Transcript: Martin Wolf and Anne Applebaum on democracy’s year of peril

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Martin Wolf and Anne Applebaum on democracy’s year of peril’

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. It’s Marc Filippino here. Regular listeners will know that for every Sunday this month, the News Briefing is going to do something a little bit different. We’re running a series about the outlook for democracy, hosted by the FT’s chief economics commentator Martin Wolf. He’s been talking to leading political thinkers about what this year, a pivotal year for democracy, has in store for the liberal democratic system. So here goes Martin Wolf, Democracy’s Year of Peril.

Anne Applebaum
I’m in effect a citizen of three countries. I’m American, but I live part of the time in Poland. My husband’s Polish, I have a Polish passport, and I also spent many years in Great Britain. And there was a kind of spark that went off in my head or somewhere in the year 2015, when I suddenly realised that the political system in all three countries, all of my countries, was being challenged.

Martin Wolf
Being a citizen of three countries has allowed the author and journalist Anne Applebaum to bear witness to some of the seismic shifts that have taken place in America and Europe.

Anne Applebaum
In my case, I realised in some cases it was being challenged by people I knew. Not necessarily my best friends, but people I had met or people I’d come across, or people who’d been part of the mainstream politics for a long time, and who were veering rapidly, in this case to the right or to the far right. And there were some left-wing challenges to democracy, too, but they had become much more extreme in their views. They were much more radical, and they were beginning to attack not just their political opponents in some kind of civilised way, but they were attacking the political system itself. And this is when I realised that something different was happening.

Martin Wolf
What’s interesting to me is that it was actually a year later, in 2016, with the Brexit referendum and Trump emerging, that had a similar effect on me, though of course the way I analyse it has been rather different, so I completely understand that.

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I’m Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, and this is part two of my FT’s series, Democracy’s Year of Peril. This year, billions of citizens are being asked to cast their vote in elections across more than 50 countries, just as populist parties and the illiberal right are gaining traction around the world. But why is this happening and where could it lead? A person with some lived experience of this turmoil as a sometime resident of eastern Europe is Anne Applebaum. She’s written about the dangers to western democracy with great eloquence in The Atlantic and in several books. She won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2004. Her newest title is Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, and it will be out this summer.

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One of the bright spots for liberal democracy in the past year came last October, when opposition parties in Poland, led by the former prime minister and European Council president Donald Tusk, repelled the right-wing Law and Justice party, thereby shifting the country away from the illiberal path that had been taken by Jarosław Kaczyński.

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Martin Wolf
This event had personal implications for Anne Applebaum. Her husband, Radosław Sikorski, was appointed minister of foreign affairs in the new government.

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I would actually like to start with Poland, because it’s one of your three countries, and it’s been a very important country. Many of us had thought that it was a great success. The economy was doing so well. And then we had the Kaczyński government and now it’s been defeated. Could you talk a little bit about what you now know about the problems of rolling back that authoritarian interlude? We hope, interlude. How difficult is it? How dangerous is it that people will charge you, the liberals, of doing exactly what they did by trying to pack the courts or whatever, by undoing it? What is this experience taught you?

Anne Applebaum
First of all, let me start with something you just said, which is that Poland has been a great economic success. That was true, is true, remains true. In the scale of 30 years, it’s perhaps the most successful country in Europe in terms of growth and prosperity. And of course, the experience of Poland was my realisation that this attack on the system was not purely economic and a very, very important cultural component. And the doubt that people had about Polish democracy and about Poland’s role in the world and its membership of the European Union and so on, was coming from anxiety about other things. It was coming from demographic change, social change, the sense of loss of control, that we aren’t making decisions for ourselves. They’re being made somewhere else. That kind of fear, that kind of paranoia in Poland. And that was successful enough to keep a far-right government led by Jarosław Kaczyński and the PiS government in power for eight years, but it was never bought into by the majority of the population. They sought to take control of all state institutions, but they didn’t fully succeed, partly because there was a lot of resistance in the society. So they made an attempt at taking over as much of the media as they could. They got pretty far. They took over many institutions of the state. They took over the . . . partially the courts. Quite a lot of the civil service, Poland’s state companies became politicised. Their profits began feeding the ruling party rather than merely helping taxpayers. And so they took over a whole series of institutions, and they lost because they didn’t succeed in doing that. I mean, they could have succeeded, I think, had they won in last October’s election. I think this would now be the end of Polish democracy. And I was, by the way, mentally prepared for that already.

