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.

Dear Twenty-Four Two subscriber,

If your interest in Europe strays beyond the political into economics and monetary policy, click here to read my new long-form profile of Pablo Hernández de Cos - another contender to replace Christine Lagarde at the helm of the European Central Bank. If you’re not an aficionado, I recommend staying here.

Best, Tim.

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.

Back for one episode only at 242econ: The Chair, a nine-part podcast series on the US Federal Reserve behind closed doors.

Over The Chair’s two seasons, I talked to authors of books about the Fed’s most consequential chiefs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell.

The Powell podcast was meant to be the last but, after Kevin Warsh took over on 22 May 2026 and started preparing for his first policy meeting as chairman in mid-June, a ninth episode became irresistible. Who is this Republican hawk-turned-dove? As one voting policymaker among 12, has he dangerously over-promised to a volatile and cornered president?

To discuss Warsh, I’m joined by three “Fed watchers” – Claire Jones from the Financial Times, Catarina Saraiva from Bloomberg News, and Michael Redmond from Medley Advisors. “I think [Warsh] has upset a lot of people with the criticisms that he’s had of the Fed,” says Claire. “I think there’s just this sense where people are worried because they’re thinking: ‘What did you have to say in order to get this job? What have you promised to the administration in order to get this job?’ So, there’s those issues of trust”.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

Podcast production by Emin Fikić and artwork by Abbie Hutchins

In March 1983, after struggling for two years to balance a super-expansionary programme with currency stability, France’s left-wing government suffered a devastating local-election defeat.

Victory for the right in more than 30 cities caused internal arguments that had plagued François Mitterrand’s first administration to crescendo. Should they continue socialism in one country despite haemorrhaging support from voters and investors, or make a decisive tournant to economic orthodoxy? While influential figures argued for tariffs and devaluations to sustain the dream, Mitterrand’s prime and finance ministers – Pierre Mauroy and Jacques Delors – wanted to tighten the budget and curb inflation. Within days of the local-election drubbing, Mitterrand picked a side – lifting taxes and cutting spending as part of a new strategy that eventually readied France for German reunification and the euro.

Forty-three years on, Mitterrand’s British sister party faces an equivalent moment. For five years under Keir Starmer, Labour’s leadership claimed it could “Make Brexit Work”. But it couldn’t - not outside the European Economic Area (EEA), the 30-nation single market that encompasses the EU, Norway and Iceland. In thrall to Blue Labour Brexiters and Remainiac-turned-Trumper Peter Mandelson, Starmer thought economic “alignment” with the EU and the “special relationship” with the US would do. Within those parameters, he and chancellor Rachel Reeves could solve the UK’s post-2008 productivity puzzle and enact “Moonshot” economics1. This didn’t even survive first contact with their first budget but Starmer, Reeves and the Downing Street operation made things far worse with their abysmal expectations management, perpetual policy reversals and their inability to quit Mandelson. Above all, they took pride in a “punch a hippy”2 strategy of alienating their young, city-dwelling, europhile and socially liberal base in unrequited pursuit of older, small-town conservatives3. The predictable result was this week’s extinction-level event in England’s local elections and nationals in Wales and Scotland. In coalition with the Conservatives, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is on course to win the general election due by mid-2029.

Worse than a crime

That sounds terminal until you recall that Mitterrand and his socialists were re-elected in 1988. Starmer and his inevitable replacement could interpret this week’s results as yet another vote against the metropolitan, latte-sipping, Guardian-reading elite. They could stick with their European “red lines”, try to outdo Reform and the Greens on “change”, talk about nothing but Gaza and “small boats”, and find unlimited public spending from “waste” and wealth taxes. They could do this, but it would be bad politics as well as bad policy. To cite another Frenchman: It would be worse than a crime; it would be an error.

Reform won a quarter of the national vote on turnout well below 50%, performing especially well in areas that voted heavily for Brexit in 2016 and badly everywhere else. Ten years on, Brexit is unpopular. A YouGov poll conducted in late-February found that 55% of respondents believed 2016 voters were “wrong to vote to leave” while 32% regretted nothing. Today, net Bregret is felt across every demographic segment but one - men (56/36%), women (55/27%), 18-24 year olds (76/10%), 25-29s (63/21%), higher-income households (64/27%), lower-middle (49/38%) and working-class voters (47/35%), as well as people in the North (51/35%) and Midlands (49/34%). The last holdouts are over-65s. They may not be working themselves but they’re still making Brexit work by 52/39%.

