During her 18-minute video, Bonya drew on pressing issues in the country, including the disastrous floods in Dagestan, livestock culls in Siberia, intensifying financial hardships for SMEs, and strict internet freedom limitations. The TV star presented herself as the defendant of the grievances of ordinary Russians.

However, the blogger trotted carefully, outlining issues that avoided perturbing authorities and challenging Putin’s authoritarian rule over the country. In the most daring part of the video, Victoria alleged that the Russian people—including regional governors—feared the President, and were too afraid to relay the gravity of the situation.

The scale of this response quickly attracted attention both inside and outside Russia, after the video garnered over 27 million views. Western media outlets took up the uproar to portray Bonya as an influential figure opposing the Russian authorities, with a publication from The Guardian citing her ‘scathing remarks’ and ‘fierce critique’ of the Kremlin.

In addition, a series of interview requests from Russian opposition outlets such as Silver Rain and Meduza followed. Bonya hit back vehemently, claiming that she “loved [her] country” and “loved [her] President,” shutting down suspicions of her membership in Russian opposition. Insisting that the media was misrepresenting her messaging, the TV star urged journalists to refrain from considering herself their ideological ally.

“I am not with you,” she remarked after facing considerable backlash from pro-Russian public figures, notably state-channel media figure Vladimir Solovyev. “Please do not associate me with [your] opposition.”

Abbas Gallyamov—a Russian exile and former speechwriter for President Vladimir Putin—analyses the effect of Bonya’s address on drawing in a ‘new audience’ into the realm of political dialogue. The unlikely participation of otherwise apolitical citizens poses the wider question about a more covertly dissenting form of civic dialogue in Russia, dissimilar to conventional state-society dialogue in Western democracies.

The success of Bonya’s video raises broader questions about who is capable of articulating public grievances in contemporary Russia, and through what channels such grievances are expressed.

On the basis of the social grievances that Bonya raised, the resonance that the public found with the blogger triggered an explosion of support, the strength of which surpassed the dwindling opposition outlets, many of which operate in exile. This is particularly striking given Bonya’s lack of political credentials and her repeated rejection of an oppositional identity.

Rather than emerging through familiar opposition structures, this resonance suggests that expressions of public grievance may increasingly be articulated through less conventional or institutional actors, particularly in times of heightened repression.

While more conspicuous forms of civic engagement, including direct manifestations of dissent, may be more readily understood by a Western political framework, the ordinary Russian may voice political concerns differently. What, then, is the Russian understanding of personal freedoms? Of justice? And of participation in dissenting rhetoric?

Bonya’s fierce appeal yet loyal position undermines long-standing Western assumptions about Russian dissent and the figures typically associated with it. Movements and campaigns by figures such as Navalny and Nemtsov have long been tokenised as representatives of Russia’s liberal opposition. While their appeal undeniably piqued support from certain groups in Russia in the past, the present domestic situation may point towards a more complicated reality.

Notably, the popularity of the blogger’s video is difficult to compare with the recent acclaim received by conventional pillars of the Russian opposition, such as Yulia Navalnaya’s continuation of Navalny’s project FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation).

Viewed through this lens, the acclaim received by Bonya’s video is particularly revealing of political participation in Russia, especially the public’s aversion to explicit political agendas and reluctance to disrupt the status quo.

With the war’s further penetration into daily life, the lifestyle blogger found resonance through a form of civil society activity that does not fundamentally undermine the ruling party and carefully circumvents outright rejection of the governing system. Bonya’s conscious avoidance of blaming public grievances directly on the President is not only a strategic move familiar within the Kremlin’s political playbook, but simultaneously a key factor behind her broader appeal.

By refusing to align herself with any explicit ideology, or to place herself in stark opposition to the President, Bonya’s video enabled ordinary Russians to feel vindicated in their grievances without identifying themselves with overt political dissent or committing to a long-term political agenda. Her appeal did not fundamentally challenge the stability of the existing political order, nor did it implicate viewers in the risks that often accompany direct criticism of the authorities. Instead, it removed many of the social and political costs typically associated with participation in oppositional discourse.

Such a form of civic engagement is compatible with the wider public’s aversion to overt manifestations of dissent, which are frequently associated with instability, social upheaval and the disruptive nature of protest movements. By insisting on greater freedoms without the obligations or consequences of opposition membership, Bonya’s address helped lower the barriers that often discourage political participation among ordinary Russians.

Political science research delineates a similar narrative. Influential works on civil society in Russia insist that, rather than rendering the concept obsolete in the current political context, Russia’s state-society contention has long pursued a more nuanced form of dissent. As scholars argue, civil society in Russia should not be understood solely through the Western prism of binaries, such as the presence or absence of liberal democratic institutions or outward manifestations of opposition, but through the diverse ways citizens negotiate, challenge and engage with state power outside conventional frameworks of political participation.

Far from demonstrating total political apathy, the popularity of Bonya’s address suggests that civic engagement in contemporary Russia may be most effective when it allows citizens to express discontent without assuming the social and political risks associated with organised opposition, and when grievances are voiced in a manner that is not fundamentally disruptive to the familiar status quo.

While Russian understandings of liberal freedoms may appear contrarian and differ significantly from those of the West, episodic flare-ups such as the appeal of Bonya’s video serve as a reminder that political disengagement should not be confused with political indifference. The resonance of her message suggests that many Russians remain acutely aware of the social and economic pressures shaping their daily lives. What is often absent is not dissatisfaction itself, but a compelling vehicle through which that dissatisfaction can be expressed. In turn, Bonya’s address may reveal the blueprint for the conditions under which Russian civic consciousness is willing to make itself heard.

In April 2024, Malawi’s government, led by President Lazarus Chakwera, made a telling decision that revealed its true economic priorities. With elections approaching, the Reserve Bank of Malawi (RBM) reversed an IMF-mandated devaluation and fixed the official exchange rate. The logic was straightforward: devaluation was pushing up import prices, import prices were fuelling inflation, and inflation was losing votes.

Fix the rate, shield consumers, win the election.

Chakwera lost anyway. In September 2025, voters chose his predecessor Peter Mutharika by a landslide — 56.76% vs. 33.01% of the vote — with the economy as the dominant issue. The exchange rate fix had failed even on its own political terms, and left behind a structural wreckage that Mutharika now inherits.

This is not primarily a story about one government’s cynical monetary policy, but rather a story about what happens when a state tries to use an exchange rate anchor it cannot actually sustain.

The mechanics are worth understanding. When Malawi re-fixed its rate, it created an immediate gap between the official rate and the parallel market, which was running roughly 100 per cent above official for essential goods at its peak. This is not an abstract distortion. It meant that ordinary import-dependent households — the vast majority of the population — were being pushed onto a black market to access basic goods, while the formal rate offered them nothing.

Meanwhile the tobacco sector, which benefits from periodic step-devaluations and conducts dollar-denominated transactions, remained largely insulated from the kwacha (Malawi’s currency) depreciation eroding household purchasing power. Yet even here, the desperation of the FX position is visible: the RBM imposed a 30 per cent export surrender requirement to claw back foreign exchange from its primary beneficiaries, imposing distortions even on the sector the arrangement was designed to protect. The fix looked like consumer protection. It functioned as a subsidy to export capital at the expense of import-dependent labour.

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Credible exchange rate commitments require transparency, enforceability, and sufficient political cost of abandonment. Malawi’s arrangement failed all three. The Reserve Bank published no intervention data, giving private actors no basis for confidence in the rate. The government's willingness to re-fix the exchange rate after already agreeing to float under IMF Extended Credit Facility conditions demonstrated that the commitment could be abandoned on demand. And the ECF terminated without completing a single review, removing the one institutional constraint that gave the arrangement any external credibility. With gross reserves at just 0.7 months of imports — far below any recognised adequacy threshold — the Reserve Bank was not defending a rate so much as declaring one.

