Transcript: Martin Wolf on the US midterms -- Trump loses. European populism lives on.

This is an audio transcript of the Martin Wolf on the World podcast episode: 'Martin Wolf on the US midterms: Trump loses. European populism lives on.'

Martin Wolf

I'm Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. American voters have delivered a resounding defeat to Donald Trump's Republicans. The Democrats now control both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but Trump still has two years in the White House. How much can the Democrats constrain him? And has this election changed the course of American democracy?

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My guest today is the historian and Oxford professor emeritus Timothy Garton Ash, who made his name chronicling the fall of communism across eastern Europe in 1989. It was a moment of extraordinary optimism about the triumph of liberal democracy, with the United States as its most powerful champion. Timothy, welcome to the show.

Timothy Garton Ash

Good to be with you.

Martin Wolf

Timothy, in your latest book, Europe in 7 1/2 Chapters, you argue that the west made a fundamental mistake in assuming that the post-1989 era was the new normal rather than a historical exception. You also suggest that the Europe of nationalism and anti-liberalism may gain the upper hand over the next five to 10 years. Does the Democrats' sweeping victory in the US midterms give you any reason to reconsider that assessment?

Timothy Garton Ash

So I think that it's clearly very good news for Democrats everywhere because it suggests that you can come back from a significantly eroded democracy. Now, we've seen that in Hungary coming back; we've seen it in Serbia, but obviously this is the biggest of the lot.

But for Europe, I think we should not overestimate both the direct and indirect effects. I mean, it is true that Congress is the first branch of government in the Constitution and has the power of the purse and therefore can, to some extent, constrain Trump. But the guy in charge of foreign policy is still Donald J Trump. He may be a lame duck, but he can be the biggest, angriest, arguably most dangerous lame duck in world history. And for the things that really matter to Europe -- for example, support for Ukraine or European defence -- he's just as dangerous, if not a little more so now, than he was before the midterms.

Martin Wolf

Do you think then, and it seems that you do, that sort of a number of people around are reading too much into this as we did in the post-1989 era -- though it's obviously not a direct comparison; United States is not the Soviet Union -- and we are in danger, or many people are in danger, of reading too much into this moment?

Timothy Garton Ash

So I think people are in danger of reading too much into it, but I think the story in historical comparison, Martin, is a different one. Everyone says early 1990s: liberal triumphalism, Francis Fukuyama, end of history -- no. As you will well remember, in the early 1990s, we were very uncertain what was coming next. We had no idea whether the transitions could succeed from, you know, a Soviet-type regime, centrally planned economy. The joke at the time, as I mention in the book, was we know you can turn an aquarium into fish soup, but can you turn fish soup back into an aquarium?

And my view, the hubris set in -- the illusion that history was going our way actually set in in the early 2000s when it looked like mission accomplished. They had actually made the transitions to liberal democracy, market economy, even in the Baltic states, and they'd joined the EU and Nato. And it's at that point that we thought, this is the way history is going to continue. And of course, typically, that was the very moment at which history started to turn against, so to speak, the liberal international project. Those illusions were in some sense much more understandable because they followed 15 years of extraordinary progress and achievement. We've never been nearer to a Europe whole and free than we were around 2004-5.

But in this case, you know, I think we have to be very sober. And actually, my prescription for Europe would be to go on doing what we're doing already, but even more so: to build up our own resilience, our own independence from the United States and, as Mark Carney has been arguing, the connections between us. And then, if the US really comes back -- and the test of that will be the presidential election in 2028 -- they can rejoin a liberal international order which, at least to some extent, we have preserved.

Martin Wolf

If you look at the obvious advance of rightwing populist parties in Europe since that heyday, and particularly in recent years, how far do you think that was a consequence of Trump's political success? And how far was it actually rooted in very similar but parallel grievances in European societies, or is it actually impossible to disentangle the two?

Timothy Garton Ash

Clearly the latter. Fifteen years ago, I would have thought populism was a fairly useless term. Now I think it does describe a phenomenon seen across the democratic-capitalist world, and that the similarities -- both the economic dimension and the cultural dimension -- are very, very strong. And then, of course, there are specific factors in Europe and in each individual European country.

But what I do think is that last year, 2025, we had a US administration that was explicitly supporting an anti-liberal nationalist populist Europe. We've never had that before. We've had a US that was indifferent to Europe; we've had a US that supported liberal Europe, free Europe, European integration. But for the first time . . . with Trump and Vance explicitly supporting all those parties.