This is a gift to post-election Labour, whose revised core offer should be a return to Europe’s single market. Too slow for Labour’s political needs, Stella Creasy’s incrementalism via a Swiss model is no longer an option. Labour’s new leadership must offer a return to a (reformed) EEA together with proportional representation to protect the settlement from minority landslides. Labour shouldn’t hold 63% of House of Commons seats with 34% of the 2024 national vote but neither should the Tories have taken 56% of the chamber with 44%. On taking office, the new Labour premier should initiate negotiations with the EU and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), working together with Norway and Iceland to democratise the EEA. While they are free to lobby in their interest during the EU lawmaking process, the EEA’s non-EU members have no vote when it comes to adopting single-market legislation. The EU itself knows this rule-taking is unsustainable. In a 2016 paper for the Fondation Robert Schuman, Thierry Chopin and Jean-François Jamet proposed amending Article 7 of the 1994 treaty to make the 30-minister EEA Council the competent legislative body for single-market legislation that applies to all area members.

The market is the prize

Why settle for the EEA – even a democratised version? After all, full-fat Rejoin is all the rage after persuasive editorials from Ben Judah, Ian Dunt, Simon Nixon, Tom Baldwin all the way to Neil Kinnock, a much-loved Labour leader, and Philip Rycroft, a lead negotiator for withdrawal in 2016-19. I take Dunt’s point that Rejoin “is the cleanest political argument … [that] provides a chance to bring the progressive voting bloc under Labour leadership”. The YouGov survey survey found only 49/23% support for single-market membership versus 55/34% for Rejoin. A Survation poll of Labour Party members, who will after all elect the new leader, conducted on 17-22 April, found a whopping 87% in favour of full re-accession.

However, while some are sure to say that the EFTA and EEA renegotiations will be fraught, they will be as nothing compared to re-accession to the union. For those who don’t know, let me tell you what EEA membership includes and what it leaves out. It means free movement of goods, services, and capital, allowing firms to operate across the 30 economies without subsidiaries and compete equally for public contracts. Crucially, it also means a restoration of Britons’ free movement throughout the EU, an end to the 90-day rule, and the ability to work anywhere - a freedom the young want more than any of the union’s extras. Inside the EEA but outside the EU, we would not be part of the unloved common agricultural or fisheries policies. We would have no overpaid and underworked MEPs or elections that do nothing but benefit extremists, and no European commissioner (a prize to anyone who can name two out of Britain’s 15, excluding Mandelson). There will be a membership fee in the form of grants to channel into the union’s poorest regions but no direct contribution to the “Brussels budget”. This isn’t politically risk-free but the UK has already got away with paying to play in the Erasmus+ and Horizon education and research programmes.

Compare this to the politics of full re-accession. In his post, Ben Judah describes the claim that this would take “years of painful wrangling” as “another myth”. “[W]e have not meaningfully diverged, meaning it can be done relatively fast”. That’s true of single-market law, as the latest UK In A Changing Europe divergence tracker confirms, but that’s not what joining the union would be about. On top of making the entirely makeable case for free movement that comes with the EEA, the government would have to explain why €20 billion a year has to go to the EU budget without Margaret Thatcher’s hard-won rebate. It means renegotiating farm subsidies, fish quotas, personnel allocations, and - whether Rejoiners want to admit it or not - a Danish-style formal opt-out from the euro. Personally, I’d be happy to swap the e-pound for the e-euro but I’m atypical. The Survation poll of Labour members (not even the general public) found support for Rejoin dropping by more than 30 points if this meant adopting the euro. Yes, Sweden has a quarter-century workaround to show how this can be avoided but, as the 2016 campaign over budgetary contributions and Turkish accession showed, when you’re explaining, you’re losing.

Then there’s the small questions of timescale and ratification. Negotiating full accession will take years, at least one and probably two referendums, and the EU side will need to feel confident that Brexit II won’t quickly follow. Since a return to the single market still keeps us outside the union, no referendum is needed. As Theresa May said more than once, “Brexit means Brexit”. The 2029 general election can ratify the results of the negotiations (and their PR insurance policy). And, by making this central to the election campaign, this has the added political benefit of forcing defectors to the Greens and Liberal Democrats back into the camp.

