The Twenty-Four Two Podcast

Six months before its most consequential presidential election since at least 1981, France is going through a severe financial crisis.For decades, presidents and parliaments have ducked difficult budgetary choices, surrendering to the street and borrowing to buy social peace. But, today, after a string of economic shocks, the political class has run out of road. Governing without a majority in the national assembly since 2024, Emmanuel Macron’s governments have struggled to pass budgets that have done nothing more than stabilise the deficit, leaving the debt to balloon to 120% of national output. Economic growth is stagnating as rising interest rates drive up the cost of servicing the debt to more than €90 billion in 2027, outstripping spending on education and defence.Yet, politicians are still not explaining the crisis or its remedies to the public - something that maddens Jacques de Larosière, a veteran Fifth Republic policymaker who ran the Treasury, the Bank of France and the International Monetary Fund. “In a democracy,” he tells the Twenty-Four Two podcast, “the objective of electing people in parliament is not to have a detailed statement by each of the people … on the public finances. It’s not that. It’s the idea that, when you are elected, you have to tell the truth. You have to say the situation is serious but, if you don’t say that in a democracy, if you tell them fairytales, you’re not a democrat”.From January, Twenty-Four Two will begin a weekly series on France leading into the two-round election in April and May. This is the first of three pre-series teasers.Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.Subscribe (free) to the podcast and to 242.news. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com

On August 29, Icelanders will vote in the country’s fourth national postwar referendum and, amazingly, its first on the European question. The polling is neck and neck over whether this sparsely populated but strategically important island should restart the negotiations it suspended 13 years ago over whether Iceland should join the EU. This decision by the country’s 230,000 registered voters will have ramifications well beyond the Arctic. For 60 years, the European communities (now the union) have been a unique magnet for countries in the old continent. Starting with six member states, the EU now has 27 and another six in active accession negotiations. But these take time. A long time. And, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and US threats to annex Greenland and withdraw security guarantees for its oldest allies, Europe needs new military architecture and fast-track integration.Could Iceland model a version of this? Although it’s outside the EU, Iceland has been a member of the European Economic Area (EEA), Europe’s 30-nation single market, for 32 years and of the Schengen free-movement area for 25. This referendum is about extras only - extra benefits and extra annoyances. Icelanders are being asked whether their government should start negotiating for representation in the union’s institutions, membership of the EU’s agricultural and fisheries policies, and the euro.“That’s why it’s 50/50,” political scientist Vilborg Ása Guðjónsdóttir tells the Twenty-Four Two podcast. “I mean, there’s no real urgent reason to join as things stands. For me personally, I think the strongest reason would be to be in the midst of accession talks while we see how things develop globally in the next two or three years with the US: who’s going to take over from Trump etc. I think that’s the strongest reason: being on a team that’s going to be there for you when things go insane, which they have been doing … I know people in Greenland, quite a few and personally, and this was an absolute … and, to a point, still is an absolute nightmare. So I feel like we have to. It’s only responsible for us to take that into the equation”.Twenty-Four Two, hosted today by Tim G. Jones, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com

Equipped with a constitution-rewriting supermajority, Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party cabinet just marked their first 100 days in power.And ‘power’, rather than ‘office’, is the right word as Magyar moves at speed to dismantle the Fidesz state built over four consecutive terms by his predecessor, Viktor Orbán. Their initial popularity has dipped after a misstep over the appointment of a new president but Magyar and Tisza still command 60% national support - founded not only on a desire for political change but on hopes for economic stabilisation and swift entry to the euro area.After their 16-episode pre-election series on Hungary, Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen are checking in on Magyar’s 100-day honeymoon - helped by Pepijn’s recent research trip to Budapest. “It’s been basically scorched-earth tactics with regard to getting rid of as much as possible what remained of the Fidesz regime,” he says. This is necessary and popular but the government is facing major challenges as it readies Hungarians to swap their forints for euros early in what it hopes to be its second term.Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com