Now, in the case of the Polish presidential election last year, which was very close and very important, Donald Trump's support for Nawrocki, who's now the president and causing a lot of trouble, clearly helped. Arguably, it even got him over the line. It helped the Alternative for Germany, the AfD, in the federal election in Germany last year. But already this spring, I was in Hungary for that wonderful moment when Viktor Orbán was voted away. Explicit support from JD Vance and Trump not only didn't help him; arguably, it harmed him.

And now I think we're in a position, and this is a significant change, where none of the major nationalist populist parties are wanting to be associated too closely with Trump, obviously including Marine Le Pen, but also Vox in Spain and Reform UK in Britain.

Martin Wolf

That's quite encouraging in a way, isn't it? Because they were seen to be the wave of the future, because they were part of a global development, and now they're more obviously domestic nationalist parties, not part of something that they can put forward as a popular front to populist parties.

Timothy Garton Ash

Yeah, but I'm not gonna overstate that factor because, as I say at the end of the book, in the 7 1/2 chapter, if you put a gun to my head and say, "What do I think is gonna come out of this long 2027 . . . this megacycle of European elections?" my hunch is it's still gonna be, in most places, victories for the anti-liberal nationalist populist forces, right?

The AfD has already done shockingly well in two East German Länder. Spain votes at the end of this month, and it seems pretty clear that unless something dramatic changes, it will be an alliance between the centre-right popular party, Partido Popular, and the hard-right populist, xenophobic Vox party. French presidential election crucially next spring -- as it looks at the moment, I was just talking to a leading French analyst yesterday -- Marine Le Pen seems to have it in the bag. And then you have parliamentary elections in Italy and Poland, and in both cases it's going that way.

And then people say, oh, well, but, you know, maybe they'll all behave like Giorgia Meloni. But the point is, five Melonis is something very different from one Meloni. One Meloni had to adapt to the centrist mainstream. Five Melonis, even if they are all Melonis, will be the new mainstream.

Martin Wolf

But do you feel very strongly that essentially the forces driving what's happening in Europe are more or less indistinguishable from the forces driving the same phenomena elsewhere and, above all, in America? Or are there some peculiarly European elements to the rise of populism? For example, the reaction against the European Union itself, the integrating project which embraced them.

Timothy Garton Ash

So the European Union is something unprecedented in history. An empire by consent, a liberal, non-hegemonic empire. And what these parties have in common is nationalism, and those nationalisms are kicking against this European empire -- this, however liberal, non-hegemonic, nonetheless supranational authority.

So, you know, listen to Marine Le Pen, and basically you remember Margaret Thatcher saying, I want my money back. Well, that's what she's now saying, I want my money back. And national privilege, privilege for national citizens. If you listen to Alice Weidel of the AfD in Germany, she's saying the French just want our money, and we want our money for ourselves. So that it clearly is a distinctive European element.

And my hunch is that things are going to get worse, that we will have stronger forces of European disintegration at precisely the moment when we need actually more European integration in a few key areas such as defence. The question, it seems to me, is: will it be it gets worse and then it gets even worse, or will it be it gets worse and then it gets better?

Martin Wolf

I mean, when you say things are gonna get worse, you obviously are envisaging a situation in which some or possibly all the countries we've mentioned -- and they're very important countries, to put it mildly -- will fall very heavily under the influence of this sort of populist nationalist politics. In that world, what might happen, and how do we get back?

Because what happened -- of course, in Hungary very obviously and elsewhere, and to some extent in America just now -- elections worked, at least. When they made a complete mess of it, there was a reaction against them in the end. It took a long time in Hungary. But if they're all being controlled by the same sort of party and they all sort of agree that, well, these stuffy European rules about democracy and so doesn't really matter so much, is it plausible that we could have that sort of reversal, or are they all actually going to agree on one thing, which is suborning electoral democracy?

Timothy Garton Ash

No, I think it's entirely plausible that we could still come back from it, because an international of nationalists is a contradiction in terms. And so the one thing you can be sure of is they'll be disagreeing very quickly with each other. And I think the second thing you can be fairly sure of is that they won't have many solutions either, right?