The consequences were predictable. Inflation peaked at 35 per cent in early 2024 and has since fallen to around 24 per cent as of early 2026 — a sign of some stabilisation — but still deeply damaging for a country where nearly three-quarters of the population lives below $2.15 a day as of 2025. The parallel market spread deterred foreign direct investment not only because of Malawi’s underlying economic weaknesses, but because investors could not reliably assess effective returns when profit repatriation might occur at either the official or the parallel rate. The currency distortion was generating uncertainty on top of genuine economic weakness, compounding both.

The IMF’s prescription — a unified market-clearing rate — is technically correct. The problem is that it is insufficient on its own. Malawi arrived at this crisis through a combination of fiscal dominance, reserve depletion, and absence of genuine central bank independence. A rate unification that is not preceded by fiscal consolidation, reserve rebuilding, and meaningful RBM autonomy will simply face the same political pressures that have hampered every previous stabilisation attempt. The structure that produced the April 2024 decision has not changed. Only the government has.

Mutharika inherited an economy where public debt has returned roughly to the levels that preceded Malawi’s major debt relief in 2006, in which the ECF remains terminated, and in which the distributional coalitions that benefit from exchange rate distortion are still politically powerful. The tobacco sector’s interests have not changed. The political incentives to prioritise short-term price stability over long-term monetary credibility have not changed. The question is whether a new government, without an electoral horizon for another four years, has the window to do what its predecessor could not.

There is a narrow case for cautious optimism. Chakwera’s loss demonstrated that economic mismanagement carries electoral consequences; the electorate delivered the punishment the IMF’s terminated programme could not. Mutharika has both the political capital of a landslide and the institutional memory of having governed before, providing a rare political window for change. The interest rate cut from 26 to 24 per cent in March 2026 is modest but suggests a willingness to begin normalisation. Yet these advantages are opportunities rather than achievements. The underlying constraints — weak reserves, high debt, and powerful interests that benefit from distortion — remain largely unchanged.

Optimism has to be conditional on the sequencing being right. Rate unification without fiscal consolidation is not reform; it is exposure. Malawi’s monetary problem is downstream of its fiscal and institutional problems, and treating the exchange rate in isolation will not resolve it.

The IMF knows this.

The question is whether the new government does too, and whether it has the political appetite to act on that knowledge before the next electoral cycle begins to foreclose options once again.

At an event hosted by the Institute for Government over 10 years ago, Economist Sharon White described Britain as one of the most centralised states in the developed world. Successive governments have promised to fix it and, so far, every single one has failed.

The consequences are visible not merely in constitutional arrangements but in economic outcomes. Consider what the 2026 Cities Outlook Report tells us about what actually works. In a decade of national economic stagnation — disposable incomes up just 2.4 per cent since 2013, barely worth measuring — a handful of places managed to do genuinely better: living standards rising more than twice as fast, residents thousands of pounds better off in real terms. Barnsley. Doncaster. Wakefield. Not glamorous cities. Not tech clusters or university boom towns. Northern towns that turned local economic growth into actual income gains for residents. Meanwhile, plenty of places with booming GVA figures — Cambridge, notably — saw real disposable incomes fall.

The standard diagnosis — levelling up, rebalancing, the Northern Powerhouse, whatever the current rebrand is — treats the problem as one of resources: if only we could redirect enough investment northward, the geography would fix itself. It won't. Manchester shows why.

Manchester’s advocates point to a city-region economy exceeding £100 billion, with a consistent 3.1% annual growth rate (double the UK average), a serious institutional architecture in the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, and the Bee Network as tangible proof that meaningful devolution produces results. All of that is true, though the critics are also right that living standards in Greater Manchester’s most deprived communities are still lagging. The growth is real; whether it reaches everyone is still a work in progress. That’s an argument for doing devolution better and more completely, not for retreating from it.

And let’s be clear about what devolution actually means. This is not inherently an argument for less government, nor a case for Whitehall to step back and let markets sort out the North. Economic growth is fundamentally local. A civil servant in a Whitehall office does not know that a particular bus route is why a firm can’t recruit from a particular neighbourhood. The local mayor does. The OECD has long emphasised that agglomeration effects only materialise when cities can coordinate transport, housing, skills and infrastructure at a regional level. Active government is essential; the question is which level of government should be acting, and on what.

The Bee Network is the clearest example. Using devolved transport powers, Greater Manchester is building the first fully integrated public transport system outside London: buses, trams, cycling, and eventually local rail under a single network, with coordinated fares and coherent branding. Disconnected transport is one of the most reliable mechanisms for locking low-income workers out of opportunity. London has had integrated transport governance for decades. The idea that Manchester having it too is somehow radical or experimental is a kind of institutional provincialism that stands in the way of economic growth.

But cities cannot build everything alone. Rail connectivity between Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Liverpool is not a local question but a national one, and here the central state’s record is disappointing. HS2’s northern leg was cancelled. The government promised the saved money would go into alternative rail upgrades; most of it didn’t. Labour’s January 2026 Northern Powerhouse Rail announcement is better than nothing — a new Liverpool-Manchester line, upgrades at Leeds and elsewhere — but with no formal cost estimate and completion dates sliding into the 2030s, it is a commitment whose ambition is inversely proportional to its urgency. The North has been promised better railways for thirty years.

The devolution argument and the national infrastructure argument are not in competition. They are making the same point. Cities can govern themselves. They cannot build north-south rail lines. Westminster’s job is not to micromanage local planning decisions in Leeds; it is to deliver the strategic connective tissue that allows Northern cities to function as an integrated economic unit. The tragedy of British governance is that it does neither well: too controlling about the things cities should run, too irresolute about the things only the state can deliver.

Germany doesn't agonise over this. Munich governs Munich. Hamburg governs Hamburg. The federal government takes primary responsibility for strategic national infrastructure, while the Länder and municipalities exercise far greater autonomy over local affairs. The result is a national economy whose strength doesn't depend on one city and one postcode.

The truth is that Central government likes controlling the money. Whitehall officials like being the people who decide. Ministers like having patronage to dispense. Devolution requires those institutions to surrender power, something they are not incentivised to do voluntarily.

The much-needed Trailblazer Devolution Deals — expanded powers for Greater Manchester and the West Midlands — suggest that Westminster does occasionally grasp the logic. But Britain’s devolution settlement is still a patchwork of ad hoc deals extracted from a reluctant centre by politicians with enough clout to negotiate. The country outside of London deserves a system, not a series of exceptions.

A government that truly sought to boost economic growth would look at the Cities Outlook data — the towns translating growth into living standards, the cities with booming GVA but nothing in workers’ pockets, the stark variation in outcomes between regions — and conclude that locally-tailored policy, delivered by leaders with skin in the game and democratic accountability to local voters, beats uniform national prescription almost every time. It would then build a system that reflected this.

Britain keeps designing systems that don’t.

Let Manchester govern Manchester. Let Leeds govern Leeds. Let Liverpool, Sheffield and Newcastle shape their own economic futures. Build the railways and energy networks that bind those cities into a functioning national economy. Stop treating city autonomy as a reward for good behaviour, and stop treating national infrastructure as an aspiration for some future decade.

The data exists. The model exists. The only thing missing is a central government willing to admit that competence isn’t something it has a monopoly on.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenia’s alignment with Russia seemed inevitable: like many post-Soviet states, the landlocked country found itself structurally dependent on Moscow for energy, security and the troops garrisoned on its own soil. In 1992, Armenia became of the founding members of the CSTO, Russia’s answer to NATO. This dependence on Russia looked like partnership for decades until September 2023, when Russian peacekeepers stood by and watched Azerbaijan end Armenian presence in Nagorno-Karabakh and pulled out altogether in the aftermath. With an Armenian population revolted about Karabakh, Pashinyan, who has liberalized and democratized the country since his advent in 2018, got the domestic mandate to pivot away from Russia and towards the West and, in particular, the European Union.

