Nine months into the second Babiš government, Czech politics has settled into a pattern that neither its supporters nor its opponents predicted in October 2025. The coalition has not collapsed. It has also not delivered the rupture with Brussels and Kyiv that its campaign promised. What has emerged instead is a government that concedes on substance while holding the rhetorical line, and a presidency that has turned a largely ceremonial office into the main institutional check on the cabinet.

The numbers are now official. The Office for National Statistics projects that approximately seven million migrants will arrive in the United Kingdom over the ten years leading to 2034, pushing the national population to a record 71 million. No democratic mandate was sought for this. No referendum was held. It was simply administered. Seven million migrants will come to the UK in the next decade, pushing the nation's population to a record high, according to official data.

Two franchise models have now had sufficient time to be evaluated on their results. The right-populist franchise delivered sovereignty theater and institutional corrosion. The left-progressive franchise delivered solidarity theater and policy incoherence. Both failed on the same metric: material conditions for ordinary people did not improve under either model, and in several cases measurably worsened. The electorate is not ideologically sophisticated in the academic sense, but it is ruthlessly empirical in the practical sense.

Why Orbán’s Fall Would Matter More Than Trump’s The franchise metaphor is more precise than it might first appear, and precision is where the insight lives. A business franchise operates on a core proposition: the model has been proven to work, the brand conveys that proof, and new operators buy in not just to run a business but to inherit a playbook. The playbook is the product. In neo-autocracy, the playbook is: capture the judiciary first, then the media, then the electoral rules.

Friedrich Merz is not the most charismatic leader in Europe. He is not the most rhetorically gifted, the most ideologically coherent, or the most beloved by his own party’s base. He is something rarer and, in the current environment, considerably more valuable: he is a leader whose actions are consistently more serious than his words, which in European politics today represents a distinct minority position. The standard against which to measure him is the field he actually inhabits.

When the drafters of the EU Constitution debated whether to include a reference to Europe’s Christian heritage, the argument was not really about religion. It was about which version of European identity would be enshrined as foundational — the one rooted in a specific civilizational tradition, or the one that emerged from Enlightenment universalism by bracketing that tradition. Secularism won, officially. But the question it was designed to close keeps reopening.

The short answer is that the European public would react badly to any “Growth First” agenda premised on welfare retrenchment — but the more interesting question is which publics, and on what timeline — because Europe is not a monolith, and the political economy of welfare retrenchment plays out very differently depending on where you are standing. The historical record on this is fairly unambiguous. Every serious attempt to structurally trim European welfare states — Schröder’s Agenda 2010, Sarkozy’s pension reforms, the austerity packages imposed on Greece, Portugal, and Spain after 2010 — generated fierce political backlash, often with lasting consequences.