Two months into the war on Iran, the skeptics have been vindicated, and Europe’s center is slowly rediscovering the international law it abandoned in February. Liberal globalism has collapsed; violent, lawless illiberalism epitomized by Trumpism fills the void. The European center, with Merz as its figurehead, was meant to be the counterweight. Instead, when the US and Israel struck Iran on February 28, German chancellor Merz refused to “lecture” allies, declared internationa

Péter Magyar will be sworn in as Hungary’s new prime minister this week. His government has a strong technocratic thrust — a departure from Viktor Orbán’s cronyism but hardly a revitalization of democratic participation. https://jacobin.com/2026/05/hungary-magyar-democracy-orbanism-technocrat

Europe's response to the US-Israeli strikes on Iran exposes a continent locked in dependency and struggling to find its voice. Liberal globalism has collapsed, and the vacuum is being filled by an increasingly violent, lawless illiberalism that trades principle for hierarchy and force. The centre right — and its European figurehead, Friedrich Merz — is often framed as the main counterweight to illiberal disruption. Yet when the United States and Israel launched strikes on I

Hungary’s Viktor Orban left Washington with a one-year exemption from US sanctions on Russian energy, a short-term political win that exposes his long-term dependence on foreign power. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his very large team of ministers, propagandists and members of the country’s well-connected economic elite flew to Washington on November 7 to meet President Donald Trump, the first bilateral meeting of the two leaders since his return to power. The t

Christopher Saville’s paper makes a valuable contribution to the growing field connecting the political economy of capitalism to population health.1 Using extensive, high-quality survey data, Saville shows that the health consequences of deindustrialisation in Wales have persisted across generations. Residents of areas with deeper mining histories report poorer health, with the strongest effects among those who lived through mine closures. Although the gap has narrowed for yo

Illiberal leaders rise, fall, and sometimes crash. Yet, the illiberal movement itself continues to gain ground. The current moment again feels like the pendulum is swinging back to the center. But beneath the surface, a deeper crisis continues to erode democratic politics. Unless we reinvent democracy, the illiberal wave will keep coming back. My article for the Charles F. Kettering Foundation blog: https://kettering.org/why-democracy-keeps-losing-to-illiberalism-and-how-to-f

Trump’s tariffs are failing, but the old model won’t save us either. Trade wars won’t save workers. A new economic order can.

I Watched Orbán Destroy Hungary’s Democracy. Here’s My Advice for the Trump Era.

In this article in The Conversation, I dive into our first-of-its-kind meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Political Science.

I watched Hungary’s democracy dissolve into authoritarianism as a member of parliament − and I see troubling parallels in Trumpism