In 2024, Pashinyan suspended Armenia’s participation in the CSTO and called for the withdrawal of Russian troops. He secured an EU integration framework and, most dramatically, greenlighted the TRIPP corridor, a US-brokered route across southern Armenia that would connect Europe to Central Asia while bypassing both Russia and Iran, undermining one of the Kremlin’s most valuable logistical strangleholds in the region. The reaction from the Kremlin has been as swift as it has been predictable: threats of interference, warnings that EU integration is incompatible with Armenia’s membership of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, restrictions on imports of Armenian products and threats to withdraw access to discounted natural gas. Its latest response has been somewhat novel: to use the roughly two million Armenians living and working in Russia as both a pressure point and an electoral weapon to tamper with the country’s elections.

Old habits die hard: the playbook being deployed in Armenia was already operationalized before. In 2014 and 2025, Russia massively interfered in Moldova’s national elections through mass disinformation campaigns, a Kremlin-backed oligarch funding the opposition, the bussing in of Transnistrian voters and the bribing of voters in the occupied region. In Georgia, sustained pressure, a captured judiciary and a pro-Russian ruling party delivered Moscow a friendlier government, through thinly veiled fraud, without the need for overt interference. The Armenian operation follows the same logic: a billionaire candidate in Samvel Karapetyan, Armenian-Russian and currently on trial for calling for the overthrow of the government; a newly established Kremlin directorate specifically tasked with running influence operations in Armenia; and a disinformation campaign that, according to the Berlin-based ZOiS research centre, ranks as one of the largest state-backed operations in modern European history. The voter airlift, confirmed or not, is the newest element of a campaign that is otherwise eerily familiar.

The Kremlin is likely to be disappointed. Pashinyan is polling at around 60%, with Karapetyan’s Strong Armenia party struggling to crack the 20% ceiling. Even if Moscow succeeded in transporting 100,000 voters, the arithmetic does not work in a proportional system with a gap that wide. Eurasianet, one of the more sober analysts of the Caucasus, called any such effort “a waste of time and money.” The Kremlin appears to know this: the voter airlift was a plan discussed, priced and assigned regional quotas, according to Reuters. What remains is the disinformation campaign, the economic coercion and the hope that a fifth of undecided Armenian voters break heavily against Pashinyan, but all of this is a rearguard action, not a strategy, which seems to be a recurring issue in Russia’s foreign endeavors.

The significance of June 7 is not limited to Armenia; a Pashinyan win would cement Armenia’s westward break; Russian troops would likely be withdrawn, TRIPP greenlit, EU integration underway. For Moscow, this would be a structural setback. Armenia has served as a garrison state, an economic dependent and a blueprint of the kind of captivity Russia has relied upon to maintain its post-Soviet architecture. Losing it, in the middle of a war that has already exposed the limits of Russian hard power is a different order of defeat. The frantic interference and spending from the Kremlin supports this theory of panic.

June 7 seems to be Pashinyan’s to lose. But a won election is not an end in and of itself; Russia does not need to win on polling day to retain influence in Armenia: it needs only to keep the country economically dependent, politically polarized and strategically hesitant. The disinformation campaign will not stop on June 8, nor will the gas threats. The two million Armenians in Russia remain a pressure point. The West, slow to grasp the significance of the Caucasus, cannot afford to treat a Pashinyan victory as a non-event. EU integration needs resources behind it, not just frameworks and statements. The Kremlin is on the verge of losing a fundamental stronghold in a region that is crucial to its security framework; the question is whether the West is serious enough to make that loss permanent and to leverage it.

On May 20, Ben Gvir posted a video of himself at Ashdod Port taunting detained flotilla activists, dozens of whom were forced to kneel on the ground, hands bound behind their backs, as he waved an Israeli flag and declared: “Welcome to Israel, we are the landlords.” The international reaction was swift and damning: Italy, France, Spain, Canada and the Netherlands summoned Israeli envoys. The European Council president called it “completely unacceptable.” Even Netanyahu publicly rebuked him, a rare rebuke that, as we shall see, came with no consequences whatsoever.

In Israel, the hardest condemnations came from the opposition. Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition, called it a “terrorist attack on Israel’s international standing,” blaming “the Prime Minister, who brought a convicted criminal into the government.” Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF Chief of Staff-turned-politician, similarly berated Netanyahu, underscoring that “a prime minister who truly prioritizes Israel's interests should have fired him long ago.”

He is a repeat offender: inflammatory, depraved videos, statements and policies are his MO. It is how he galvanizes his electorate of fanatics who want the whole land conquered and the Palestinian multitude expelled, or subdued.

But Ben Gvir did not self-appoint to the government. He did not self-sustain his presence. It is reassuring that the rest of the Israeli government, starting with Netanyahu, recognized that this latest outburst was beyond the pale, but the ensuing statements are hypocritical beyond belief.

Traditionally, when a head of government determines that one of his ministers “does not represent the values” of the country, that minister is dismissed. After all, why would someone who does not represent the values of the country remain in charge of its national security?

There are no signs of Ben Gvir being fired. Not now, nor at any point during his tenure — not after he publicly called to starve Gazans, not after he boasted of torturing prisoners, not after he delivered a speech at a Kahane-founded yeshiva with a banner glorifying Kahane and Baruch Goldstein — who killed 29 Palestinian worshippers in the 1994 Hebron massacre — as “martyrs,” not after he repeatedly defied the status quo on the Temple Mount, not after he claimed that spitting on Christians is an “old Jewish tradition.”

Netanyahu appointed him with full knowledge of his record: the infamous 1995 interview in which he held up an ornament ripped from Rabin’s car and said “We’ll get to Rabin too,” weeks before Rabin was assassinated; the 1995 Goldstein Purim costume; his ban from IDF service because he was deemed too extreme; his 2007 conviction for racial incitement; the 2021 incident in which he drew a handgun on two unarmed Arab garage attendants in Tel Aviv, shouting “Arab dogs.”

This is only a snapshot. Ben Gvir is a pyromaniac who has no place in public office, let alone government, and he never did. This latest outburst did not reveal that; it only confirmed it.

If Netanyahu and his allies were serious about reining in Ben Gvir and advancing “the true values of Israel,” they would uproot the rot he and his party bring. The absurdity is glaring: they say Ben Gvir does not represent Israel’s values, yet they keep him in government. That contradiction resolves itself only one way: they are not claiming to represent those values either. Which would, at least, be an honest position.

The real reason is straightforward: coalition survival, as always. But there is a darker logic underneath it. Ben Gvir is not merely tolerated; he is useful. He functions as a pressure release valve and a negotiating tool, allowing Netanyahu to govern to the hard right while maintaining deniability. Every time Ben Gvir does something unconscionable, Netanyahu gets to play the moderate, as seen in the flotilla incident. The outrage is not a side effect of the arrangement, it is integral to it. Put bluntly, Ben Gvir is Netanyahu’s designated arsonist.

There is, however, one scenario worth watching. Once the Knesset session ends, Netanyahu may fire Ben Gvir; not out of principle, but to campaign on it. He would claim he finally stood up to the insanity, a claim as absurd as it is cynical, made safely after the Knesset has dissolved and before anyone can hold him to account. He would then quietly negotiate Ben Gvir’s return should the next election allow it.

