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.

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.