But a number of factors, one was, the way the campaign was run. Another was the importance of abortion restrictions, which awakened a whole generation of young women and indeed young men, to the personal impact that the loss of democratic institutions would have on them, because in Poland, it was directly connected to the shift in the court system. And what you therefore had was an extraordinary election, actually in October, one that I don’t think we’ve seen almost anywhere else, which was based on a huge turnout, though 75 per cent of Poles voted, 74 per cent, 75 per cent. In the cities it was 85 per cent. I have a friend who lives in a district of Warsaw where it was 92 per cent, and you had a kind of counter-revolution. You know, you had so many people turning out just to say, no, we don’t want this. We don’t want to lose our democracy and we don’t want to leave Europe. And that was part of one of the issues.

But you’re right that we are now in a different moment when we have a democratic coalition. It’s a centre left, centre right, centre liberal, three parties, and it is seeking to restore the institutions to a state of neutrality. And yes, you’re right, it’s difficult. It’s legally difficult because the former ruling party still controls the presidency. The president comes from that political grouping. And because they are very entrenched. So rolling it back involves, for example, retaking state television, which actually legally wasn’t difficult because the state television is constitutionally obligated to be politically neutral. And it very much wasn’t. And it had been taken over and run in an unconstitutional way. And so they simply said, all right, we’re changing that. And it was very ugly looking though. So it involved switching off the signal for a period of time, which was done partly because there were enough people at the television station who were also angry at the way it was run. And so it . . . there were there were insiders who helped. But that was a, you know, it was an ugly looking moment. You know, there will also have to be a legal reckoning with the former ruling party, with a number of people who broke the law. That includes some very high-ranking people. I mean, for example, the misuse, the abuse of Pegasus spyware. This is a kind of software that can be put in people’s phones and spy on people. And so there are particular government officials who were responsible for illegally putting that in the phones of political opposition. Those people will have to be investigated and they will eventually go on trial, and they may be condemned. And every time a case like that will come up, it will look ugly. There will be a huge shouting match, there will be backlash, there will be propaganda. You know, you’re using the state against us and so on. In some ways there’s some parallels to what’s happening in the United States. But the lesson I’m taking is that it’s very important to do it quickly and to do it very decisively. And I think Donald Tusk’s government has been more decisive than many expected. There was a lot of drama at the very beginning. Now it’s slowed down a bit, but the importance is going to be in doing it decisively and quickly and restoring the state. I mean, the problem is, of course, that there will never be a moment when everybody says, OK, you’re right, we’re back to normal and it’s all fine. And finding the balance, you know, finding the moment when we have neutral courts, we have, you know, media, which is not extremist and extremely partisan. Re-establishing that balance is extremely difficult. And you know what remains to be seen whether it can be done.

Martin Wolf
And we know from what we see that I was there a few months ago and talked to some people, but we also concede with Donald Trump, that they will always argue that neutrality is actually partial.

Anne Applebaum
Yes.

Martin Wolf
And all the people who support them will accept that view because it justifies their view that they alone are neutral.

Anne Applebaum
It justifies their view that they’re persecuted, which is slightly different. And they see themselves as persecuted, and they use the language of revenge. And, you know, we’ve been persecuted, we’re going to take back what’s owed us, which is very powerful politically. And it has all kinds of echoes. So anybody who feels they’ve been unfairly excluded or they’ve lost out somehow, or they’re not as central to the political system or to the national conversation as they think they should be, we’ll sympathise with the people who say, you know, we’re being oppressed or we’re being forced out. And that is it’s quite a powerful political message, and it will be very central to the US elections, as it is right now in Poland.

Martin Wolf
And you actually argued that’s a driving motivation for these people in the first place, this sense that they are excluded by the conventional system?

Anne Applebaum
Very much so. I mean, this is when I said a few minutes ago, I don’t think that their primary motivation was ever economic. You know, the idea that it’s economic losers protesting against the system is not always correct. In fact, it’s often people who’ve done very well, but who are angry that their ideas are not central, or they’ve been pushed out from a previous position of influence and who want revenge and who want to somehow take back the system or take back control. And that’s an extremely powerful political slogan.

Martin Wolf
How convinced or concerned are you about the durability of the attempt by the Tusk government to restore a democratic, legitimate state and society? Is that going to succeed?