TLDR: the government’s sudden damage control is as farcical as it is performative; a front erected to placate Israel’s allies and maintain the fiction that Ben Gvir has gone rogue. But Netanyahu has full powers to remove a minister at any time, for any reason. Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who was fired in November 2024 for the cardinal sin of disagreeing with Netanyahu, can testify to that. And yet Ben Gvir remains, with no dismissal in sight. Ben Gvir is not rogue: the government is, and always has been. His continued presence is the proof. He is a feature, not a bug, of this government, one that Netanyahu assembled, sustains and will reassemble the moment the votes allow it.

Labour’s demise is the consequence of two years of purposeless leadership. Dealt a historic mandate in the summer of 2024, Starmer has failed to use it meaningfully. The parliamentary majority he was handed, the largest in a generation, demanded boldness; what Britain got instead was managerialism. He became a paragon of caution without conviction, triangulating endlessly. Voters who lent Labour their votes expecting change watched instead as Starmer picked fights with his own party, retreating from almost every commitment that might have defined his premiership. There is no Starmerism; there is no project; there is no vision. There is only the management of decline, a form of damage control, conducted by a man who seems more comfortable as a technocrat than a leader.

The numbers were a bleak harbinger for Labour. Starmer’s net favourability stood at -45 in April, making him the most unpopular leader in Britain — by far. A majority of the public believe he should resign, compared with just 23% who think he should remain. Most devastating of all: among 2024 Labour voters, opinion is split, with a staggering 37% believing he should step down. His ratings sit in similar territory to Theresa May’s just before her resignation. This is no difficult patch; it is the picture of failure, felt even within his party.

Internally, the party is in shambles. Union chiefs have turned on Starmer; on the backbenches, Labour MPs have indicated that if the party performs poorly across the board, Starmer will face renewed pressure to quit or set out a timetable for his departure; one Labour MP, Jon Trickett, has already publicly called for his resignation. The problem, it seems, is personal. And, thankfully for Labour, Starmer is not inevitable; several credible alternatives have emerged. Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester Mayor, is the public’s preferred choice with 36% of voters preferring as Prime Minister against 29% for Starmer; 62% of Labour members would back him in a head-to-head. Other potential candidates include Health Secretary Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner and Shabana Mahmood. None of them are perfect. All of them are better than the status quo.

What Labour needs is not merely a different face but a different approach. Whoever succeeds Starmer must offer three things he has failed to provide: a distinct political identity, a willingness to govern boldly, an honest relationship with the public. The EU is the clearest test of all three. Streeting has hinted at a customs union and Burnham has said he hopes Britain will rejoin in his lifetime.

The public supports rapprochement: a majority of voters support rejoining the EU, with that figure reaching 83% among Labour voters. And yet, inexplicably, Labour has spent two years carefully avoiding saying so, getting outflanked on Europe by the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, who, conversely, are willing to say plainly what Labour cannot: that Brexit was a mistake that left Britain’s economy an estimated 4% smaller than it would otherwise have been, weakened Britain diplomatically and worsened the immigration crisis. A new Labour leader who speaks honestly about that damage would also force Farage to defend the disaster he spent decades engineering.

The local elections are an indictment not of Labour’s policies, but of their absence. It is an indictment of purposeless, directionless, lethargic leadership. Parties recover from bad governments; they rarely recover from leaders who have lost the fundamental trust of the people they govern. Starmer has lost that trust and the longer he stays in office, the more damage Labour will suffer. Reform is not waiting. Nor are the Greens. Every day Starmer remains in Downing Street is a day Farage spends consolidating gains that will be very hard to reverse. Labour was elected to govern Britain, and it must fulfill that promise before it is too late.

For thirty years, Collins has cultivated the image of the pragmatic Republican: too principled for partisanship, too Mainer for Washington. Her record reflects that complexity: she voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act, condemned the Muslim travel ban and was one of seven Republicans to vote to convict Trump after January 6. Last week, she was one of only two Republicans to support a preemptive War Powers Resolution that would have required Trump to seek congressional approval before launching military action against Cuba. The resolution failed 51-47. Trump has repeatedly lambasted her: in January, The Hill reported that he “dialed Collins with profanity-laced rant” over her vote on Venezuela war powers. He has also called for a Republican to mount a primary challenge to unseat her.

But in practice, Collins has voted with Trump 95% of the time since he returned to the White House in January 2025. She confirmed Kavanaugh and Barrett to the Supreme Court after assuring Maine voters they wouldn’t touch Roe v. Wade; they did. More recently, she endorsed the SAVE Act, a sweeping voter suppression bill backed by Trump. And that discrepancy has become starkly clear in Trump’s second term and explains her growing unpopularity.

Last summer, Graham Platner, a Marine veteran, oyster farmer and first-time candidate, launched his bid for the U.S. Senate with a video that racked up 2.5 million views in its first 24 hours. Platner introduced himself as a weathered working man from Sullivan, staring down the oligarchy and the politicians who serve it. The campaign raised a million dollars in its first nine days and had amassed over 6,000 volunteers by September. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren switfly endorsed him. The Democratic establishment, spooked, recruited two-term Governor Janet Mills to run against him and clear the field. On April 30, Mills ended her bid, led by as much as 30 points by Platner. The insurgent won a major battle in the internal ideological war that has brewed in the Democratic Party since November 2024. But the establishment had reasons to seek an alternative to Platner.

On October 21, 2025, Platner posted a video of himself dancing shirtless at his brother’s wedding, hoping the video would humanize him and boost his popularity. Instead, it revealed a chest tattoo bore a striking resemblance to the Totenkopf, the skull insignia of the Nazi SS. Platner reasoned that he had gotten it drunk in Croatia, confusing it for a generic skull and crossbones, and that he had since had it covered. But an anonymous former acquaintance told CNN and Jewish Insider that Platner had been fully aware of its meaning and had previously referred to it as “my Totenkopf.”

Within days, reporters surfaced a trail of Reddit posts that painted a broader and more troubling picture: in 2013, he posted a thread about anti-rape underwear where he suggested that people worried about sexual assault should “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don't mean to.” And in 2014, he described a Hamas raid in which terrorists killed Israeli soldiers as “a damn fine looking and successful raid against a superior opponent,” adding that he would “give credit where credit is due, no matter who they are fighting for.”

This led his campaign’s political director to resign and call him “unelectable.” His campaign manager and finance director followed suit.

Come November, Maine Democrats face a choice between two kinds of disaster. The first is the one Genevieve McDonald saw coming when she resigned: Collins floods the airwaves with the tattoo, the Hamas comments, the rape thread and Platner loses a race that was one of the Senate Democrats’ most reliable pickups. Collins has defied the polls and the pundits before: in 2020, she was written off by virtually every analyst and won anyway. Handing her opposition research this rich is a gift. But the second scenario may be the more quietly troubling one: Platner pulls it off and heads to DC. And then what? The moderating has already begun. He has said he is “currently not for an assault weapons ban, certainly in the form that they have been put forward,” positioning himself to the right of the Democratic mainstream on the issue before he has cast a single Senate vote.

There is a prior for what happens when Democrats elect their rough-edged, anti-establishment savior and send him to Washington. John Fetterman was endorsed by Sanders, ran as a populist outsider and won Pennsylvania in 2022 on the back of enormous grassroots enthusiasm. Within two years, he called for mass deportations, opposed every War Powers resolutions, unironically spoke of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and called for Trump’s ballroom to be authorized. Platner has already shown the instinct, if not yet the full trajectory: in addition to his opposition to an assault weapons ban, he has said many of his friends voted for Trump and has faced allegations that he himself previously voted for him. None of this disqualifies him. But it is a concerning harbinger.