So I mean, the votes for these parties are votes against the failure of, broadly speaking, liberal centrist governments to deliver. And the classic example is the politician in whom liberal Europeans, including me, had such high hopes 10 years ago, namely Emmanuel Macron, 'cause what did Macron do? He put all the liberals into one big centre block and said, we're gonna make this country better economically and in other ways, and spectacularly failed to deliver. France is now in a terrible mess. And so what do voters do? Either the extreme left, Mr Mélenchon, La France Insoumise, or Marine Le Pen, the hardened far right. And you know, quite honestly, it's hard to say which is worse.

But give it a few years of populists in power failing to deliver, which, by the way, we already saw in the Netherlands, and if there is -- as we saw in the United States, and here I think the United States is an inspiration -- really new energy and new ideas and candidates who can actually appeal to the parts of society that liberals have lost, and have an emotional connection with people and, if you like, speak human, then I absolutely think we could come back. The problem is, do we have globally the three or four or five years that's gonna take? Because at the same time we're under attack militarily from Russia, economically from China and politically from the United States.

Martin Wolf

How easy is it to undo the damage? And this is something that I've been thinking about also in the American context. Because one of the things such parties tend to do in government is suborn, destroy, corrupt core institutions of the state, particularly the liberal state -- the judiciary, intelligence services, tax-collecting agencies and so forth -- and they all have to be put back together in a way which is credible to the population.

And what I read in Poland is because it's such a divided society, it's very difficult to do that. And part of the reason is that the people who are at the, as it were . . . being pushed aside, the old populists, the nationalists say, well, these people are behaving just as they . . . in the way that they accuse us of, and that's utterly illegitimate. So how easy is it actually to undo the damage?

Timothy Garton Ash

So this is the question of questions. I mean, a couple of things. First of all, very importantly, before these guys get to power, reinforce all the anti-majoritarian pluralist institutions. Reinforce the independence of the judiciary, the neutrality of the civil service and the security services, public service broadcaster if you have one, and so on.

This is actually where Britain has not done so badly. You know, the Germans talk about wehrhafte Demokratie, which means a democracy capable of defending itself, and that leads them to talk about banning parties like the AfD. In my view, that's quite the wrong way to go. Wehrhafte Demokratie, a democracy capable of defending itself, is all about shoring up this, the separation of powers and all these countervailing checks and balances, the liberal and pluralist checks and balances.

If, however, they have been partly or extensively destroyed, then you have a real problem. In Hungary, because they've got a constitutional majority, a two-thirds majority, they can, if you like, do take revolutionary steps by legal means. The mistake they made in Poland was . . . because they didn't have the constitutional majority, so they couldn't entirely change the system by legal means to say, OK, we'll go softly, softly, step by step, and wait until the presidential election, and then when our president wins, we'll be able to do it all legally. And then their president lost, partly because Trump supported his opponent.

So I think the lesson there is, Martin, that sometimes it may actually be necessary to take, if you like, quasi-revolutionary steps -- which are not, as it were, strictly compliant with the black-letter law -- to restore the rule of law in a larger sense and these vital pluralist anti-majoritarian institutions. That's of course very risky territory. But if you're gonna do it, do it fast and do it once.

Martin Wolf

I would like to turn to a bit about what's happened in America. You wrote in a prescient article last year that the US midterms were one of two big tests for American democracy. You even gave this a name, "Operation Save US Democracy".

And the first test was for the Democrats to campaign on costs of living issues in the midterm, which they did, and they were successful, so they passed the first test. The second test will, of course, be the 2028 presidential election. What do you think the Democrats should be doing now to increase their chance of winning in 2028 and ensuring a peaceful transfer of power thereafter? What's the programme for the second stage?

Timothy Garton Ash

So first of all, and I think they are acknowledging this, to see very clearly that although some of their candidates were terrific, this was fundamentally an outright passionate rejection of the policies of Donald Trump and not in any way a heartfelt endorsement of the Democrats. Their popularity is almost as low as his. They have got to get their act together and not, you know, be lulled into thinking that the electorate has suddenly fallen back in love with them. That's point number one.

Point number two, no party is more capable of forming a circular firing squad than the Democrats in the US. And I think they're quite capable of messing this up, particularly because the party is so divided. You know, the polite way of saying it is big tent, but that's a very polite way of saying it: very divided between centrists and so-called progressives or quote, unquote, democratic socialists. My own view is they need to get a really attractive candidate more from the centre who can appeal to the other half of US society, if you like, who can appeal to the electorates in states like Texas and Kansas and so on, who amazingly went for the Democrats in the midterms. But it's absolutely not a given that they will do so in the presidential election.

Martin Wolf

So somebody with the sort of appeal that Barack Obama had?