Anne Applebaum
I hope it will, I can’t guarantee it. I mean, there are some good signs and some bad signs. As I said, there were some things they managed to do very fast. And the things that, you know, we’re very fast are kind of already we’ve moved on and there are some pieces of the story that are taking a lot longer. It may require a kind of constant renewal of the government. It may require constant look, you know, how do we speed this up? I mean, in a way, if you don’t continually try to go faster, you will be overwhelmed by the weight of bureaucracy and exhaustion and so on. And so, you know, it’s very interesting. I mean, I should say here also, just as a declaration of interest, my husband serves in this government, he’s not part of this particular process. He’s the foreign minister and has a slightly different role. But it’s worth noting, for example, that they’ve only been in office a few months and there’s already a big government reshuffle coming. In other words, you’re going to have almost a kind of revolutionary, you know, where you’re going to constantly need energy in order to make this change happen. And as I said, you’re up against sluggishness, tiredness, cynicism, you know, the public getting distracted and losing interest. You know, it’s going to take a real commitment to liberal values and a real commitment to change to make this happen.

Martin Wolf
And obviously, a government trying to do that is simultaneously having to govern the country. It has to govern successfully. And there are some pretty big challenges for Poland. If you look at what’s happening in Ukraine, a revanchist Russia under Putin. So they are trying to play two very, very big games at the same time. It’s obviously a tremendous challenge.

Anne Applebaum
Absolutely. I mean, there are several challenges. There’s the how do we reset the state? How do we bring back decent civil service? How do we bring back independent judges? How do we reestablish a kind of credible national media, state media, public media really? And at the same time, how do we push back against Russia? How do we and, you know, Poland really sees itself also as taking on the job of convincing other Europeans. So it’s not just Poland by itself that needs to resist Russian propaganda and the Russian military threat. It’s also they need to inspire the French and the Germans, and they need to maintain links with the British and the Americans. I mean, they see it very much as a broader role even outside of their country. So, you know, it’s about the EU, it’s about Nato, it’s about group diplomacy. I mean, it’s a very difficult task. And also you have to do that at the same time as you do the same things everybody else has to deal with, you know, inflation and, you know, other kinds of discontent and the constant wear and tear of ordinary politics and the genuine cynicism that people feel now about politics partly comes from the experience and partly comes from the plethora of media and messages. And, you know, people tend to want to step away and say, it’s all too loud and noisy there. I don’t want anything to do with it. And so you also are combating apathy and distrust. And so how you rebuild trust is also has to be part of the process.

Martin Wolf
And of course, quite apart from these larger countries, you have Hungary and Slovakia where these sorts of messages are playing quite well. We’ve got European elections coming up, which many fear will lead to quite a big swing to the right. How concerned should we be more broadly about the stability of core democratic institutions in member states of the European Union and in Brussels?

Anne Applebaum
So I essentially think now and for the rest of my life, you know, for the next few decades, this will be a constant and permanent threat. There’s not going to be a moment when we all say, oh, it’s OK now, you know, we can go back to the end of history and everything’s fine and so on. I mean, I think that now the struggle to maintain liberal democracy and also to maintain a liberal alliance in the face of a, I was about to say double challenge from Russia and China, but it’s really much broader than that. I’m publishing a book in the summer, which is called Autocracy, Inc, and the thesis of the book is that it’s Russia, China and Iran and Venezuela and North Korea and Belarus and others, and that these are states that work together in different ways, through the kleptocratic practices, also through, you know, the use of information and propaganda who work together to protect themselves and to push their autocratic vision of the world. And they are successful. When they are successful, it’s partly because they find allies inside the democratic world. You know, they have friends in Washington or in Madrid or London or Paris or indeed Warsaw. And so understanding that that is part of the threat, it’s not the whole threat, is also an important aspect of the story. And will there be Russian propaganda in the upcoming European elections? Yes, there will. And so it’s a . . . I mean, it will it be the most important thing? No, but it might help amplify a few candidates. I mean, we know in Germany there have been revelations that the AfD, which is the German far-right party, has very direct links to Russia, Russian support, but also some links to China. There was an adviser to a member of the European parliament from the AfD, who turned out to be a Chinese spy. I mean, you know, this is also a piece of the story.

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Martin Wolf
Let’s turn to the US. So when Biden became president, he also, in a way, though Trump had been president for four years, but he also had a bit of a cleansing to do. And also a resetting to some extent of the political debate. He can’t do much about the Supreme Court, which is a pretty big loss. It’s just become increasingly obvious. How well do you think the Biden administration has done in making the liberal democratic view of the world successful, believed in functional in the US?

