government and media, majority and minority. It needs to rediscover the idea that the rules of the game are not themselves a partisan prize.

This is the uncomfortable paradox at the heart of any illiberal “restoration.” Leaders elected to undo the damage must voluntarily limit their own power. They must resist the temptation to repay their predecessors in kind. They must reconstruct neutral spaces in a political culture that has learned to treat every institution as a weapon.

The easy part of defending democracy is voting an autocrat out. The difficult part is then accepting that, in a healthy system, your own side will also be constrained, frustrated, sometimes defeated by independent courts, critical journalists and stubborn bureaucrats. After sixteen years of Orbánism and eight years of PiS, that may be the hardest lesson of all.

Hungary’s Year Zero will not be cinematic. It will be slow, procedural, intermittently boring and endlessly contested. But if Europe is lucky, it will also be the beginning of something which the continent has not seen enough of in the past decade: a story not just about how democracies erode, but about how they painfully, imperfectly, learn to hold again.

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Mika Horelli, Brussels

There are moments when reality does not change, but our ability to see it does. Iran remains what it has long been. We have simply stopped looking.

Western media can barely process one major outrage at a time. As Donald Trump’s rolling spectacle dominates headlines, Iran’s theocratic regime has intensified repression at home and survived a devastating war with the United States and Israel, emerging domestically more cohesive and ideologically hardened. Executions have surged, dissent has been crushed, and a younger, more disciplined security elite has tightened its grip.

While Trump presents himself as the protector of Iranian protesters and the defender of a Western civilisation under God, his politics of permanent outrage help to erase Iran’s victims from the Western field of vision.

The joint US–Israeli assault may have damaged Iran’s military infrastructure, but it also gave the clerical regime both the pretext and the momentum for a brutal political rejuvenation. At the very moment when Iranians needed sustained international attention, Western media turned back to its most reliable source of drama: Donald Trump. This is how one form of authoritarianism ends up shielding another.

There is an old German proverb: Das Kind mit dem Bade ausschütten — throwing the child out with the bathwater. In the eagerness to get rid of what is dirty, something essential is discarded.

This is roughly what is happening now. As the full bandwidth of attention is consumed by Trump’s political theatre, the continuous crimes of Iran’s clerical regime vanish from view. The child in this metaphor is Iranian society itself, especially the young and the poor, who were briefly visible during the Mahsa Amini protests and then disappeared again into the shadows.

Iran’s Islamic Republic marked the forty-seventh anniversary of the 1979 revolution as a coldly routinised dictatorship. It no longer needs revolutionary enthusiasm; it relies on a state machinery capable of systematic fear. Mahsa Amini, the young woman whose arrest and death at the hands of the morality police triggered the largest protests in decades, has already faded from many newsrooms’ collective memory. The repression that followed has not.

Human rights organisations now describe a historic wave of executions. Amnesty International reported more than 1,000 executions in 2025, the highest annual figure it has recorded in at least fifteen years. Iran Human Rights estimates that the real number is higher, with many deaths hidden behind administrative language and unreported proceedings.

Women continue to face compulsion rather than choice. After a brief tactical retreat during the height of the Women, Life, Freedom uprising, the regime returned to compulsory hijab enforcement with renewed force. Surveillance systems, including facial recognition in public spaces, now support that enforcement. The morality police have reappeared on the streets, more aggressive and more technologically equipped than before.

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