For 16 months, Marine Le Pen’s fourth bid for the French presidency seemed doomed as she appealed against a five-year office-holding ban after being convicted for embezzling public funds. Jordan Bardella, the 30-year-old chief of Le Pen’s nativist Rassemblement National (RN), was lined up to replace her and was out-polling all rivals at 35% for the first round of the election on 18 April 2027.This week’s appeal court ruling ended Bardella’s dream. Le Pen will run again, and two post-appeal polls show her not only matching Bardella’s first-round score but winning a run-off against centre-right challenger Édouard Philippe. Like we did for Hungary’s pivotal election this year, Twenty-Four Two will run a weekly French election podcast from January until decision day on 2 May 2027. As a taster, host Tim Jones invited political scientist Philippe Marlière to discuss the court decision, how a Le Pen victory will remake the French right and what the exit of Emmanuel Macron and Jean-Luc Mélenchon will mean for the left. “What Le Pen reminded … party members and colleagues is that she is the boss, and she was always the boss,” he says. The party “remains in the hands of lepénistes. Bardella has few supporters in a party … [that is] really devoted to Marine Le Pen”. Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com

On June 18, a special election in northwest England will determine whether Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister since 2024, will face an immediate challenge to his premiership led by the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, and former health secretary Wes Streeting.Following a referendum in 2016, the UK left the European Union in January 2020 and Starmer became Labour Party leader three months later, swiftly imposing a Brexit omertà on the centre-left. Instead of endless debate, he said his government would “Make Brexit Work” outside the 30-nation single market (the European Economic Area, EEA). Even supposedly ardent Remainer ministers fell silent for five years.That’s now over as a Labour Party leadership election looms and polling reveals widespread Bregret across every region and demographic group except the over-65s. But what does it mean in practical terms? To reunite a fracturing left-wing vote, should Labour offer a multi-year programme to rejoin the EU? Or, instead of pursuing something so ambitious, should it plan to return to the EEA, or seek sector-by-sector agreements like Switzerland? To discuss the options, host Tim Jones brought together Peter Foster, the Financial Times’s world trade editor and author of What Went Wrong With Brexit And What We Can Do About It, and Neil Kinnock, the Labour Party’s leader from 1983-92 and European Commissioner for transport and administrative reform from 1995-2004. “We’ve got to really assert, because it’s backed by all reality, that our special relationship is with neighbours 21 miles away,” says Kinnock. “And all the mythology – and a lot of it is mythology – of our special relationship with the United States of America has to be displaced and replaced by a recognition of unavoidable realities”. “The British public are as ‘cakeist’ about Europe as their politicians are because the politicians have never explained to them what the trade-offs are. They’ve never made the arguments, and Keir Starmer is the worst in some ways for that,” says Foster. “I think it is a genuinely difficult and bleak prospect. In some ways, maybe the thing that has to happen is something really bad, where it becomes really obvious that economically and strategically our position lies with Europe”.Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com