So here is where Maine’s Democrats find themselves in the spring of 2026: slated to nominate a tattoo-covered, Hamas-praising, sexual-assault-minimising oyster farmer to take on a five-term incumbent who has survived everything the party has thrown at her for three decades. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps Platner is exactly what Maine needs: unpolished, unvetted and unafraid, a human wrecking ball aimed at a woman who has made a career out of being too reasonable to dislodge. But the Democratic Party has a habit of telling itself that this time is different and driving into a wall. And this time, they seem inclined to sacrifice their very values to defend what they would never defend if Mr. Platner was a Republican.

I arrived in Budapest the weekend after the election that ended Viktor Orbán’s sixteen-year grip on Hungary. On the streets of District VII, the Jewish Quarter, the posters were still up. Some had been ripped down. Some had been defaced. A few lay flat on the pavement, face-up, staring at the sky. Nobody had bothered to remove them.

That seemed about right.

I had not let myself believe it would happen. For months, the polling had shown Tisza ahead by margins that seemed too good to be true. I had watched the 2022 cycle, when United for Hungary went into election night with momentum and came out crushed. I knew what Hungarian electoral geography looked like, what Fidesz’s grip on rural constituencies meant, what a gerrymandered map could do to a popular vote. So I watched the supermajority projections with skepticism, and I waited for the catch.

There was no catch.

141 seats on 53.2% of the vote. Fidesz halved to 52. A turnout of 79.6% — the highest since the last Communist-era election of 1985. No contestation. Orbán conceded on the night. It was clean, decisive, and stunning.

Which made what I found on the ground all the more surprising.

Relief, not real joy. That was how a middle-aged woman put it, her children beside her, when I asked how she felt about the election. We were standing in HAB — Hungarian Art and Business, a contemporary art centre on Andrássy út. She said it simply, almost flatly, the way you say something that has been true for a while and doesn’t need explaining. Then she turned back to the exhibition.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that.

I flew into Budapest through Ferenc Liszt International Airport, the subject of an ongoing EU anti-fraud investigation — itself a lesson in what sixteen years of Orbán looks like. The structures Orbán built did not announce themselves. They were just there, quietly.

On the drive through Erzsébettelep, there was a billboard. On it: Dóra Dúró, a politician from Mi Hazánk (Our Homeland Movement) infamous for shredding a children’s book she deemed to be "homosexual propaganda" at a press conference. Her face was still there. Still up. The week after the election that was supposed to end all of this.

That felt like the right introduction to Hungary.

Budapest

The Jewish Quarter — the old ruin bar district, now colonised almost entirely by tourists — made it genuinely difficult to find Hungarians. The centre has become a theme park: beautiful but unkempt, full of stag parties and backpackers unaware an election just happened. Infrastructure that should have been upgraded wears its neglect visibly. Corruption, everyone agreed, had exploded under Fidesz. The money went somewhere. It did not go here.

One thing I had not expected: the visibility of LGBTQ people. Same-sex couples, visibly queer individuals, people presenting in ways that would have felt conspicuous elsewhere in Central Europe. Budapest has always been Hungary's liberal exception; this may simply be what it looks like when you pay attention. Whether people simply felt freer knowing Fidesz was out, I cannot say.

What I can say is that the legal picture has not changed and is unlikely to. Magyar's Tisza ran on a pro-European, anti-corruption platform — not a socially liberal one. LGBT adoption rights and same-sex marriage, constitutionally banned under Orbán, are not on his agenda. The law has not moved.

I met more Hungarians in Zugló and around Angyalföld. What I found was not jubilation. It was something quieter and more complicated: relief, caution, and often a frank admission that Tisza had not been anyone’s first choice so much as their only one. Several people described voting for Magyar the way many Americans described voting for Biden in 2020, not out of enthusiasm, but out of a desperate need for the alternative to lose.

Some younger Hungarians in District V were more vocal: openly contemptuous of Orbán, happy to say so to a foreign stranger. But even they were hesitant about Magyar. The celebrations, one told me, felt premature.

“We don’t really know what he is yet.”

The Vote Beneath the Vote

The headline obscures something. The only other party to cross the parliamentary threshold was Our Homeland Movement — the ultranationalist far-right. The liberal Democratic Coalition and the satirical MKKP won no seats. That the only genuine options facing Hungarian voters were centre-right, right, and far-right says something about where the country sits.

The voters who backed Tisza did not all back the same thing. An older couple I met from Balatonföldvár wanted more EU, yes, but also conservative values, Hungarian identity, nothing radical. They saw the result as a win-win. Others in Budapest voted purely to stop Fidesz. These are not the same electorate, and Magyar will have to govern both.

Analysts had noted before the election that Magyar leaned into some core continuities with Fidesz — nationalist rhetoric, scepticism about Ukraine’s EU accession, rejection of the EU migration pact. He is not Orbán. But he is not a liberal either.

The Same People

The most clarifying thing anyone said to me in Budapest came from a young Nigerian couple — medical students, five years in Hungary, who spoke with the authority of people who have watched the country from the outside in. When I mentioned the election result, one of them shrugged.

“These are the same people who kept him in for sixteen years.”

It landed like a correct answer to a question nobody had asked. Four elections which produced landslide mandates for Fidesz cannot simply be waved away with accusations of electoral bias or unfair press coverage.

Orbán was genuinely popular in Hungary, and perhaps his loss reflects what Hungarians stood to lose by reelecting him — economically, internationally, institutionally — rather than a fundamental rejection of the values he represented.

What the couple described of their own experience as a Black couple living in Hungary confirmed what you would expect. The election result was real but the country had not become a different place overnight.

The police, separately, made their own impression. We encountered a young woman one evening who was clearly in serious distress — disoriented, potentially drugged, unaware of where she was. The officers who responded treated her as an inconvenience. Slow to act, dismissive, apparently uninterested. Hotel workers nearby were unsurprised.

“The government doesn’t care about women, and neither does the police” one told us, unprompted.

Ultimately a social and political transformation in Hungarian is far from guaranteed — if possible at all.

What One Election Can and Cannot Do

Magyar’s two-thirds majority gives him the power to amend Hungary’s Basic Law, the same constitution Orbán rewrote to entrench his own power. That is significant. The tools exist, on paper, for genuine structural reform.

But Fidesz spent sixteen years building something more durable than a parliamentary majority. It built a media landscape, a judicial culture, a network of loyalists in institutions, a geography of patronage that runs deep into rural Hungary. Fidesz recorded its best results in the eastern Szabolcs–Szatmár–Bereg County and won 84.2% of the diaspora vote.

The Fidesz base has not gone anywhere.

Then there is the media, with Fidesz directly or indirectly controlling roughly 80% of Hungary’s media resources. KESMA — Orbán’s media conglomerate — now owns over 470 outlets, all producing content indistinguishable from government campaign material. KESMA does not dissolve because Fidesz lost. Simply replacing its board with Tisza-friendly appointees would replicate the problem with different beneficiaries. Magyar will have to decide what to do with an apparatus built specifically to destroy pluralism — whatever he decides, he will be accused of hypocrisy either way.

The Fidesz posters on the pavement in Budapest were not a metaphor I was looking for, but was one nonetheless. They were still there. Nobody had cleaned them up. And the people who put them there — who voted for what they represented, four elections in a row — were still there too.

Hungary did something remarkable on 12 April. Whether it did something meaningful is a different question. The honest answer, standing in Zugló a week later, listening to people speak carefully about a future they wanted to believe in but had not yet earned the right to assume, was: not yet.

Perhaps.

Ask again later.

There is a photograph circulating online this week, taken in the Lebanese village of Debel.

In it, a soldier — IDF uniform, unmistakable — holds a hammer above a statue of Jesus Christ. The figure has been pulled from its cross and turned upside down. The soldier’s expression is blank. He could be fixing a shelf.

