The great French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand remarked about the Bourbons after the French Revolution that they had “learnt nothing and forgotten nothing”. We might say the same about the Western establishment’s more recent response to the rise of the populist Right.
Donald Trump’s election victory in 2024 should have taught everyone that what has come to be known as “lawfare” — using legal processes to weaken political opponents — doesn’t work politically. But it seems few heeded the warning. Only last week, a similar attempt to bar Marine Le Pen from running in next year’s presidential elections failed after a French appeals court reduced the length of the ban. This is not the end of her legal battles, but it is certain now that she will be a candidate and her popularity remains undimmed.
There are other examples: in Romania, the supreme court banned the far-Right leader Călin Georgescu from taking part in the 2024 presidential elections. In Germany, the CDU wants to deprive Björn Höcke, one of the most high-profile politicians of the far-Right Alternative for Germany, of his fundamental right to vote and stand for elections. In the Netherlands, they went after Geert Wilders. It’s happening everywhere, again and again.
They have learnt nothing. Trump bounced back from his legal battles and won the election. Le Pen will be a candidate. It is too early to make any predictions about the next French presidential election. But we can at this point safely conclude that the technocratic coup against Le Pen has failed. It will now be up to the voters to decide. This was not supposed to happen.
The case of Nigel Farage in the UK falls into the same category, though the details differ. Unlike Trump or Le Pen, the Reform UK leader faces neither criminal charges nor a police investigation. Instead, he was being investigated by the House of Commons Committee on Standards after breaching rules by failing to declare a gift. It would almost certainly have recommended a suspension which could have triggered a recall petition. If 10% of voters had signed it, a by-election would automatically have followed.
But by resigning his seat, Farage has short-circuited the procedure that could have led to his removal. If he wins, he may still face an investigation when he returns, though the House of Commons would, at that point, probably not be so stupid as to suspend him, if only to avoid the absurd spectacle of two by-elections in the same constituency within a few weeks of each other.
The media plays an important role in the political campaign against Farage. And its pursuit of Farage is deeply reminiscent of the one against Trump in the two years preceding the 2024 election. Ultimately, though, Trump walked away from his legal troubles and an assassin’s bullet. Farage walked away from a plane crash, and I suspect he will survive the slings and arrows of the British press as well as the onslaught of Count Binface’s jokes. British politics is full of entertaining stunts. But the idea that the Tory, Labour, Green and Lib Dem voters of Clacton will unite and support the bin man is absurd. What does it tell voters about how seriously politics is being taken by the establishment?
What, too, does it tell us about the media’s motivations? I suspect they’re mainly selfish ones. The legacy media owes its existence to closed-shop access arrangements such as the political lobby in the UK, or the White House press corps. In Germany, exclusive access to politicians is organised by a journalists’ club, which organises all government press conferences. If Friedrich Merz wants to talk to the media, he has to knock on their door. And in the US, legacy media has been one of the biggest losers from the Trump administration. They lost their exclusive access to administration officials as the Trump administration opened up to bloggers and influencers.
Count Binface: a serious fool
Populist leaders do not respect the press cartel. They are creatures of social media. If Farage were to become prime minister, he could decide to discard the political lobby altogether in Westminster. He could instruct his arts minister to allow foreign media organisations take control of UK newspapers and private broadcasters. Without much effort, he could finish them off in a single term. Even if British voters were to get rid of Farage after one term, his successors would almost surely not resurrect the old system. Even if a candidate of the Left in the US were to succeed Trump in early 2029, I would not expect that person to waste political capital on resurrecting long defunct journalist lobbies. Time moves on, and priorities change. No wonder the fourth estate is panicking.
And as consumers of news, we should speak out if the media pack is out for blood, or, as the Germans say, are chasing a pig through the village. This is what is happening to Farage. Sometimes it works: the media successfully got rid of Boris Johnson by persuading gullible Tory MPs to commit electoral suicide and ditch the leader who won them a landslide victory. They dispensed with Keir Starmer in similar circumstances.
I doubt, though, that the campaign against Farage will succeed, because Farage, unlike Johnson and Starmer before him, is in control of his party. His voters don’t care about politically constructed criminal cases or donations. They care about the things that affect them.
And they are right that many politicians simply don’t seem to care about the things that affect them. Yesterday’s men simply cling to mistakes of the past, refusing to learn from them. Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump should have been a cautionary tale. Instead of pursuing him through the courts, the Democrats should have focused on their own campaign, and considered whether Joe Biden was fit to run while there was still an opportunity to find an alternative candidate. But no, the Democrats figured they had it in the bag — just as they did back in 2016. Overconfidence and wishful thinking play a big role in the demise of the centre. I see the same mindset again in the UK campaign to rejoin the EU. The Rejoiners are clinging on to the same old failed strategies that sunk the Remain campaign — a false assessment of the economic significance of the single market.
Farage's Clacton reckoning
In Germany, the centrist parties that now want to ban the AfD should similarly reflect on why such attempts failed in the past. In 2017, the constitutional court struck what appeared to be a rock-solid case against the Right-wing extremist NPD. Unlike the centrists, though, the AfD learned from the episode and has taken precautions to protect itself against a ban. The chances of a ban are practically zero. And yet, the Left clings on to the same old failing ideas again and again.
Lack of reflection and critical self-examination has a become a defining characteristic of the political centre worldwide. And all the while, the centre-right, which has traditionally been stronger than the centre-left in Europe, is losing support. By creating perma-coalitions with the centre-left, they are driving more and more voters to the extremes. They do what they always did. Exactly as Talleyrand said.
The way to solve the political problem is to attempt to address the underlying problems such as de-industrialisation and low productivity. Yet centrist policy agendas are full of displacement activities. So instead of focusing on fixing what lies beneath their broken economy, the British establishment is rooting for a man with a bin for a face. Should that strategy fail, if you want to dignify it with such a term, they might even resort to the ultimate, and most desperate, trick to keep Farage out of power — proportional representation. The experience of European countries has been that cynical changes in electoral systems backfire against those who initiate them. The simple reason is that voters, as a group, are not stupid.
Just as Talleyrand’s famous phrase described the failure of the House of Bourbon, it explains the demise of the age of multilateral globalisation, the age that the EU represented so fittingly. Rather than confronting economic and political failures that have driven voters elsewhere, politicians simply return to their familiar tactics. Multilateralism is dying not because it was bound to fail, but because its proponents never learned, and never forgot.
And we all know what happened to the Bourbons.
Wolfgang Munchau is the Director of Eurointelligence and an UnHerd columnist.