Timothy Garton Ash

Yeah, there . . . I mean, I think there are some candidates. I don't know who it would be, but I think there's a laser focus on, you know, who's actually gonna win it. Because obviously lesson number one when you're trying to restore democracy is win the next election. And by the way, because I so much think this is not a given, because the next couple of years are gonna be very rough for the United States as they're gonna be for us, and therefore you're gonna have a lot of unhappy voters in 2028 . . . This is why I think the lesson for us Europeans, or indeed Canadians or Australians or Japanese or Koreans, is we have to go on doing, you know, what we would be doing almost as if, you know, Donald Trump were to be coming back.

Also, for another reason, which is, you know, what the Ukraine war has shown us is that we are already in a post-western world, right? We threw the kitchen sink of sanctions against Putin's Russia, and his economy did better than ours for two or three years, partly 'cause he prepared for it, but mainly because he had China to give him the trade and technology that he wasn't getting from us; India to buy the oil; Turkey, Brazil, South Africa and many other non-western powers quite happy to go on doing business as usual with us. And when they acted in the same direction, they have sufficient wealth and power for the first time in 200 years to counterbalance the west.

And so, in that sense, my argument is that we need us, in Europe and in other democratic middle powers, to go on building up our own strength because we will actually need, if you like, more combined power in whatever's left of the west because we are now for the first time in two centuries in a post-western world.

Martin Wolf

If you were advising the Democrats in Congress -- and their position is obviously going to be fairly strong, but they won't have a two-thirds majority in the Senate, clearly -- what would you say they must not do, and what is the sort of thing that they must focus on to build up the strength and credibility of their side of politics, and therefore improve the chances of winning in 2028?

Timothy Garton Ash

Try to demonstrate that despite having an angry lame duck in the White House, they can actually deliver on things like the cost of living and the issues that ordinary voters cared about. That is clearly crucial. Not to fall back into culture wars. Culture wars will lose them votes, not win them votes. I would say don't go for impeachment of Trump, but investigations most certainly, because clearly, next to the cost of living, the transparent, outrageous, obvious corruption of the Trump administration was a major source of, you know, of the midterm landslide. And so I think to go on exposing that corruption is something they could very usefully do.

And by the way, just to make a broader point, the great achievement of democratic capitalism was to separate wealth and power. For most of human history, that wasn't the case. And what the Trump administration is now doing is putting them back together again, as in a classic oligarchy. So I think focusing on that issue, which does get at, you know, the real unhappiness of a lot of, quote, unquote, middle-class or working-class Americans would actually be a very useful thing to do.

Martin Wolf

Now let's look at where Europe is in this new world, as it were. We hope America will be back, and for reasons you've already mentioned. We need America to be back. But it can't be with divided government, with Donald Trump still president. We can't in Europe rely on it. That's pretty obvious.

So what should European leaders be doing? What lessons should they draw from the experience in the United States, complicated though it has been, to shape a future for Europe in which it can conceivably defend liberal democracy, certainly in the continent, with an unreliable and, in some cases, some eventualities, hostile US? Or is there actually really no freedom of manoeuvre anymore for Europeans? Domestically, they're constrained by the politics you've mentioned, and internationally, well, they can't get away from the fact that Trump is president and Europe is sort of paralysed.

Timothy Garton Ash

There's absolutely masses that Europe could potentially do, but I've of course slipped in the word potentially there.

The Europeanisation of Nato. We already have very large armed forces serving under European forces, serving under European command all down the eastern frontier of Nato, right? The German command in Lithuania, British command in Estonia, the French command in Romania and so on. Europeanisation of Nato is a key to the military side of our defence, and then of course much better co-ordinated arms procurement. Everyone talks about spending 3.5 per cent, but the other point is we spend this money so absurdly badly, 14 different kinds of tank and so on. So those are two things in a crucial area, defence and security.

And then I would say there are a handful of other areas where we have to build up European strength. Clearly, in the digital field and AI, what we should be doing is trying to build up some major European strength somewhere up and down the tech stack. At the moment, we basically have one card to play, which is ASML, the Dutch company that makes the machines that make the most advanced chips. So we need to build up some European strength in that area. I would say, but this is your field, Europeanisation of capital markets as represented by Mario Draghi, removing some more barriers in the single market. You know, there's amazing figure, I think it was IMF, that the barriers inside the single market are equivalent to, I think it was 44 per cent tariff on goods and 110 per cent on services. Correct me if I got those figures wrong. So here are four or five big, very important things to do.