The IDF confirmed the photograph was genuine and vowed disciplinary action. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was “stunned and saddened,” denouncing the act “in the strongest terms.” The condemnations were swift, the outrage international.

Then the news cycle moved on. But for the Christians of Gaza, Lebanon, and Jerusalem, it has not.

Gaza:

Only around 1,100 Christians live in Gaza, according to a 2024 US State Department report, down from 3,000 in 2007. They are, by any measure, a community on the edge of extinction.

On 19 October 2023, an Israeli airstrike struck a building within the compound of the Church of Saint Porphyrius — one of the oldest churches in the world — where some 500 civilians, mostly Christians, had taken shelter. At least 17 were killed. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate denounced it as a war crime, while Amnesty International called for an investigation.

Then, in July 2025, a deadly strike hit the Holy Family Church, Gaza’s only Catholic church. Three people were killed: Najwa Abu Dawood, Foumia Issa Latif Ayyad, and Saad Issa Kostandi Salameh. The church’s priest, Father Gabriel Romanelli — an Argentine who has ministered in Gaza for nearly three decades — was also wounded. The IDF attributed the strike to a misfired munition. The Israeli government said it deeply regretted the incident.

One church bombed. One church struck by tank fire. All within a congregation of barely one thousand.

Lebanon:

On the afternoon of 9 March 2026, a fifty-year-old Maronite Catholic priest was struck by tank fire in the village of Qlayaa while running toward the wounded to help them.

His name was Father Pierre al-Rahi. In Arabic, al-Rahi means the shepherd.

Father Pierre had defied an Israeli evacuation order to stay with his parishioners. Three days before his death, he had delivered a speech from the steps of a church:

“None of us carries weapons. The only weapons we carry are peace, love, and prayer.”

An Israeli tank fired on a house in the village. Neighbours, Red Cross workers, and Father Pierre rushed to help. Then the tank fired a second time, injuring Father Pierre. He died before reaching the hospital.

The destruction of the Jesus statue in Debel came weeks later. By then, Father Pierre al-Rahi had been largely forgotten by the same news cycle that made the statue go viral.

The 2026 war has killed 2,000 Lebanese and displaced more than 1 Million, including many Christians. Southern Lebanon’s Christian communities — historically neutral, unarmed, and vocally opposed to Hezbollah — have watched their villages obliterated. In April 2026, an IDF strike on a church-sponsored social housing complex in Ain Saade, a Christian locality near Beirut, killed at least three people: including local politician Pierre Moawad of the Lebanese Forces, a party fiercely opposed to Hezbollah.

Jerusalem:

Israel presents itself, consistently, as the Middle East’s sole guarantor of religious freedom. That claim became very difficult to defend on Palm Sunday this year.

For the first time in centuries, the heads of the Church were prevented from celebrating Palm Sunday Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — the holiest site in Christianity. Israeli police, citing security concerns, stopped Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, from entering — despite having requested permission for a private celebration for a few religious leaders.

But Palm Sunday was not an aberration.

Bishop Emeritus Munib Younan describes being spat at “many times” by Jewish yeshiva students in the Old City without any legal repercussions. Boulos, a Christian shopkeeper in the Quarter, now travels to Bethlehem to attend church:

“There, nobody is pointing a gun at you on the way to church. Life is at least normal. Here, life is not.”

Many young Palestinian Christians are now actively seeking to emigrate. The community has already dwindled to less than 2 percent of the population. Each departure is felt. Few return.

Inheritance Without Solidarity

There is a specific irony that goes largely unspoken.

The countries most visibly underwriting this war are heirs to a civilisation that defined itself, for centuries, as Christian. Since October 2023, the United States alone has provided at least $16.3 billion in direct military aid to Israel. Britain, France, and Germany have given diplomatic cover and arms of their own.

These are largely secular societies now. Scholars distinguish between confessional Christianity — active belief and worship, which has declined sharply — and heritage Christianity, treating faith as a source of cultural identity and history, which has not. It is the latter that most Western governments represent: nations that have shed the practice but kept the civilisational claim.

Yet as Gaza’s last Catholic church is struck by tank fire, as a Maronite priest dies running toward the wounded, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is locked on Palm Sunday — Washington’s response was to “raise concerns.”

The Christians of the Levant are asking not to be forgotten by the civilisation that was, not so long ago, defined by the same cross now being smashed with a hammer in southern Lebanon.

A Pattern, Not a Policy

It would be dishonest to argue that Israel is conducting a deliberate campaign against Christians. The IDF condemns individual acts of desecration when they surface. Netanyahu issues statements. Investigations are opened.

Yet condemnations are not consequences, and statements are not accountability.

What is undeniable is the pattern: churches struck in Gaza, a priest killed in Lebanon, a mock wedding staged by soldiers inside an Orthodox church in Deir Mimas, a Jesus statue smashed and posted online, the holiest site in Christendom locked on the holiest day of the Christian year.

These are not accidents connected only by coincidence.

Even Israeli commentators have noted the deeper issue. Writing in the Times of Israel, Lazar Berman observed that the IDF has not put an end to the phenomenon of soldiers filming themselves defying regulations and international law, and uploading that content to the internet — despite the incalculable damage this does to the legitimacy of Israel’s military operations. This is not a rogue soldier problem.

The Christians of this region — Palestinian, Lebanese, Israeli — are an ancient community caught between a state that claims to protect them and wars that keep killing them. They are declining in number everywhere they exist in the Holy Land.

And the world is watching it happen.

This fragmentation is symptomatic of the crisis it flourishes in: a country that has not grown meaningfully in fifteen years, whose public services are buckling, whose political class has exhausted its credibility across parties and governments. The anger is legitimate, but the cure is worse than the disease.

Reform and the Greens have built their ascent on this frustration. The former harvested the fears of a left-behind England, while the latter harnessed the anxieties of a generation that inherited a decaying planet and a broken economy. They are not the same party. In fact, on paper, they could not be more dissimilar. But they share something more important than policy: a politics of gesture over programme, of enemy over argument, of feeling over fact.

Populism is one of the most well-researched topics in political science. At the dawn of the 21st century, it has re-emerged globally and powerfully. It relies on a simple yet convincing story: the pure people, victim of and pitted against a corrupt elite. The appeal is undeniable: it takes the genuine complexity of political failure and flattens it into something you can feel in your heart. Emile Durkheim, one of the forefathers of sociology, understood this impulse:

“when a society suffers, it feels the need to find someone to blame for its pain, someone on whom it can avenge its disappointments.”

The moment a populist movement is forced to answer how — how will you fix the NHS, how will you bring down energy bills, how will you house a generation, the dam breaks. Therefore, the programme is always kept deliberately equivocal, the enemy kept permanently in focus. Grievance is the product, not a bug, in populist politics.

On the far-right, Farage’s pitch is not unfounded. Deindustrialisation is real. The NHS is broken. The sense among vast swathes of England that the political class has not merely failed them but quietly written them off. But diagnosis is not the same as remedy. Reform’s programme, including a flat tax that disproportionately benefits the wealthy, sweeping public spending cuts and deregulation would hammer the very communities that vote for it. Farage has spent three decades as a disruptor, never once having to be responsible for anything he engineered; Brexit is the most paradigmatic example. The most economically disruptive policy choice in post-war British history was championed by Farage, who resigned the morning after the referendum result, leaving others to manage the damage.

And then there are the candidates. By the 2024 election, Reform had dropped at least eleven for racist or extremist posts. In the coming election, Reform fielded a candidate who called for Muslims to be “blast[ed] off the face of the earth”; other candidates were found to have shared posts praising Hitler, pushed antisemitic Rothschild conspiracy theories and circulated material from known neo-Nazi organisations. This is no vetting problem; it is a foundational one.

