Austrian composer Gustav Mahler reportedly joked once that “if the world were about to end I would move back to Vienna: things happen there 50 years later”. Anyone planning a Mahler-inspired move to the Austrian capital these days, however, is in for a rude awakening.
Four days after Vienna’s New Year’s Concert, a waltzing celebration of constancy, modern Austrian politics took an unprecedented right turn. By this time next month, the country’s postwar era – stable centrist coalitions and compromise – may be consigned to what Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, a century ago, termed the world of yesterday.
Why? Because of Herbert Kickl, a 56-year-old college dropout and extreme-sports fan, on course to become Austria’s first far-right chancellor since the Nazi era.
Kickl is the leader of the populist far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), founded in 1956 by ex-Nazis and SS members. After a quarter-century of creeping normalisation and political cohabitation, Kickl led the FPÖ to a historic 28 per cent victory in last September’s national parliamentary elections.
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After failed coalition talks among runner-up rivals, Kickl and his allies will either head a new coalition or – now on 37 per cent in polls – come back even stronger after a snap election.
Kickl has promised that any FPÖ-led government will use as its guiding principle “patriotic common sense”. As the “people’s chancellor”, a historically burdened term, Kickl and his party will be “tools” to fix all of what he says ails Austria: self-serving elites, “wokeism” and “the rotten fruit of mass migration”.
It would be a first for western Europe if Viktor Orban’s authoritarian democratic playbook drifted up the Danube from Budapest to Vienna. Two furious protests in the freezing Austrian capital this week channelled the fury and resignation of WB Yeats’s Second Coming: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
It’s not just in Austria that 2025 began in an air of anxious deja vu. A century after the poet wrote those lines, as Europe emerged from war and a severe flu pandemic, the Continent is once again grappling with war, pandemic aftershocks and the second coming of Donald Trump. Will Trump 2.0 mean, as Yeats wrote, “anarchy is loosed upon the world”?
It’s too soon to tell but when his arrival triggers the departure of the Democratic president, Joe Biden will not be the last liberal democratic leader out the door this year.
North of the border, unpopular Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau is stepping down after a decade in power in Canada.
[ Justin Trudeau: A fighter who didn’t know when to throw in the towelOpens in new window ]
In France, Emmanuel Macron remains hostage between warring extremist political camps and a mutinous public. Across the Rhine in Germany, a luckless Olaf Scholz failed to complete his first term and may not secure a second in elections on February 23rd.
His Social Democrats are trailing in third place behind the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Its resentment-fuelled nationalism and emotional social media messaging has pushed the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) – likely leading polls – further to the right. All mainstream parties are running scared of Elon Musk’s endorsement of the AfD as the only party that can “save” Germany. Its leaders hope Musk will push the party even further above its current, record 21 per cent support.
In this age of anxious uncertainty, is western progressive democracy experiencing just another regular swing of the political pendulum – this time from centre-left to right and hard right? Or is it facing something unprecedented?
US historian Timothy Snyder has sounded the alarm for a decade, warning in his 2017 bestseller On Tyranny about the threat to modern democratic norms, in particular human and minority rights: “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans, who saw democracy yield to fascism, nazism and communism.”
Dismissing such arguments as alarmist, German political scientist Philip Manow says it is not democracy itself under attack but the dominant, liberal post-Cold War variant to emerge in the 1990s.
No one spoke of enemies of liberal democracy before 1990, he argues in his bestseller Under Observation, “because liberal democracy did not exist – neither as a specific idea nor as a distinct institutional framework”.
The main existential threat, as he sees it, is to those who secured privileges, riches and influence in a period now ending.
“[They] think it is obvious that a democracy is liberal or is not a democracy at all,” writes Prof Manow, political scientist at the Germany’s University of Siegen. “But before 1990 you couldn’t decide for or against a liberal democracy – though one could certainly decide to be for or against democracy.”
While the Global South pushes for a new multilateral world order from outside, Trump 2.0 may take an even heavier wrecking from within. Much of what we are seeing now carries echoes of century-old warnings from Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset.
