John Foster / 19 Jun 2026
Demographic Populism Failure
The No to Ten Million Switzerland Referendum
The Swiss referendum on population growth underscored the limitations of centrism.(...)
Technocracy
John Foster / 05 Jun 2026
The Centre Cannot Hold
Ideology is Back
The paradox of contemporary French politics is that Emmanuel Macron conquered the centre without managing to reconstruct it.(...)
John Foster / 29 May 2026
Neither Democracy Nor Dictatorship
Weimar Republic 2.0
What most closely links the post-2008 world to Weimar Germany is not extremism, but a deepening loss of confidence in liberal institutions.
(...)
John Foster / 20 Mar 2026
The Last Universalist
The Life and Times of Jürgen Habermas
The death of Jürgen Habermas at 96 marks an end, but not of the questions he posed.(...)
John Foster / 13 Mar 2026
Technocratic Left Crisis
Germany’s Dying Social Democrats
Is Germany’s Social Democratic Party dead? That’s what the state election in Baden-Württemberg indicates.(...)
John Foster / 07 Nov 2025
Populism is Fragile
The Dutch and Irish Elections
The recent elections in the Netherlands and Ireland suggest that far-right populism may not be the end of Europe after all.(...)
John Foster / 16 May 2025
End of the Middle
Tariq Ali’s The Extreme Centre: A Warning
Tariq Ali’s 2015 book The Extreme Centre: A Warning makes a strong case for a new systemic order.(...)
John Foster / 28 Feb 2025
New Politics Needed
Germany After the Election
The only thing good about the German election is that the results were as bad as expected.(...)
John Foster / 24 Jan 2025
The Strange Death of North Atlantic Liberalism
Populism Starts Here
It’s easy to become overwhelmed by the flood of crazy ideas from the far right.(...)
John Foster / 16 Feb 2024
Too Close to Moscow
Viktor Orbán and the EU, Part II
The populists are taking over. The pronouncement is familiar and gets trotted out before every European election.(...)