The Greens present a different issue. Climate change is real. The cost of living crisis is real. The fury at a Labour government that promised change and delivered managerialism is legitimate. None of that is in dispute.

But Polanski has quietly transformed the Greens into something more than an environmental party. Israel has become their organising principle; not merely a foreign policy position but a litmus test of political identity, deployed ward by ward, community by community. The absurdity is disarming: local elections are about who fixes the roads, runs the libraries, manages planning applications. The Green Party has made the answer to all of it Israel. Not housing. Not the council tax. Not the bin collections that actually determine whether local government functions. A foreign conflict, however grave, is not a platform for local governance. It is a recruiting tool, a rallying cry.

The consequences for Jewish communities have also been predictable. At the Green Party’s spring conference, WhatsApp messages from party activists described Jewish people as “an abomination to this planet” and suggested a recent arson attack on a Jewish organisation had been a “false flag.” The candidates tell a similar story as Reform: multiple Green candidates have shared conspiracy theories about Jews, including content originating on far-right neo-Nazi websites, along with clear evidence of Holocaust distortion. A Green candidate in Camden shared posts claiming “Zionists” were responsible for the 9/11 attacks and that Israel orchestrated the Golders Green ambulance arson. A candidate in Lambeth claimed Netanyahu “works for Jeffrey Epstein.” A candidate in Newcastle argued that the October 7 attack was justified.

Much like Reform, the platform itself is questionable in its shallowness. When pressed on how the Greens would fund a £160 billion rise in day-to-day spending, Polanski argued that “the fiscal rule we need is to make sure inflation doesn’t go higher than the skills and resources in our economy.” When pushed further, Polanski retreated: “I’m more interested in what’s happening to cleaners, teachers and nurses than being caught up in economic theory.” That is not a programme. That is a cheap, populist deflection disguised as authenticity.

Likewise, in early April 2026, Polanski tweeted: “The economy was designed, and it can be redesigned.” This claim is incredibly inaccurate and simplistic; institutions are human-made, but “the economy” was never designed, it was the aggregate result of billions of decentralised decisions, incentives and feedback loops that nobody foresaw. This statement is exemplary: it oversimplifies a key issue to make it seem straightforward while evidently lacking substance.

On defence, the incoherence is starker: in a single Channel 4 interview, Polanski argued that NATO could be reformed from within, then reversed himself, calling instead for “an alternative alliance” with Brazil, Mexico and Global South countries. At a time when Russia is pushing on the eastern front and global threats are increasing, not receding, the Green Party does not have a unified position on NATO and defence. What it does know is that it wants to “build a relationship with Putin” as was stated by Polanski in March 2026.

Reform and the Greens are not mirror images. But beneath the differences runs the same current: a politics built on performance rather than programme. Both are pushing hard to appeal to a disgruntled middle and working class. Neither are providing meaningful solutions.

Britain’s crisis is undeniably real. It deserves better than a party that cannot define antisemitism without internal chaos or a party whose chief whip thinks Islamists run London.

Serious politics requires something far more demanding than what Reform and the Greens are offering: it demands method, programme, institution, patience. The prophets are always loudest when the times are darkest. That is precisely when you should listen to them least.

When a bank is fined for misconduct, the press release follows a reliable script. The institution expresses regret. It announces new internal controls. It commits to a culture of compliance. Politicians cite the penalty as proof that the system works. And then, usually within a few years, something very similar happens again.

This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern. And it points to something more troubling than individual bad actors or under-resourced regulators. Across sectors — from finance to employment law — organisations routinely satisfy the letter of the law while resisting its spirit. The gap between formal compliance and substantive change is not a failure of enforcement design. It reflects deeper structural pressures that shape how regulation operates in practice.

Large organisations hire compliance officers, establish internal review processes, and document procedures meticulously, not primarily to change behaviour, but to demonstrate, if challenged, that they took the rules seriously. Some become adept at compliance theatre: immaculate paperwork, impressive policy manuals, and reform that rarely extends beyond the filing cabinet.

Shauhin Talesh’s research on U.S. insurance intermediaries shows how this works in practice: firms reframe anti-discrimination law around litigation risk, bulletproofing workplaces against legal challenge while leaving deeper inequalities untouched. The letter of the law is observed. Its spirit is quietly neutralised.

The problem is not confined to firms. Research on regulatory prosecutors in Brazil found that overstretched officials routinised standard workloads just to create space for more meaningful engagement. Organisational pressure had impacts beyond the regulated because it reshaped enforcement itself. The people responsible for holding firms accountable were operating under conditions that made accountability harder to deliver.

Regulators face their own structural constraints. They are often technically outgunned, dependent on data supplied by the very firms they oversee, or on industry experts whose careers are intertwined with the sector they evaluate. In complex industries like finance, oversight frequently relies on proxies — the status of an expert, the reputation of an institution — rather than independent verification of what is actually happening. Overlapping jurisdictions blur responsibility further, making it genuinely difficult to determine whether substantive objectives are being met, or just formally gestured at.

Deterrence models assume firms rationally calculate the costs and benefits of non-compliance. In reality, those calculations are shaped by uncertainty, limited knowledge, and resource constraints, on both sides. Even carefully designed enforcement strategies falter when regulators lack the expertise or access to detect violations comprehensively. And when violations are detected, the penalty is often calibrated to make headlines rather than change behaviour.

There is a subtler problem too, one that rarely surfaces in policy debates. James Kwak, writing about the 2008 financial crisis, identified what he called cultural capture: the process by which regulators who work closely with an industry over years — attending the same conferences, drawing on the same expert pools — gradually absorb its worldview. They begin to see industry objectives as aligned with the public interest rather than in tension with it. Oversight becomes negotiation. When regulatory expectations then clash with organisational culture, firms may deliver what scholars call “unnatural” compliance: outward conformity without meaningful change. By the time a serious violation occurs, the regulator may genuinely not have seen it coming, not because they were corrupt, but because proximity had quietly narrowed their field of vision.

· · ·

Some theorists have argued for more collaborative, iterative approaches — responsive regulation, meta-regulation — built on trust and dialogue rather than fixed penalties. The instinct is right. But it carries its own risk: that collaboration slides into capture, that engagement becomes co-option, that goodwill and information transparency, both of which can be strategically managed, end up serving the industry’s interests in the name of working with it.

Substantive compliance is difficult not because regulators fail to design effective enforcement mechanisms, but because organisations adapt to them. Information gaps, institutional incentives, and cultural pressures systematically constrain regulatory authority. The obstacle is not the rulebook. It is the relationship between the regulator and the regulated, and the organisational cultures on both sides that determine whether rules produce change or just paperwork.

Governments announce crackdowns. Regulators publish strategies. Companies issue commitments. The audience applauds.

The question worth asking is not whether the rules are strong enough. It is whether anyone involved — regulator, firm, or politician — has a genuine interest in finding out.

Orbán survived election after election while stifling essential freedoms and isolating his country on the continent. But now, on the eve of a historic vote, the strongman who scrambled to make himself structurally unbeatable, faces defeat. Worse: the defeat he faces is a revenge from a former ally turned nemesis.

Fidesz, Orbán’s party, rose to power in 2010 and has since held on to it, having briefly governed from 1998 to 2002. In the nearly two decades since 2010, Orbán embarked on a uniquely nefarious mission: to dismantle democracy and the rule of law from the inside. With the backing of his party, he unleashed every available tool to complete it.

The Constitution was rewritten to expand his powers. Courts were packed. The electoral map was gerrymandered to make defeat structurally unlikely. Independent media was strangled, bought out by loyalists. Universities were pressured into exile. Civil society was harassed into submission through legislation lifted almost directly from Putin’s playbook.