The problem, Martin, the key structural point is that the policies we need are European, but the politics are still national. The democratic politics are still national. So we can all see what we need to do is getting these European-scale . . . building up European strength in these four or five crucial areas. But for that, you've got to get the politics right, and that's the national politics that we talked about. And our problem is that most likely, at least in the next, you know, year to 18 months, in more European countries, they're gonna go the wrong way rather than the right.

That, I think, is the historical weight of this moment, because I really do believe that the second half of this decade, the next four or five years, are make-or-break time for the European project as we've understood it since 1945, which has given us by far the most advanced instantiation of liberal international order ever seen and seen anywhere else on the planet. So a great deal is at stake in that.

But I think if the national politics go the wrong way, and therefore we can't do what we badly and urgently need to do in European policies, then come 2030, I don't think it's gonna be 1933 or 1939, but I think it's gonna be what we have seen so many times before in European history, which is a gradual weakening, if you like, disintegration of a European order that has lasted many decades.

Martin Wolf

Earlier on, you said the west needs to be a more powerful force in world affairs, and I perfectly well understand that given what's been happening. But the west really does need some form of functioning alliance between the United States and Europe. And that doesn't look very likely in the near future, perhaps even the longer-term future. So your arguments look to me pretty pessimistic. Do you really think there is someone, people out there who can prevent the further decline of the west and its fragmentation?

Timothy Garton Ash

So when I talk about the west, I think in a sense we have to take it so far beyond the traditionally conceived core transatlantic west, ie, including countries like Japan and Korea, that maybe we need another word, but I mean the widest possible community of democratic powers. The danger, of course, is that we might see a tragic role reversal. At the moment, we have a broadly speaking liberal internationalist Europe facing an anti-liberal nationalist United States. If a charismatic internationalist Democrat doesn't win the US presidential election in 2028 and the European national elections go the way we fear, then come 2029 it might be a role reversal. And you have a liberal internationalist United States facing an anti-liberal nationalist Europe. So it needs both, as it were, to come out right, and that depends . . . I mean, I'm gonna say pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will; my favourite formula.

Martin Wolf

We've been talking about Europe. We're both British. Does Britain matter? And were you heartened by the fact that Andy Burnham, our prime minister, has indicated not only that Brexit is a mistake, which many people would agree with, but he actually wants to undo it. Is that relevant?

Timothy Garton Ash

Yes, clearly it is. Britain obviously doesn't matter as much as our political class like to think it does. But it is still one of the big three in Europe -- economically, still militarily, in diplomacy, intelligence, in tech, in financial services -- so of course it matters. Andy Burnham finally said what actually a majority of the public had already been saying: Brexit didn't work. It was a big mistake, a very big mistake. Reversing it is going to be incredibly difficult, partly because the politics in the EU are such that we're not gonna get anything like as good a deal as we had before. The negotiation would be difficult before we even get there.

We have the British politics, and the British politics are gonna be, as we go into the next election, that you have a left bloc which is competing with each other in pro-Europeanism -- Labour, Lib Dems, SNP, Plaid Cymru, Greens -- but you have a right bloc, Conservatives and Reform UK, who are competing in anti-Europeanism; who actually want to take us out of the European Convention on Human Rights, which, by the way, would torpedo our existing hard Brexit deal. So, in my view, in the best case, it's probably gonna take two terms of British politics before you actually get to the point where we could seriously negotiate a full redraw and re-entry into the European Union. But then, of course, the question is, what's the EU gonna look like by 2033 or '34?

Martin Wolf

It might be so fragmented we can join it, but then it's not going to be a club worth joining. Anyway, I agree with that.

Timothy Garton Ash

Yes, to adapt Groucho Marx. (Laughter)

Martin Wolf

Yes, exactly. Two last questions. We've lived, both of us, through the extraordinary optimism of 1989 itself and what have followed, as you rightly said. The transition went even better than I expected, and I wrote a lot about it at the time, except in Russia. My first writing was on Poland, and Poland clearly, as in terms of economic transition, has done phenomenally well. And we also thought that liberal democracy had won the argument, in Europe at least.

But that's not how it looks now. So what did we fundamentally get wrong? Was it about the economics of an open world and the shocks that would follow? Was it about the way politics inevitably goes -- in the end, people take for granted the freedoms they enjoy and get irritated by all the things that aren't working? Or was there something else that we've missed in failing to understand how fragile the new democratic order was going to be?