Anne Applebaum
So when Biden became president, his big idea was that he was going to do things in the real economy that would affect people and that that would prove that democracy is functional and can work. And so he passed an infrastructure bill. He passed the Chips Act. I mean, it was some of the other decisions he made had the effect of bringing a lot of manufacturing back to the US. Even weapons production, which I think he didn’t anticipate being necessary but is connected to the war in Ukraine, has had that effect. And I think he’s been, and this to me was unsurprising. But, I think to them it’s been more surprising. It hasn’t had the impact that he thought. And this is, again, one of my themes. And that’s partly because the arguments are more cultural than economic. And so his achievements and the legislation that he’s passed, which is really pretty remarkable, actually, if it’s more than any other recent president has done, isn’t getting the recognition that it should, partly because the other narratives are more important.

My view is that the Biden administration made one very big mistake, and that was not to immediately begin the process of making Trump responsible for January the 6th. They waited far too long. I mean, the election is upon us, and that trial hasn’t even really begun. And the investigation, you know, there was a . . . the House conducted its investigation and that was very good. But it wasn’t sufficient. And not doing that fast and not making that a huge priority. I mean, I think Biden wanted to ignore it. He was hoping that if we do the Chips Act, and if we do these other things, then people will move on. And people did not move on. And what’s called, you know, in the US, the big lie, in other words, that the election was stolen remained a very, very important conspiracy theory and very dominant inside the Republican party. And I think the Biden administration waited far too long to tackle it up front. And funny enough, I mean, we just since we were talking about Poland before, one of Donald Tusk’s conclusions from watching the US was that you need to move very fast. People need to see not just results in the real economy. They need to see somehow that justice is done and some kind of balance has been returned. And I don’t think Trump paid a price for January the 6th. You know, there were arrests of some of the protesters, but the full story wasn’t reflected in the judicial system. And I think that was a . . . maybe a fatal mistake.

Martin Wolf
So let’s come to the fatality of the mistake. What do you think would happen if — that seems at least plausible in the polls — Donald Trump is reelected?

Anne Applebaum
So he could win and again stipulate that he might not. And so I don’t want to.

Martin Wolf
He will argue that he won even if he loses.

Anne Applebaum
Right. Well that’s another . . . that’s a secondary issue that people are starting to think about that now too. And not only that, he might try the same game again and this time he will know how to do it. But anyway, that’s it. That’s a secondary issue. The first issue is if he wins legitimately. He has been very clear actually about what he wants to do. He wants to, you know, build detention camps for migrants, whatever exactly that means. He wants to politicise the civil service. There has been a Heritage Foundation paper that describes how that could be done, which has gotten a lot of interest and I think probably rightly so. For me, it’s very funny because of course, it is effectively what happened in Poland after 2015. You know, there’s all the people who are in charge of pollution and nuclear waste, and the Department of Energy and the Department of the Environment are all the scientists and, you know, experts are removed and they’re replaced with party loyalists. And I don’t know, people’s . . . in Poland, it was people’s cousins, you know. Here it will be people who, you know, the litmus test, and this is already clear inside the Republican party will be, do you agree that the 2020 election was stolen? So do you accept the big conspiracy? Do you accept the big lie? And if you accept it, then you’re an acceptable person to be in the government. So the government will be staffed with those people. And actually in the US administration, the president already has a huge impact over the civil service, much more so than in most European countries, because you can appoint several thousand people to what are effectively civil service jobs, political appointees. So he would do that. But as I understand it, the plan is to go even farther. And to remove people.

And then you have all, you know, there is a whole range of dangers that come from that, from I mean, what if you don’t have the right person in charge of the Department of Energy who monitors nuclear waste? I mean, you could have an accident. I mean, from those kinds of issues on he’s . . . Trump has spoken about politicising the military, you know, using the military in US politics. He’s talked about sending the military to the border or sending the military to put down political protests. He’s expressed the desire to prosecute. I mean, he uses more colourful language. I mean, he talks about killing former generals who he didn’t like or who’ve said negative things about him since he became president. I mean, he has a whole new kind of language that he uses talk about. He uses the language of revenge, retribution. Oh, you know, we need to get this person in that person and so on. That language, again, has a kind of psychological and emotional echo among the people who follow him and who feel that, you know, justice needs to be done and they deserve some kind of justice. But it is also, once again, a direct threat to the judicial system.

Martin Wolf
So let’s look at this is a worst-case possibility. Are we actually really talking about a situation in which the model of governance we would ultimately see in the US would look like Russia?