That was not coincidental: Orbán was tapping directly into Putin’s strategies, befriending the Russian dictator, aligning Hungary with Moscow amid its war on Ukraine, leaking European documents and briefings to the Kremlin and vetoeing aid to Ukraine. Orbán’s blueprint was Russia. Hungarians noticed: “Russians, go home!” soon became one of the most popular chants at anti-government rallies.

To manufacture consent for this authoritarian push, Orbán wrapped it in the language of national sovereignty and Christian civilization. This allowed him to refute any attack on his power as an attack on Hungary itself. In order to advance this narrative, he inevitably resorted to bigotry and racism, using various minorities as scapegoats to define who Hungary is for by defining who it is against.

George Soros, the Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire and Holocaust survivor, became Orbán’s ur-villain, plastered across government billboards in a campaign that drew international condemnation for its antisemitic overtones. Migrants were dehumanized as an existential threat to Christian Europe. Roma communities were systemically marginalized. LGBTQ Hungarians were legislated into second-class status, their existence reframed as a danger to children. Hatred, in Orbán’s Hungary, was a load-bearing wall.

Although his work is unfinished, it has already left a mark that will outlast him. Under his rule, Hungary has racked up a distinguished collection of firsts. The only EU member state downgraded to “Partly Free” by Freedom House. The only EU country to have a sitting government expelled from its own pan-European party family. The EU’s most corrupt member state by most measures, a title it has held with remarkable consistency. And, for long stretches of the Orbán era, one of the bloc’s fastest-growing poverty rate; in 2025, Hungary managed to surpass Bulgaria to become the poorest country in Europe in household welfare.

While Hungary’s peers in Central and Eastern Europe became some of the fastest-rising economies, with Poland, Czechia, and the Baltic states surging toward the EU average, Hungary has fallen behind.

Then came Péter Magyar.

For years, Orbán’s electoral strategy had been to vilify his opponents, painting them as foreign agents, “globalists,” Brussels-friendly technocrats, liberal intellectuals untethered from real Hungarian life. Magyar’s Tisza party, though, is different; he is an insider. A lawyer, he was formerly married to a Fidesz-aligned justice minister. When he turned on the regime in early 2024, Orbán, for the first time in years, faced an opponent his system was unprepared for.

Previous election cycles were an indictment of the strategy adopted by a fragmented opposition that stood no real chance against a Fidesz machine. In 2014, 2018 and 2022, Fidesz won supermajorities. There is still a chance Orbán will stun the opposition, but this time, it seems extraordinarily slim. Magyar’s register is different. He is angry. He is determined. He is personal. Throughout his campaign, he held rallies in towns that had never seen opposition crowds. For the first time, those people have somewhere else to go. For instance, in Győr, a wealthy western city and longtime Fidesz stronghold, Tisza pulled 36% in the 2024 European elections, trailing Fidesz by just four points.

Prevailing in the election thus seems more attainable than ever. But it is a mistake to assume it will be enough. Winning is one thing. Securing the win is exponentially harder. Undoubtedly, Orbán, who is endorsed by both the United States and Russia, will, if faced with defeat, not go quietly. There will be no peaceful transition of power. There will be no scenes of fraternity. Every lever that could be pulled to contest, delay, or delegitimize a result sits in friendly hands. To assume he will accept the verdict of an electorate he has spent fifteen years carefully managing would be outlandish.

Magyar may well win on Sunday. The harder question, and one that may well define a generation of European politics, is whether that win will materialize.

These words summarised a worldview that would follow him into the 1860s: that the Constitution should command not merely obedience, but reverence.

Political religion — that, indeed, is an apt description of its place in American life.

Few democratic societies relate to their founding covenant with such ritualised devotion. Since Lincoln spoke those words, nearly two centuries ago, only fifteen amendments have since been added, with none having been passed in the last three decades. Today, there is no feasible prospect of another constitutional amendment.

Political rhetoric around the Constitution reveals one of the rare areas of consensus in American society: the vast majority of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike converge in a shared constitutional worship. The Constitution is routinely depicted as a direct legacy of the Founding Fathers; an enduring symbol of the American experience; a foundational, indefatigable cornerstone of national moral identity.

The Constitution is approached like a biblical covenant, and debates over its meaning resemble theological disputes — where challenges to its original purpose are viewed as radical, heretical, un-American.

While some proposed constitutional changes have warranted their rejection, others have more merit, none more so than the Second Amendment. Drafted in 1789 amid fears that a standing army could become an instrument of tyranny, the right to bear arms was conceived as a counterweight to federal overreach.

That historical context seems extraordinarily distant today.

The United States now fields one of the most professionalised military forces in the world — the argument that an armed citizenry constitutes a bulwark against authoritarianism has grown harder to justify. Especially when that same citizenry has produced recurrent cycles of political violence, such as the recent assassinations of Melissa Hortman and Charlie Kirk. Beyond the direct threats such chaos has fuelled, the logic of the constitutional arrangement is in itself a recipe for division:

The Second Amendment simultaneously affirms democratic legitimacy while presupposing its fragility, embedding institutional distrust into the very architecture of the state.

Chief Justice John Roberts inadvertently crystallised the broader tension during recent oral arguments over the Trump administration’s attempt to repeal birthright citizenship. When Solicitor General Bauer invoked the “new world” we live in, Roberts fired back:

Roberts is no post-constitutionalist, and undoubtedly did not intended for his words to be framed as such, but the quote is arresting nonetheless. How is it that a 250-year-old document continues to dictate, so narrowly and stringently, the rules of a nation its framers could not have anticipated?

One rebuttal holds that the Constitution requires no further revision; that its architecture is so sound that fifteen amendments across two centuries suffice.

Another contends that its continued relevance is a sign of longevity to be embraced.

Yet endurance is not proof of adequacy. Longevity can signal durability; it can equally signal gridlock. The relevant question is not how long the document has lasted, but whether it continues to provide effective governance. American political culture remains largely tethered to the era of James Madison, relying on judicial interpretation to reconcile 18th-century language with 21st-century realities, clinging to the covenant in a manner that Madison himself warned against:

Constitutional stability, at some point, becomes Constitutional inertia.

The assumption that rethinking the Constitution risks eroding the soul of the nation does not survive comparison with peer democracies. France has revised its constitutional framework five times in two centuries and remains — recognisably — France; its identity, security and republican character intact.

A democracy can adapt its founding document without losing itself. The United States, alone among its peers, treats that proposition as heresy. The Constitution need not be discarded. It need only be demystified.

Political commentary is boring. Not because it is dry or technical, but because it is predictable — uniform even. Young people’s disillusionment with the news is understandable; the exercise is increasingly less about thinking than about signalling alignment with the leading consensus.

The name is Socratic: the gadfly is the one who stings the city into wakefulness rather than letting it drift into a convenient sleep. The term is wittingly grandiose, but it reflects our mission, not our egos.

We are not here to tell you what to think. We are here to provoke different thoughts and encourage dialogue — without the institutional pressures that turn so much political writing into managed noise.

We exist in a uniquely strange state of limbo when it comes to politics. Wars are being fought over the international order. Democracies are straining under pressures they were not built to withstand. Our cultural fabric is fraying as shared values give way to performative tribalism. The traditional labels of Left and Right are fracturing. These are extraordinary circumstances, and they deserve extraordinary commentary.

We are students. We are Gen-Z.

We argue, we concur, we dissent, we vote. We question. We challenge. We debate.

You will, at times, agree with us. You will, at times, disagree wholeheartedly. That is the point.

So read us. Push back. Dare to think.

Never accept or reject any proposition without first mulling it critically.

That’s the bet we are making with The Gadfly Journal.

— The Editors