Ivan Krastev writes:

Late in life, the 18th-century French liberal thinker Abbé Sieyès was asked what he had done during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. He replied, “I survived it.” Reflecting on Sieyès, Michael Ignatieff counsels that it is through survival that liberals can withstand revolutionary times. They need to work hard to remain politically relevant, so that once the revolution has run its course (if they are lucky enough to have survived it), they can try to preserve what revolutions have achieved and to restore what they have destroyed.

Ignatieff’s comments are relevant not only because he is the acclaimed biographer of Isaiah Berlin and a former leader of the Canadian Liberal party, but also because he is someone who understands 21st-century illiberalism first hand. Ignatieff was the rector and president of the Central European University at the very moment when Viktor Orbán expelled it from Hungary in a political act that signalled the arrival of the postliberal age.

Now that we are in that post-liberal age, does it mean the populists will inherit the Earth?

In less than a year, the United States has not only ceased to be the guardian of the postwar liberal order, but turned into its chief antagonist. The effect of the US “changing sides” in international politics is so consequential that it might be compared only to the impact of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The Trumpian revolution has changed the identity of almost all political players. At the same time, the symptoms of a populist handover can be seen in many corners of the world.

The questions, then, are: what choices do centre-left liberals have when coming to power in a postliberal world? How should they shape their new political identity?

The customary answer is that liberals must be the defenders of democracy, decency and common sense—they should frame politics as a clash between democracy and authoritarianism, sanity and insanity, competence and catastrophe. That strategy sounds noble, but it hasn’t worked particularly well. The expectation that populist governments would vitiate themselves through their own carelessness and extremism proved wrong. The record shows that it is more difficult for populist parties to come to power for the first time than to return to office.

Donald Trump demonstrated that, once in power, populist leaders tend to have a second coming. In 2023, the party of Robert Fico also came back to power in Slovakia’s parliamentary elections. In the October 2025 elections, it is widely expected that Andrej Babiš will win re-election in the Czech Republic. Liberals’ attempts to stand for normality and restoration have not paid dividends. As the last year of the Biden administration shows, sanity can easily be mocked as senility and normality as the arrogance of the elites. Even liberal voters are not particularly eager to return to the recent past. In politics, the yesterday people really desire is never simply the day before.

Poland, no less than the US, exemplifies the failure of postpopulist governments betting on normality, the rule of law and militant antipopulism. The return of Donald Tusk to power in Poland in 2023 was widely read as proof of liberal resilience. The Polish prime minister is that rare type, a charismatic liberal, and his victory made many believe that we should expect a reversal of the populist wave in central and eastern Europe. It seemed that there was no stronger argument in favour of liberalism than eight years of nationalist populist rule, in Poland’s case by the Law and Justice party (PiS). But less than two years since Tusk’s victory, that optimism must be corrected. His unstable governing coalition looks doomed. It has already lost this year’s presidential election, its popularity is declining and the country—most saliently the younger generation—is moving further rightwards.

The problem with framing the struggle against populism as a struggle for the defence of democracy is that hardly anybody is openly against democracy. [Continue reading…]