Anne Applebaum
I don’t think it would look like Russia. I mean, it could eventually, but that would take a long time. I mean, even Putinism took 20 years to become Putinism. But it could look like Hungary, or it could look like Turkey, or it could look like India. And because the United States is so big and the state is so powerful, it would have a much more important, I mean, Hungary is a country of no significance, but it would have a much more important effect on more people and on the world. I mean, a US administration that built concentration camps for however you want to define it, migrants or illegal aliens or even legal aliens, millions of people would encourage the Chinese who also built concentration camps for Uyghurs, and the Russians, who put lots of people in prison. I mean, it would have a profound effect around the world.

Martin Wolf
The last time the US did anything like that, I think, was during the second world war, when they interned what was about 100,000 or so Japanese. And that’s still regarded as a pretty major scandal. So it would be an astonishing thing to see in peacetime.

Anne Applebaum
It would be, because again, then that happened in wartime, in the context of paranoia about Japanese spies and so on. I’m not excusing it. I’m just saying that was the political context for it. And it’s considered a terribly shameful and embarrassing episode in American history.

Martin Wolf
So we are talking about some pretty big things.

Anne Applebaum
We could be talking about pretty big things. I mean the . . . you know, the strange thing about Trump is that last time his administration was characterised also by a lot of incompetence, and it’s hard to know whether he’ll have more competent people this time. Maybe he will. I mean, there are people who learned things from the last time they were in power and who would come in a new administration and have a much more active and more, you know, they would move much faster.

Martin Wolf
Wouldn’t it be fair to describe this combination of the politics of revenge, the politics of insisting on absolute personal loyalty among military officials, civil servants and so forth the quasi-judiciary, all around leadership cult? Isn’t this fascism?

Anne Applebaum
I’m always reluctant to use the word fascism, and I have disputes with my friends because it immediately makes people think of the Holocaust, you know? And so for those reasons, I don’t use the word. But yeah, I mean, if you want to look at historical precedents, maybe Mussolini is a better one than Hitler.

But the point is that the way Trump talks and the people around Trump talk now, what they’re talking about is eliminating any independent and any neutral institutions inside the state. So the state would become completely politicised. And, you know, when we talk about the preservation of liberal democracy, it’s funny we don’t talk enough about . . . We talk about the independence of the judiciary. But there are other institutions inside the state that have historically or have evolved to become independent.

So, for example, again, the US military. The US military is not loyal. People don’t take their oaths to a specific president. They are meant to be loyal to the constitution. And that’s true also of civil servants. Civil servants are not supposed to be, you know, of course they have their own politics and so on. And, you know, but they are not supposed to be loyal to one president or another. They’re supposed to work on behalf of the United States and the US constitution, whatever. Diplomats, civil servants and those kinds of institutions are part of what keeps the system stable. It’s part of why we can have a change of power from one party to the other and not have, you know, terrible risks or fights or violence. And they’re much more important part of what it takes to have rotating leadership than we usually give it credit for.

And Trump has been actively speaking about eliminating or damaging those things. Again, military, civil service, diplomats, obviously courts. But, you know, once you remove all those institutions and once you start talking about removing people’s rights and openly unconstitutional actions like the creation of, you know, doing random arrest, then you have a new era in the United States. You know, you’ve left the old constitution behind in some sense.

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Martin Wolf
So let’s look at the global implications. Let’s suppose this happens. You have Trump there pursuing this sort of agenda. You’ve talked about it a little. Where would this lead America’s alliance system? His capacity to deal with the autocrats. You listed China, Russia and the rest to help Ukraine, to work together with allies in Europe and in Asia. How complete might the collapse be, and what would the implications of that possibly be? I know you go to the Munich Security Conference. I’m sure they’ve been discussing that. So how do you see it?

Anne Applebaum
So everybody discusses it all the time, not just the Munich Security Conference. So of course, the implications could be very profound. And Trump himself has made enough disparaging remarks about Nato and about the allies and about countries he doesn’t like, which include France and Germany over the years to have made. I mean, in most European capitals, there is — often it’s very quiet and not terribly public — but there is beginning to be some kind of preparation for what happens if the United States is no longer an ally of Europe. And so you’ve heard, the French president has started talking about, some idea of nuclear sharing. You know, should there be a European nuclear umbrella in addition to the one provided theoretically by the United States? Inside Germany, you have some talk about how, you know, again, mostly not in public, but there’s conversation about German military and how maybe it should be changing its operation. I mean, I know for a fact all those conversations are happening. And so the preparation for it and the awareness of it is there. And I and I mean, actually it was at the Munich Security Conference where I remember the German Bundestag said something even more stark to me, who said to me, you know, we have to do more than that. We have to prepare for a world in which we’re challenged by three autocracies, you know, Russia, China and the United States. Whether that’s an exaggeration, I don’t you know, we’re a little early for that.