Leader of the outs

A final but essential element to this plan is to make it not all about us. One of Dunt’s arguments for full Rejoin is that the EU is not the organisation we left in 2020. Hungarian vetoes and the need for speed over Covid and Ukraine led to the bending of normal EU procedures and the formation of ad hoc policy clubs. This is true but is, in my view, a stronger argument for the market-only strategy. Let’s restore our European economic bedrock and maintain the flexibility to build from there. By the way, this isn’t English shopkeepery - prioritising ease of business over values. Those values aren’t expressed through common agricultural and fisheries policies, painful and lowest-common-denominator statement drafting and electing Farage to an 11-year term in the European Parliament. Especially today - this very day as Péter Magyar is sworn in as Hungarian prime minister - Europe’s core values are expressed through free movement, respect for liberal-democratic norms and the rule of law, and willingness to defend these against autocratic invaders.

We don’t need to be inside the EU to do that. As the leader of Europe’s vanguard military and diplomatic power4 pointed out, NATO will soon need to be replaced by a new military alliance encompassing the EU’s martial states, Britain, Turkey and Norway. Building this alliance will be the job of nation states, not the EU. But, at the same time, London cannot afford to repeat decades of pitting states and alternative alliances against the union. Throughout their career in the European communities and the union, British governments were notorious – not least with their own frustrated diplomats – for failing to build and sustain alliances. The Ukrainians, above all, understand that memberships and alliances are complementary. By starting a concerted process this year to move back into the EEA’s halfway house, the new British government could lead Ukraine, Moldova and the Western Balkans into a new post-2022, post-Trump European economic and security architecture.

Today, opportunity knocks for Starmer and his successor. Boxed in fiscally, they have a unique chance to design a cost-free governing programme that would energise their collapsing base, re-attract defectors, force Farage back onto Brexit terrain he’d vacated, and restore Britain as a continental diplomatic player. This is Labour’s last chance but, if Rejoiners shoot too high and miss, it could also be the country’s last chance to repair the self-inflicted damage of this lowest and most dishonest decade.

So, fare-ill Viktor Orbán.

He’ll still be Hungary’s prime minister for another two weeks, but Orbán’s defeat on April 12 was so crushing and his successor’s exertion of power so complete that this 16-year fixture in European politics is already just a chalk outline.

Blissful as it was to watch Budapest celebrate his demise and anticipate the roll-up of his accumulative state1 and the de-funding of his foreign entourage, the militant democrats among us know this is just one battle in a forever war. The tide will never turn against populism or authoritarianism. Keeping a majority coalition in favour of free and fair economic and political competition is a permanent revolution. It’s a complex argument for managed uncertainty against three-word slogans and a promise to stop the world changing. Sustaining consensual efforts to boost growth while rebalancing public finances and containing ethnic, cultural and religious resentments is the work of political wunderkinder. And they’re a rare breed, especially now.

In Europe alone, elections are looming that will pitch the open society against its enemies in Sweden, three eastern German states, Italy, Spain, Slovakia, Poland and – the big one – France. Outside Europe, the most consequential choices between liberalism and illiberalism will be in Israel and the US, where midterms will deprive Donald Trump of at least one Congressional house and launch a succession battle. With Orbán out and Trump emasculated, the central obstacles to Europe and its economic, political and military ambitions will be out of the way. Right?

Wrong. Orbán, like the British before him, has been a convenient invisibility cloak for governments who, even now, worry about poking Moscow, losing their last drops of Russian energy, re-arming, and provoking their farmers. As for the maniac 77,302,580 Americans chose to return to office, does anyone believe he will smile and accept his new impotence? In his latest Inside Trump’s Head podcast, Trump-watcher Michael Wolff revealed that White House advisers were attempting to “course-correct” in time for the midterms but …