Last week’s election-eve podcast with Ábel Bede and Gabriela Greilinger was meant to be the last in Twenty-Four Two’s special 15-episode series on Hungary. But, after the partying in Budapest and the incoming prime minister’s hilariously unforgiving first moves, we couldn’t resist a post mortem with political scientist Gábor Scheiring.Among the hot and bad social-media takes on Péter Magyar’s landslide victory over Viktor Orbán, the winners have to be: See how quickly Orbán conceded - this was never the dictatorship you said it was! (from the right). No one credible said it was.Magyar isn’t the liberal you think he is (from the left). No one credible said he was.“A competitive authoritarian regime is a competitive authoritarian regime,” Scheiring tells us. “As long as you have elections, it’s possible to beat the ruling party, but it’s just hard, right? It’s much harder than in a free and fair democracy with free and fair elections”. Orbán conceded quickly because his defeat was undeniable. “I’m pretty convinced they had multiple scenarios and multiple playbooks but the result was so overwhelming, they couldn’t really do anything. What do you do against a landslide? Your only option is to use the military and repress society, and the next question is: do you really want to enter Hungarian history books as the dictator despised by his own people who used the country’s security forces to stay in power?”Formerly a left-wing MP who now teaches at Georgetown University in Qatar, Scheiring doesn’t share Magyar’s conservatism but he is optimistic that the new premier will restore liberal democracy and maybe even pluralism. “He has more than two-thirds majority and huge symbolic capital, and now he has the momentum. There’s a Hungarian political scientist Eszter Kováts and she used the term: he behaves ‘like a tank’, and he does indeed behave like a tank and he should go on with this impetus and momentum”.Gábor Scheiring’s The Retreat of Liberal Democracy: Authoritarian Capitalism and the Accumulative State in Hungary was published in 2020. His next book with Benedek Jávor, How Democracracies Revive: Why Illiberalism Keeps Winning And What To Do About It, will be published in 2027.Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.This really is the last podcast in our Hungary series but we’ll be back soon to talk European politics from a (small-l, small-d) liberal-democratic perspective. We’ll cover national elections in France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden, Slovakia and Bosnia, state elections in eastern Germany, Iceland’s referendum on EU accession negotiations, British reconvergence with the EU, and the geopolitical, military and economic settlement Ukraine when it comes. And more. Subscribe (free) to the podcast and to 242.news. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com

This is it. On Sunday, Hungarians will vote to keep or kill Viktor Orbán’s 16-year “illiberal” electoral autocracy.To talk about the last days of the election campaign and opposition activists’ tempered hopes for regime change, Tim and Pepijn are joined on the Twenty-Four Two Podcast by Ábel Bede and Gabriela Greilinger from the invaluable English-language Hungarian Observer.Ábel, who is a freelance journalist, reports to us from the manic campaign trail of opposition Tisza leader Péter Magyar. Gabriela, a doctoral candidate in far-right politics and democratic backsliding at the University of Georgia, digs into the deep links between Orbánism and the American right.With two days to go, hopes (and fears of hubris) are high. The latest independent polls suggest Tisza could even win a two-thirds majority that would allow a Magyar government to rewrite the constitution, purge Orbánism from the institutions and restore liberal democracy and political pluralism. But how trusted is he to do this?Magyar is “not a leader who Hungarian opposition-minded individuals suddenly decided to follow,” says Ábel. “He’s more of a surfer. He’s riding the waves of huge, huge dissatisfaction with the Orbán regime”. “The Tisza voting coalition is basically a lot of left-leaning and liberal voters, and then also a few right-wing voters, which is a very broad coalition that you need to hold together,” says Gabriela. “The fact of the matter is that you needed that in Hungary to unseat Viktor Orbán because of the way the electoral system is made … It only works that way. You need to have a big party, a big-tent party to unseat Viktor Orbán and from then on, and you can rebuild”.Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022. This is the last podcast on Hungary but we will be back soon to talk European politics from a liberal-democratic perspective and especially for 2027 and elections in France, Italy, Spain, Poland and Slovakia. So, subscribe (free) to the podcast and to 242.news. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com

Fearing electoral defeat on April 12, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán begged for an endorsement visit from Donald Trump but will have to make do with an April 7-8 fly-by from vice-president JD Vance and his wife.That Orbán believes Vance’s endorsement could push him over the line is in keeping with an election campaign in which the ruling Fidesz party has focused on nothing but their champion’s experience on the foreign stage and hysterical warnings that Péter Magyar, Orbán’s challenger, will follow the EU and Ukraine into war with Russia. No friend of Ukraine or Europe, Vance can be trusted to stick to this line but independent polling strongly suggests it’s not working. “If the issue is that your wife wants to give birth in the local hospital and there’s no doctor to help her so you have to travel hundreds of kilometres to the more central hospital, I don’t think Vance makes a big difference,” says political scientist Miklós Sükösd on the latest Twenty-Four Two Podcast. “Diehard Fidesz fans? But even for them … the voting base of Orbán is older people in the countryside, especially in villages – it’s only in villages where he has a large constituency now and less-educated people including the Roma minority. Those people don’t care about Vance”.Our 15-episode series on Hungary’s pivotal election has covered everything from Orbánism to economics to corruption and false-flag attacks but, until today, we hadn’t dissected Orbán’s rival. The perfectly named Magyar turned on Fideszworld only two years ago and built a mass movement from scratch. Who is he? Where did he come from? How different from Orbán is he? And can he be trusted to return liberal democracy to Hungary after 16 years of creeping autocracy and a “mafia state”?To answer these questions, there’s no one better than Miklós Sükösd. A media scholar and associate professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen, Sükösd wrote The Challenge – an epic four-part (so far) study of Magyar for HVG – and will publish a book later this year on the man who may be Hungary’s next prime minister. Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com