But certainly the idea that there could be a hostile United States that was not just a, you know, rival of Europe sometimes or, you know, sometimes we have we’ve had trade arguments, you know, for many, you know, decades, but was actually hostile to the European Union, was hostile to Nato, was actively not interested in protecting Nato, and was and if you had a president who would say things as president like, well, you know, I don’t have to defend these countries or I’m not interested in helping the Baltic states, you know, then you would have a situation where the Russians would at least have, you know, some, you know, the deterrent effect of Nato could be undermined, and you would have the Russians say, well, you know, if the United States isn’t going to come to the aid of Lithuania, you know, we can walk across Lithuania in couple of days and you could have, the lack of deterrence could be a provocation that could expand the war. I mean, I’m not saying that will happen, and I don’t want to scare everybody, but those are the scenarios that people are walking through.

Martin Wolf
I mean, isn’t it possible, then, to say — given the full ramifications for the global balance of power and the balance of political ideology — that the election, this election in this year of elections could be essentially decisive for the future of liberal democracy and liberalism itself worldwide. That we are possibly watching the beginning of a process, which is why it’s so important, of profound unravelling, because the anchor state of the liberal democratic system through the 20th century, in a sense, and certainly since the second world war, which would not have had the outcome it did without it, is really flirting very profoundly domestically with a reversal of its historic liberalism in some sense betraying its own constitutional foundation, which is now 250 years ago, or more or less. So this looks and feels, at least to me, possibly one of the really decisive moments in world history.

Anne Applebaum
It could be. It could be. There’s one proviso, which is either positive or negative, depending on how you feel about it, which is that Trump himself is so unpredictable and so lacks anything resembling a coherent vision of the world that it’s possible that he could, you know, just stumble through another four years and nothing much would happen. I mean, I’m just offering you that as an optimistic scenario. But I share your concern, and I also despair of transmitting that concern to Americans who right now don’t seem to feel it. I mean, the anxiety that my European friends and indeed Asian friends, people in Europe and Ukraine feel about this election does not seem to be felt by most Americans. The idea that something about American democracy is at stake, and that this is a watershed moment, which I agree that it is, isn’t yet felt here.

Martin Wolf
But isn’t that, in a way the point that they’re complacent, partly because they don’t actually really understand for all the reasons you said, what a liberal democratic system needs to survive? They don’t understand, for example, what an independent bureaucracy is about. They call it the deep state. They’re quite happy with that idea. They can’t imagine anything so terrible happening because they have no historical experience or memory of it. They are so convinced that the US is somehow special, that there is nothing that can be done which will fundamentally transform its nature and its place in the world. So they just are blind.

Anne Applebaum
I would say it’s a bit worse than that. I don’t think they’re blind. I think many of them do know, but their view of the world is different. They think the United States is on a downward decline and that, you know, leftist ideas have infiltrated the institutions and that if they take over, they will expel these ideas and they will reassert some older vision of the United States, and that they will bring back some imaginary past America that has been lost. I mean, so for them, all the things that you’ve just described as negative, they see as positive.

Martin Wolf
Well, that’s pretty disturbing in all in itself. Anne Applebaum, thank you very, very much.

Anne Applebaum Thank you.

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Martin Wolf
A world where America is no longer a reliable ally of Europe is almost impossible to contemplate. That this is even being considered as a possible outcome of a second Trump presidency highlights the importance of the American elections to the future of liberal democracy. But there will be implications for countries outside this western alliance as well. We’ll discuss one of them, India and its latest election with former Indian central bank governor Raghuram Rajan in my next episode.

Raghuram Rajan
It is very hard for these authoritarian governments that suppress criticism to know that they have to correct course. And you might say, you know, this is so completely visible to the people in power, but they’ve cocooned. They live in a world of their own, and they get the sense that, you know, all is well, and they’re running the best of countries with the best of policies.

Martin Wolf
I’m Martin Wolf, and you’ve been listening to the second episode of Democracy’s Year of Peril. It was produced by Sandra Kanthal. The sound engineer was Nigel Appleton, and the executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. The FT’s global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley.

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