His 1929 essay Revolt of the Masses warned of societies run by ill-informed “mass-men”, who champion “intellectual vulgarity” and “their right to have an opinion on a matter without the previous effort to work one out for themselves”.
Ortega suggested the battle for Europe, then on the precipice of fascism, was not left-right or even class-based but about people with insight versus the ignorant army of “mass-man” driven by – and drawn to – ill-informed people like themselves.
“Why should he listen when he has all the answers, everything he needs to know?” wrote Ortega y Gasset. “It is no longer the season to listen, but on the contrary, a time to pass judgment, to pronounce sentence, to issue proclamations.”
A century later, in a world of self-confirming online information bubbles, Britain’s Michael Gove captured this thinking with his post-Brexit observation that “people are tired of experts”.
Tired or not, some sociologists argue that our modern crises are not necessarily greater than those of previous decades. What is different, so their argument goes, is our ability to be aware of so many crises, simultaneously – and in detail.
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The feeling of being overwhelmed, as any psychologist will point out, is a subjective perception that can be changed, but is easy to confuse with objective reality.
Confusing subjective and objective however, is, in itself, a trademark of social media and a trying sign of the times.
This week Meta trumpified its business model for Facebook and Instagram, claiming that existing content moderation – consistent if imperfect controls to separate fact from fiction and truth from lies – was censorship.
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“Great is truth,” wrote Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, “but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” Profitable, too.
The shift by Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg made UCD historian Mark Jones’s ears prick up. After a decade researching and writing on interwar Germany, Jones is intrigued – and alarmed – by historical echoes he hears in the present.
“We are still not reliving Weimar Germany but we are lot closer than we would like to be,” he thinks.
As interwar German democracy was weakened by fascist violence and big lies, the country’s elites fell into line willingly with the emerging power and Nazi opponents went quiet or fled.
The Trumpist narrative has many of the same elements, in particular the “big steal” myth around his 2020 election defeat. Supporters have reframed the January 6th insurrection as an FBI set-up while Trump’s promise to pardon insurrectionists delivers what every political movement needs: martyrs.
“Once you have once big founding myth that inverts truth and reality, anything can follow,” says Prof Jones. US billionaires have fallen into line, many bankrolling the inauguration. “Statements like this week on the Panama Canal or Greenland, which people might think are outlandish, create space to implement other outlandish things.”
Looking back a century, Prof Jones sees the real challenge in taking on populists is pacing oneself amid a permanent onslaught of outrage and distraction.
Another stress factor, he adds, is discerning the era in which we are living: when did it begin, what norms apply and how long will it last?
Meanwhile those who have switched off politics entirely, or joke that “Trump won’t live rent free in my head for another four years”, are offering 21st century version of what 20th century Germans called inner emigration.
Others argue that a firm perspective is as important as a steady pace and an alert, discerning mind.
The postwar era is filled with ages of anxiety – prosperity slumps in the oil crisis, overkill fears during the arms race – but the current pile-up of crises – in migration, climate, politics, economics, even masculinity – has been categorised by German historian Reinhart Kosselek as “collectively singular”.
Compounding the confusion are sustained attacks on the postwar framework to understand and address crises: the postwar rules-based order, institutions like the EU and international courts.
For all the gloom, many political analysts see reasons to be cheerful. Embattled or departing liberal western leaders in 2025 need not be a sign of a system collapsing – but functioning.
Compared with other right-wing parties in Europe, the Italian government is more moderate, with Meloni stronger at the negotiating table on some issues like softening the EU green deal and [hardening] migration
— Prof Lorenzo Castellani
After a decade in power, there is widespread consensus in Canada that sunny boy prime minister Justin Trudeau outstayed his welcome, with poor communication worsening a growing accumulation of voter grievances. For Quebec-based political scientist Daniel Béland, Trudeau exemplifies what locals call “usure du pouvoir” – worn down by power.
Whenever elections are called, the 45-year-old conservative leader Pierre Poilievre may emerge victorious.