Postwar reckoning

The return of Greenland as a transatlantic divider is bad enough but it won’t stop there. Once he’s paid Iran to pretend to lose and forced the hoodwinked Israelis into a premature settlement, Trump will turn on those European Judases. His most obvious act will be a performative exit from NATO. Actual Yanxit™ requires a two-thirds Senate majority Trump won’t obtain followed by a year’s notice, during which the US is still bound by the treaty’s collective-defence clause. Sure. Our enemies will know by then (if they don’t already) that the US will never come to a fellow NATO member’s aid. NATO is now nothing but mutual convenience. On the Europeans’ side – satellite surveillance, strategic airlift, pay-to-play missile defence and an established integrated command. For the Americans – European intelligence sharing (redacted for the director of national security, obviously) and strategically placed bases in Ramstein, Grafenwöhr, Lakenheath, Aviano and Rota. The desire to keep those goodies may just be enough for the Pentagon to resist orders from Trump and his compliant defence secretary to deploy the 11th Airborne to Nuuk.

At the same time as he’s ordering withdrawal from NATO and threatening Greenland, Trump will be unable to resist threatening or even imposing higher tariffs on imported goods from the EU and the UK. The US-UK and US-EU trade “deals” struck in May and July last year were never more than bids at deflection to buy time until the end of his term or life – whichever came first. Today, they’re legislated, zombie agreements that apply until Trump is offended by British failure to join his bombing campaign over Iran or realises that the EU hasn’t paid him a promised €600 billion in cash.

Today, European policymakers come in four flavours. The first, personified by NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte, is disappearing by the day. Like Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, Rutte is so obsessed with hugging Washington close to stave off isolationism that he takes sides against the rest of the alliance to avoid something that’s already happened. For all his big talk of strategic autonomy, Emmanuel Macron is closer to this flavour than the other two. Heading type two is Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, who has conjured passive indifference to European collective security into an active campaign against Israel and the US. Naturally, this is about domestic politics rather than international principle but it’s an appealing model – working for Gerhard Schröder in 2002 and Orbán in 2022 – and one that Keir Starmer, his British counterpart, typically found too late and too hesitantly.

In third place is Alex Stubb, Finland’s president. As commander in chief of a frontline military that is used to semi-detachment from NATO, Stubb leads the realist faction – using golf to manage Trump but preparing at speed for the end of the alliance and a potential war with Russia. European NATO should hang on to US intelligence, surveillance and targeting support for as long as possible, the Stubbers believe, but not at the expense of Denmark’s sovereignty. Flavour four is Ukraine - the European country with the most skin in the game, which has come to accept that Washington is no longer an ally and sees its role as imposing Russia’s needs on Kyiv. As a counterweight, the Ukrainians are shopping for new allies in the Gulf and a post-Netanyahu Israel while proposing a new security architecture for Europe encompassing the EU’s martial powers plus Norway, the UK and Turkey.

With the exception of Kyiv, the Europeans are preparing for the formal end of the transatlantic alliance but still too slowly. Defence spending has increased substantially but, as the public dispute between Britain’s Labour government and the party’s most distinguished living defence secretary shows, the real choice between arms and alms still has to be made. Germany has so much to catch up and so much fiscal space that it can dodge this for now while Italy and Spain have no intention of facing it. The French and British still want to be continental hard powers but have yet to make the case to voters.

It’s just the latest example of Juncker’s curse2. Governments (and not just those in Europe) will do nothing ambitious until they are out of options. They keep believing there’s still hope of saving the US alliance. There isn’t. Since nothing in life happens that hasn’t been trailed by Douglas Adams, Stephen Fry or Aaron Sorkin, the European dilemma recalls a story told to the president by his priest in West Wing: Take This Sabbath Day …

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this series distributed by the New Books Network in 2024-25, Tim Gwynn Jones interviewed eight writers about their biographies of chairs of the US Federal Reserve, featuring …

• Mark Nelson on Marriner Eccles

• Bob Bremner on Bill Martin

• Wyatt Wells on Arthur Burns

• Bill Silber on Paul Volcker

• Sebastian Mallaby on Alan Greenspan

• David Wessel on Ben Bernanke

• Jon Hilsenrath on Janet Yellen

• Nick Timiraos on Jerome Powell

• 2026 special: Claire Jones, Michael Redmond, Catarina Saraiva on Kevin Warsh

In 2022-24, Tim Gwynn Jones interviewed officials who shaped the EU.

• “Market pressure was growing by the day” — Charles Dallara, 19 March 2024.

• “We couldn’t accept that Spain could do better than Italy” — Vincenzo Visco, 18 June 2023.