It’s T-minus 14 days until an election that will decide whether Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister since 2010 and icon for global nativism, gets another four-year term for Fidesz or is ousted by Péter Magyar’s Tisza movement.In the final days of the campaign, Fidesz is throwing everything - allegations of sexual misconduct and drug use, claims of interference by the Ukrainian “terrorist state”, intelligence-service surveillance, and a visit by US vice-president J.D. Vance - at Magyar. Yet the latest Median poll shows a growing lead for Tisza - a centre-right party founded only six years ago and repurposed in 2024 as a Magyar vehicle.As an electoral coalition, Tisza - binding together urban liberals and disgruntled non-metropolitan conservatives - is proving uniquely difficult for Fidesz to kill. “This is a special opportunity to get rid of Orbán,” says László Andor, the secretary-general of the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS) - a Brussels-based think tank affiliated to the Party of European Socialists (PES).“There are many people who now say they will vote for Tisza on April 12 but not because they’re enthusiastic, not because they would want to stay with them for a long time but in order to benefit from this joy: the person of the prime minister would change in Hungary after 16 years and this Fidesz gang could be sent into retirement or maybe worse. This is about one opportunity”.This joy is tempered for Andor, an economist who advised Hungarian centre-left prime minister Péter Medgyessy (2002-24) and served as European commissioner for employment and social affairs (2010-2014) under president José Durão Barroso. It is “not good if Hungary, with all this jubilation, delivers a parliament without a centre-left or without a left at all,” he tells the Twenty-Four Two Podcast. “In all likelihood, Hungary ends up now with a parliament with the centre-right, the far-right and the extreme-right or maybe just the centre-right and the far-right. That’s not something people normally celebrate in the European Union. I would certainly not celebrate this”. If Tisza wins the election, Andor hopes the left will quickly start preparing for municipal and European Parliament elections in 2029. “That’s a lot of time to prepare, to come forward with new initiatives … Normally, in order to have progressive parties, you need progressive movements. You need a trade union movement with more energy. You need environmentalist movements. You need a student movement. You need a feminist movement. You need a peace movement. You need all different type of movements … to uphold politically the progressive alternative in a country”. Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com

Open a history of Europe with “everything changed on the morning of Thursday 24th of February 2022” and you will have the undivided attention of the Twenty Four Two podcast.Roderick Beaton’s Europe: A New History, published today by Penguin, reframes the last 2,500 years as the story of an idea. Starting with the Greek city states and Herodotus’s conjuring-up of “Europe” as the antithesis of “Asia”, he takes “Rome” all the way from the city republic via Constantinople to the demise of its namesake empire two millennia later. He examines Europe as both Christendom and competing Christianities, and covers invasions and assimilations, mass migrations, superstates and nation states all the way to the Ukrainian bulwark against Putinist “anti-Europe”.Beaton fears that Europe in 2026 is too like the ancient Greek city states, who chose division in the face of a ruthless neighbour. “It reminds me so much of what’s in that ghastly US document that came out at the end of last year, the strategy document, where the current White House wants to see a Europe in which European states double down on their distinctive identity,” he tells Tim G. Jones on the podcast. “I mean, it’s classic divide and rule. You can see exactly why a large military power might want to see that happen. But, from the point of view of Europe … it’s a red flag. It’s an example from the past”.Knighted in 2019, Roderick Beaton is Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College London. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com