“He is blunt and clever, adopting populist rhetoric and is not afraid of insulting opponents,” says Prof Béland, political scientist at Montreal’s McGill University. “But there are shades of populism and he will have to keep his distance from Trump.”
On this side of the Atlantic, with Berlin and Paris in political stasis, it’s an intriguing prospect that defending European democracy in 2025 falls to two countries with recent experiences of fascism and communism: Italy and Poland.
Italy’s post-fascist prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s skill at handling Trump and Musk could make her Europe’s most important conduit in addressing, or avoiding, a transatlantic trade war.
Despite her critics’ dire predictions, Italian analysts note Meloni has yet to depart from any European democratic norms, is adhering to EU fiscal rules and has frozen controversial domestic reforms of the constitution, courts and federalism.
“I don’t think western liberal democracies will collapse given most of these right-wing parties are respecting constitutions – Meloni for sure – and even softening their agenda once in government,” says Prof Lorenzo Castellani of Italy’s Luis University. “Compared with other right-wing parties in Europe, the Italian government is more moderate, with Meloni stronger at the negotiating table on some issues like softening the EU green deal and [hardening] migration.”
That applies double for Polish prime minister Donald Tusk. Unlike Meloni he is a creature of the EU machine and, as a former European Council president, has secured remarkable shifts on EU migration norms.
Tusk’s controversial decision late last year to suspend asylum procedures on the Polish-Belarusian border brought protests from leftist allies and Polish NGOs. But Tusk sold the move to EU partners as a belated pushback against Russia’s “hybrid warfare” in the region, funnelling migrants to the border to cause a humanitarian crisis.
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“We must become an organism capable not only of survival but also of political offensives,” said Tusk this week, while launching Poland’s six-month presidency of the EU. “We will be very determined to make Europe start thinking in Polish terms.”
The Polish leader’s Euro-nationalist tone – Europe must learn from its newer members or decline – plays well at home.
Meanwhile, growing public unrest around Europe over migration and its effects has made many European leaders relieved and receptive to Tusk’s “Security Europe” agenda for 2025.
After all, Tusk still enjoys considerable European good will over his government’s ongoing – and unprecedented – efforts to roll back the previous government’s attempted takeover of state institutions.
Poland is not alone here and, a year from now, opposition Hungarian politician Peter Magyar hopes to prove that even Orban authoritarianism can be reversed.
Things needn’t get that far if western democratic actors alter their habits, argues US-based political scientist Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die.
Contrary to its gloomy title, his book lays out lively strategies for democracies to live and thrive – such as through unlikely, pragmatic coalitions. The key, he says, is to re-evaluate traditional rivals as allies by viewing them through a democratic lens.
“This does not mean abandoning the causes that matter to us,” he writes – a tall order in the culture war era. “It means temporarily overlooking disagreements in order to find common moral ground.”
Canadian political analyst Darrel Bricker suggests that what is dying in 2025 is not democracy but the “polite, centrist governing middle in many countries, replaced by more emphatic and ideological alternatives on both ends of the political spectrum”.
“So far the populist right has been more successful,” says Bricker, chief executive of Ipsos Public Affairs, “but it’s likely that a populist progressive movement will emerge in response, rather than a revival of the moderate, pragmatic centre.”
In this era of globalisation, even the burning political issues – from Toronto to Trieste – are remarkably similar. Voters are putting democratic governments on notice to tackle the basics – affordable housing, the cost of living, migration – and offer clear roadmaps to overcome climate and digitalisation challenges. Or forfeit their right to rule.
The late German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, in a recent posthumous memoir, urged his colleagues to end the era of modern politics as a competition of opinion poll-based sweeteners to voters. “Instead, convey transparently why some wishes cannot be fulfilled and some demands have to be rejected,” he wrote. “The task of leadership-based politics is to develop a clear idea of the future and to stand up for it – even initially against the majority.”
To adapt Yeats for 2025 then, the political centre can hold. Not if it views itself as a given but if it addresses voter disquiet, defends legal norms and offers compelling, optimistic visions for the future.
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