• “He was definitely not amused” — Lex Hoogduin, 5 May 2023.

• “Now maybe we’re a bit spoiled” — Klaus Regling, 4 March 2023.

• “We backed down and we started again” — Andrew McDowell, 17 February 2023.

• “Trust was thin on the ground” — Georges Heinrich, 6 January 2023.

• “Look into my eyes: you’re gonna go bankrupt” — Thomas Wieser, 9 December 2022.

• “Reality took its revenge” — Ramon Fernandez, 12 November 2022.

• “Putin didn’t know that he actually united Europe” — Erkki Liikanen, 22 October 2022.

From 2020-25, Tim Gwynn Jones did 95 interviews for the New Books Network on European affairs and economics. Highlights included conversations with:

• Anne Applebaum on “Autocracy Inc”. (June 2024).

• Yaroslav Trofimov, Simon Shuster (January 2024), Illia Ponomarenko, Jen Stout (May 2024) and Tom Mutch (May 2025) on reporting from the Ukraine war.

• John Cochrane, Luis Garicano, and Klaus Masuch on how to end the euro’s “crisis cycle” (June 2025).

• Matt Sleat and Paul Kelly on “post-liberalism” (December 2025).

• Lorenzo Castellani on “Mussolini’s Technocrat” (October 2025).

• Vuk Vuksanović on Serbia’s balancing act between Russia and the West (March 2025).

• Isaac Stanley-Becker on the history of the Schengen Area and Gabriel Gavin on reporting from the Nagorno-Karabakh wars (January 2025).

• Marko Attila Hoare on the surreal history of Serbia (February 2024).

• Mark Gilbert on the neglected history of postwar Italian democracy (June 2024).

• Benjamin Schupmann on when democracies are allowed to turn “militant” in their own defence and Dmitry Grozoubinski on “Why Politicians Lie About Trade” (May 2024).

• Michael Kimmage on the origins of Russia-Ukraine war and “the new global instability” (February 2024).

• Peter Foster on the predictable failure of Brexit (September 2023).

A reading list recommended by each interviewee can be found here.

From 2024 until mid-2026, Tim Jones and Pepijn Bergsen participated in Medley Advisors’ podcasts on markets and policymaking.

If these MAGA darlings are driven from office, it will be in large part due to their increasingly flagrant corruption. Losing 15 points since 2012, Hungary’s slide in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) is the steepest ever recorded for an EU member state.

High-profile cases involving Orbán’s father, brother-in-law, close childhood friend and former chief economic adviser have dominated independent media since the 2022 election. What’s worse: this has been fed by EU transfers. The Corruption Research Center Budapest (CRCB) calculates that the net value of contracts awarded (often without competition) to 13 Orbán cronies since 2010 exceeds €19 billion.

“The luxury lifestyle, it’s extreme,” says Dávid Jancsics, author of the 2024 book Sociology of Corruption: Patterns of Illegal Association in Hungary. “It’s not like they have a nice car. No, they have five Ferraris so it’s a different level ... The luxury lifestyle of the political elite is visible. What people see is Ferraris, Lamborghinis, properties in fancy locations ... Dubai, New York City ... When you are struggling with your bills, it’s especially annoying to see this extreme wealth”.

Dávid Jancsics is a professor at San Diego State University. Before leaving the band in 1999 to start his career in sociology, Jancsics played bass guitar with Budapest thrash/hardcore punk trio Leukémia. A reunion two years ago led to a new single in December 2025.

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.

He and his Fidesz party have turned the dial to 11 in their campaign against Péter Magyar’s Tisza movement, who - they claim - plan to sell-out Hungarians to the EU and to Woke globalists while forcing them into joining Ukraine’s war against Russia.

Independent polling suggests the demonisation of Ukraine and its president may be only working with voters at the margin. The electorate seems to be motivated more by Hungary’s stagflationary environment, which has not been helped by the surge in oil and natural-gas prices caused by the US-Israeli war with Iran.

The outlook for growth in Hungary “might be made a lot worse by ... the energy-price shock that Europe is being hit by now,” says Twenty-Four Two co-host Pepijn Bergsen. “If the suggestion is that Hungary would probably be hit harder than many others in the region, I don’t think that they have a good answer to that. Just trying to cap retail-energy prices is not going to work. It’s too costly, which is why you also get Orbán explicitly arguing for sanctions reductions, particularly on Russian energy. The rest of Europe isn’t going to go along with that anytime soon”.

