Ivan Krastev on Why Even Dictators Can’t Escape Democracy

This is why for Europeans, the crisis of the relations with the United States is not the crisis of European interests, but European identity. If America is not what we believe that it was, who are we? And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. You know, one of the wonderful things about doing this podcast is that I get some nice compliments on it, and I get a lot of people saying, that guess was amazing, this guess was super interesting.

Whenever I publish an episode with Ivan Khrushchev, I get so many emails, I get so many people telling me, I love Ivan, or some people saying, I've never heard of this guy. This is incredible. And it's always just a special treat. uh to speak to Ivan because he has a capacity to to make sense of the world, to illuminate things, and also to complicate things. A lot of people are able to say surprising things, but normally when they say surprising things, you don't believe him.

Ivan is one of the few who just consistently says surprising things about the world and you think about it for a moment, you say, oh yes, that allows me to see something about the world that I really had not understood until that moment. And so it's a special pleasure to have Ivan back on the podcast for, I think, our fourth uh solo conversation. We are talking about the big news of the last 48 hours, the uh defeat of Viktor Orban in Hungary, uh, the victory of Peter Magia. We try to understand what led Orban to lose control over this country.

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