Budapest

We are now moving from Budapest to Serbia, where I am joined by Dragana Djurica — Secretary General of the European Movement in Serbia, who also sits on the board of the European Movement International. Before that, she spent almost ten years as a senior expert at the Regional Cooperation Council. We begin with a question that concerns far more than the Western Balkans: has Serbia been lost on Eur...

It is time for Budapest to move to Russia, with Maria Mikaelyan — architect, activist, and co-founder of the Community of Free Russians in Italy, and one of the voices challenging Vladimir Putin's regime from exile. We start from a straightforward question: can you fight an autocracy from abroad? For Maria, the answer came at a personal cost. Supporting Alexei Navalny's movement, opposing the war...

For this episode of Budapest, I am joined by Sandro Gozi, Member of the European Parliament for Renew Europe, Secretary General of the European Democratic Party, and President of the Union of European Federalists — and one of the most convinced and articulate Europeanists I know. We begin in Belgrade, where students have taken to the streets against Aleksandar Vučić's increasingly authoritarian ru...

For this episode of Budapest, I am joined by Cas Mudde — distinguished research professor at the University of Georgia and one of the world's foremost scholars of the far right and populism, whose work spans European politics, the radical right, and the unexpected connection between soccer and politics. Budapest, as he reminds us, is not just a city: it is in ourselves. The line between liberal an...

Catherine Fieschi has spent years studying one of the defining political forces of our time: populism. Founder of Counterpoint, visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, and fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, she is among the sharpest observers of how democracies are challenged from within. In this episode, we explore why populism should not be dismissed as anger, protest, or pol...

Greg Hands has been involved in British politics and public life for over 30 years. He served as Member of Parliament for Chelsea and Fulham from 2005 to 2024 and held several key government roles, including Minister for the Budget, Energy, and Trade, as well as Chairman of the Conservative Party. Brexit, he argues, definitively broke a taboo: a country as deeply tied to the European Union as the...

For the sixth episode of Budapest, I was joined by Thomas Carothers — senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and one of the world's leading scholars of democratic backsliding and democracy promotion. From the United States to Poland, autocracies don't rise by chance — they follow a playbook. Together with Thomas, we explore how that playbook deploys, how to recognise it b...

Catherine De Vries is Vice Dean and Professor of Political Science at IE University, where she specialises in far-right politics, populism, and European public opinion. De Vries brings a scholar's rigour and a rare gift for connecting theory to everyday life. The far right succeeds not by solving problems, but by being seen to take them seriously. Politics, she argues, is not only about facts — it...

For the fourth episode of Budapest, I was joined by Marika Mikiashvili — lecturer at Alte University in Tbilisi, and Secretary for Foreign Affairs of Droa, part of the Coalition for Change, Georgia's largest democratic alliance. Georgia sits at a strategic crossroads in the South Caucasus — and its ruling party, Georgian Dream, has been steadily opening the door to Russian influence. How does a go...

For the third episode of Budapest, I spoke to Péter Krekó, director of the Political Capital Institute and one of Hungary's leading experts on disinformation, working in partnership with the European Digital Media Observatory. As a behavioral and political scientist as well as a disinformation expert, in this episode he takes us into the nuances of a regime that can be considered hybrid. Since 201...

For the second episode of Budapest, I was joined by Cecilia Malmström — former MEP, European Commissioner, and Swedish EU Minister — one of the key figures in European Union trade policy over the past two decades. Trade was long conceived as a strategy to strengthen bonds between countries, and helped hundreds of millions come out of poverty. When did it become a means for aggressive foreign polic...

In my inaugural episode, I sit down with Nathalie Tocci — Director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali, former special advisor to EU High Representatives Mogherini and Borrell, and one of Europe's leading voices on foreign policy. From Trump's legacy to Greenland, from Iran's streets to Meloni's true intentions, we map the global state of liberal democracy — where it's crumbl...

Budapest is a podcast about the crisis of liberal democracy. Why it happens. How we fight back.