In this episode, Pepijn and co-host Tim Jones discuss the latest polls, the vicious turn in the campaign, Volodymyr Zelensky as Emmanuel Goldstein, and the overdue fiscal and political bill from 16 years of Orbánomics.

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.

Dear Twenty-Four Two subscribers,

Four years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and indirectly launched this newsletter, 242.news is expanding into the economics of the new Europe with 242econ.

This pull-out section will start out as a platform for publishing long-form profiles of key policymakers - especially those at the European Central Bank.

The first of these - on Klaas Knot, one of the two favourites to succeed Christine Lagarde as ECB president - is published here today.

Bafflingly, not everyone is interested in monetary policy but, if you’re one of the tribe, click through and subscribe separately (still free of charge) to 242econ. This will ensure you receive future profiles and other features as they come online.

Best, Tim.

Yet, a system rigged in Fidesz’s favour by 16 years of unconstrained gerrymandering, media control and pre-election fiscal bribes could still see MAGA’s closest European ally returned to office.

“Hungary is trailing behind Russia by ten years and that’s true for almost everything,” Márton Schlanger, a political polling analyst at the Republikon Institute, tells the Twenty-Four Two Podcast. “It’s the same in ways of campaigning and how blatantly, outrageously confident the governing party can be in manipulating the public and manipulating the elections”.

Hungarian polling has become deeply politicised as independent firms like Republikon, Medián, 21, Závecz and Publicus publish surveys diverging radically from those released by government-aligned bodies including pop-up organisations claiming Fidesz leads. Medián, in particular, is accused by Orbán and allies of manipulating data to produce a bombshell poll, which calculated a 20-point Tisza lead among voters who had chosen a party and would definitely participate on April 12.

“I’m not sure if I’m flattered or scared about all of the attention that polls are receiving in this campaign, not just in the past months, but ever since the [2024] clemency scandal and Tisza appeared on the field, it has been immense,” says Schlanger.

The US-Israeli war with Iran and Fidesz’s intensified campaign against Ukraine has diverted attention from the incumbents’ economic mismanagement and corruption that has been driving support for Magyar and Tisza. “It could help Fidesz but, overall, I don’t think that this will turn the tide in itself,” says Schlanger.

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.

For weeks, billboards and digital publications have been flooded with AI-generated pictures of warmongering EU leaders and Péter Magyar, Orbán’s challenger, loading Zelensky with money. Now, Orbán has taken this a step further by blocking the release of €90 billion from the EU to Kyiv after Russian oil supplied via the Druzhba pipeline was suspended due to damage at a western Ukrainian pumping station.

To talk about this dispute and energy nationalism generally, Magyar’s increasing advantage and Fidesz’s growing panic, fears of a false flag operation and an election delay, Orbán’s miscalculations around “Peak Trump”, Ukraine’s European ambitions, and the EU’s wilful policy inertia, Twenty-Four Two’s co-hosts Tim Jones and Pepijn Bergsen are joined for a panel discussion by energy-geopolitics analyst Bill Farren-Price and veteran EU journalist Simon Taylor.

The latest EU-Hungary standoff over aiding Ukraine reveals the “learned helplessness of the leaders of one of the richest continents on earth being held back by the prime minister of a country of 10 million,” says Pepijn. “Guys, just throw together some guarantees, go to the markets, borrow some money, send it to the Ukrainians. It is literally that simple. Just set up a Zoom call without Viktor in it and get this done”.

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.

Mainstream publications Népszava and HVG have held the line but today, directly or indirectly, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz controls 80% of Hungary’s media market and actively hinders the work of independent outlets. The country now languishes in 68th place out of 180 in Reporters Without Borders’ world press freedom index.

As they lost their freedom to report, journalists founded alternative outlets - Telex, 24.hu, 444.hu, Partizán, Átlátszó and Direkt36 - or, like Szabolcs Dull, attracted a paying audience on Substack. But they all struggle to survive faced with an official campaign of harassment including smears, SLAPP suits, surveillance and legislative threats. After using a 2023 “sovereignty law” to investigate Átlátszó for allegedly serving foreign interests, the government introduced a bill last year to facilitate broader inquiries. In his new year speech last weekend, Orbán promised his post-election cabinet would finish the job and “clear out” unsympathetic media.