Timothy Garton Ash

Well, first point, I think it's really important to say how big that success was where it worked. You mentioned Poland, which is, as you know, a country close to my heart. Poland's GDP at purchasing power parity in 1989, according to the best estimate, was about half that of Spain. Last year it just overtook Spain. I mean, the transformation of that country, leave aside the politics for the better, is just extraordinary. There are very few examples in modern history. Maybe Spain itself after Franco is one example, but it's even more dramatic. So that's worth remembering before we get to our breast-beating and sackcloth and ashes.

What did we get wrong? Well, I mean, it is, you know, huge subject, but first of all, hubris. Without question, hubris. Early 2000s, we really thought history was gonna go on doing our way, that 1989 was the rule when in fact it was a great exception. Remember the way the Arab Spring was greeted as if it was gonna be another 1989. Second of all, we reduced liberalism to one dimension, the economic dimension. A liberalism which only has one dimension is no liberalism at all. You need the social, the political and the cultural aspects of liberalism. Undoubtedly, we went too far in the direction of what is crudely called neoliberalism, so sheer levels of inequality, inequalities of wealth that became inequalities of power. But also the cultural component, which seems to me very important.

Liberalism -- whose, as it were, so to speak, prime directive, to use the language of Star Trek, was summarised by the great liberal philosopher Ronald Dworkin as equal respect and concern for every member of society -- demonstrated that equal respect and concern neither economically nor culturally. Because to the other half of society who hadn't been to university, it said, in the famous words of Hillary Clinton, you're a basket of deplorables; you can't say those things; you can't say what you think. Liberalism is only for the liberals who've been to university. So I think there's a large part of this story which is about the failings of liberalism in the moment of its triumph and the moment of its hubris.

But of course, the other part is about external enemies. I mean, we have also to remember that there were a lot of external enemies, Russia and China notably, who are now attacking that liberal order and, to many people around the world, particularly in the case of China, seem to be presenting an alternative model, to put it very nicely, a developmental authoritarianism, an alternative global model that wasn't there in 1989.

Martin Wolf

When you talk about the cultural mistakes, don't you have to accept that the failure to control borders on migration was not insignificant?

Timothy Garton Ash

Without question. I mean, the issue that is called immigration is not just about immigration, right? It's not just about how many thousand people came in last year. It's about this amazing transformation of most west European societies, which 60 years ago, roughly one in 20 people with a migration background. Now, a typical West European country, one in four people with a migration background. In the case of Germany, one in three in the younger generation, and in big cities, one in two. I was in Rotterdam the other day, the figure's 56 per cent.

This is a dramatic transformation of our societies, and of course, the mistake we made was to have massive immigration, some of it uncontrolled, without sufficient integration. What we should have done, and what we should still do, is to have more tightly managed immigration, but then much better integration. So those who do come in legally will then be full members of our society and given equal respect and concern. But no question, that was one of the big mistakes.

Martin Wolf

Let's finish with the ending of your book, Europe in 7 1/2 Chapters. You finish by invoking Václav Havel's distinction between optimism and hope -- very beautiful. And in the book, you're not particularly optimistic, and you haven't been particularly optimistic about Europe's political future. So let's forget optimism. What gives you hope?

Timothy Garton Ash

What gives me hope is, first of all, you mentioned Václav Havel, who I had the privilege to know well. When I first met him in 1984, he was just out of four years in prison, where he had a really tough time. It seemed completely impossible that that handful of dissidents in Charter 77 could, five years later, you know, be leading the Velvet Revolution and then turning the country into a liberal democracy. So, you know, politics can sometimes be the art of the impossible, and the impossible can happen fairly quickly. That's point number one.

But point number two, look what happened in Hungary. Look what happened in Serbia. Look what happened in Brazil. Look what's now happened in the United States. Rumours of the death of democracy have been very much exaggerated. I think key to all of this will be mobilising young Europeans, young citizens everywhere to fight back before it's too late. And for that, they have to understand that just as things can turn very much for the better incredibly quickly, as they did in 1989, they can also turn very quickly very much for the worse. And so, seeing those popular movements, seeing those successes definitely gives me hope, and I have no question about it that we have to keep fighting for it.

Martin Wolf

Timothy Garton Ash, thank you very much for an excellent discussion of some really important and in some respects pretty scary issues. Thank you very much.

Timothy Garton Ash

Always a pleasure, Martin.