To talk about 16 years of media capture, this week’s guest is András Pethő, a co-founder of investigative-journalism hub Direkt36. We discussed the founding of the company, reporting in a backsliding democracy, lessons from The Washington Post and Direkt36’s successful transition to film-making with The Dynasty and The Trap.

This is the eighth podcast in a special 242.news series on the April 12 Hungarian election that could see Trump ally Viktor Orbán removed from power and replaced with Fidesz defector Péter Magyar. András and his colleagues wrote an insiders’ account of the failure of the opposition at the last election in 2022. This time is different, he says. “Fidesz, of course, never acknowledge it officially that they are behind in the polls but they are behaving very, very differently. They are much less confident than I’ve ever seen them in the last 20 years. So it’s a very different … campaign. But I think we’ve also learned one thing in the last 20 or 30 years … You can never underestimate [Orbán] and, and his party … This is a really, really crucial election for them because the stakes are super-high”.

Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - newsletter focused on the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.

The tricks could get a lot dirtier, warns this week’s guest Géza Jeszenszky, Hungary’s first post-communist foreign minister. Together with prime minister József Antall, he began the process of Hungary’s accession to the EU and NATO and sought to repair the now century-long damage caused by the Trianon treaty that ceded more than 2 million ethnic Hungarians to modern-day Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine.

At every election since 2010, Orbán has created bogeymen like George Soros to motivate his base. In 2022, he stoked fears that Hungarians would be sucked into a western war against Russia. In the four years since, his peacenikery has since evolved into a full-on anti-Ukrainianism that is growing as election day approaches. In the past week alone, Orbán has described Ukraine as Hungary’s “enemy” and the EU’s plans to fast-track Kyiv’s accession as an “open declaration of war” against Budapest.

Jeszenszky fears this hysterical rhetoric is less about mobilising support and more about laying the groundwork for a constitutional coup - a fear that only grew after reports in the Fidesz-allied media of threats by a ‘Ukrainian soldier’ to bomb schools in Hajdú–Bihar county. “My fear is that the very opposite is in his mind or in the mind of people around him: to postpone the election, not to hold the election,” he says, pointing out that the Fidesz-dominated parliament recently extended Hungary’s Covid-era emergency laws until mid-May. “Many of us, many Hungarians who are not really too friendly to Orbán can imagine that a kind of false flag operation may be committed - obviously directly by Russians or with the help of Russia - and something may happen, which can be presented as an act of aggression against Hungary”.

Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - newsletter focused on the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.

If you need a detox from US politics but still crave a nail-biting battle over the future of liberal democracy, this is the podcast series for you. Dropping every Sunday between now and Hungary’s election night, we bring you the latest campaign news plus expert guests covering politics, economics, history and culture.

This week, that guest is Zselyke Csaky from the Centre for European Reform in Brussels - author of a recent report on the election. A specialist in the EU’s institutions, elections, the rule of law and democratic backsliding, Zselyke was previously a researcher at EUI and Freedom House and is a graduate of the Central European University and Corvinus University Budapest.

We discuss how Magyar’s foreign policy would differ from Orbán’s, whether Magyar could form an eastern counterweight to the EU’s Franco-German axis, his chances of getting his hands on €18 billion of suspended EU funds for Hungary, and Donald Trump’s failure to provide meaningful support to Orbán.

“Trump hasn’t been the boon to Orban that many expected,” says Csaky. “Certainly he has received support rhetorically, and perhaps - although, at this point, it seems unlikely - Trump will visit Hungary before the vote. But, for Hungary itself, Trump hasn’t been that much of a success story - with the trade tariffs, with the uncertainty economically”.

Most EU countries and its Brussels institutions would welcome a change of government in April, she says, but “at the same time, I think there are expectations among some in Brussels that may be unrealistic. One expectation is that once Orbán is gone, everything will be fine. I would just like to dispel that myth, because it’s easy to point to Orbán as the person who blocks everything in Brussels right now. But we know that, behind him, there are other member states who like to hide, depending on interest. If Orbán is gone, these disagreements might come out into the open”.

Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - newsletter focused on the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.