455. Question Time: Is Europe Already At War With Russia?

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1:11Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Anastair Campbell. And Rory, we have some exciting news for our members. Tell them what it is. Well, we have done a deep dive on immigration for the Members Channel. And we've got some very different voices. We've got Zoe Gardner, who is, I guess we would say, on the liberal side of immigration. Probably actually, she contributed a video, which she sent in. She's a listener. And I think she had a lot of popular support from a lot of our members and listeners who broadly sympathize with her much more open liberal attitude.

1:44And then we had, I think, this really interesting, challenging voice, Gerald Knauss. Of who? Over to you. Well, Gerald has written a book about immigration and who regular listeners will have heard on Friday talking about the rise of the AFD. but he's somebody who has absolutely devoted the last couple of decades of his life to studying immigration and immigration policy. They've got a different take. They're both really passionate, really interesting, both got different sorts of insights. And I think this is, as you said in the podcast last week, this is one of the debates of our time. And really relevant for the whole world.

2:15I mean, we'll get on in this question time to talking a little bit about Moldova, Czech Republic, Netherlands, where immigration are huge issues. But of course, one of the things that's interesting about the debate is that Gerald and Zoe very much root it in Britain. What should Keir Sama be doing? What is Farage proposing? How do we think about these issues? How do we deal with them? Yeah. So that's out on Friday for members. Deep dive with Gerald Knauss and Zoe Gardner drops the members of the rest of his politics. Plus this Friday is a taster. How worried are you that the values have been eroded that actually people are saying just let them drown?

2:51We've had 30 ,000 people now in 10 years die in the Mediterranean. The deadliest border in the world is the border around the EU. We can't have a welfare state without immigration in this country, full stop. The fact of the matter is we depend on immigration. But that's not necessarily a reason not to have a camp. If people have a safe pathway to reach the UK, they don't get on the boats. You need a way of controlling borders that does not end up going down the Orban route, the Trump route or the Gaza route. If you can't stop the smugglers earning money and people drowning in the channel, the argument globally will be won by the Trump people.

3:50Abrahams wants to know our predictions for the Czech election, which is at the end of this week. As with Moldova, says Tilly, this feels like another significant event to test if the people will continue to resist Putin. What are your thoughts? Well, I was very, very happy about the results of Moldova. Yeah. So often, actually, I think we've got to remember to update people on these issues that we raise. So what we did last week is to talk about the fact that the Moldovan election was very tight. There was huge evidence of Russian interference. And indeed, a lot of the things that we predicted might happen did happen.

4:24There were indeed bomb scares at polling stations around Europe, even one in the United States, because Moldovans living outside Moldova are really important in the vote. We've talked in the podcast before about Moldova's very unique positions right there between Romania and Ukraine. And there's this territory called Transnistria, which is a Russian satellite which has broken away. And Maya Sandu, who was a World Bank official who came back to become the prime minister. And she's a really interesting figure, maybe a little bit reminiscent of the Georgian president that we interviewed. A little bit, you know, when you hear World Bank official coming back, does it feel a bit sort of 90s technocrat or a bit like Mario Monti taking over Italy?

5:12But she's been a miracle. She won an absolute majority set up her own party, won with that party. It's now won a referendum for joining the EU, won a majority again. And it's really good news for Europe. Yeah. And I've done some stuff with her before and I find her very impressive. I think it's really terrifying to be the leader of a country like Moldova right now. Population around 2 million on the border of Ukraine, absolutely on the list of countries that Putin would like to have within his sphere of orbit. And what we talked about last week, we said that the poll suggested it was going to be very, very, very, very close.

5:47She got over 50 % of the vote, and the block of three parties that was second got just over half of that. About 25%. Yeah. Turnout, though, they were celebrating the fact that the turnout was higher than before, but it's still only 52%, which is low. Very low. And there was a lot of problem accessing these polling stations. Of course, the pro-Russian side was saying that they were prevented from accessing the polling stations. And of course, the pro-European side was saying, well, one of the reasons why you had to get from the trans-nestrian border and then travel 20 kilometers to get to a polling station is they were worried about disruption on the other side.

6:22Just as we transitioned to the Czech Republic, it's something that maybe in Britain, because we're a little bit further away from the front line, we forget how in Moldova and as we're about to discover when we discuss the Czech election, how for countries in Central Eastern Europe, Ukraine defines so much. In this case, of course, it's all about Ukraine. Her economy is barely moving. She's been hit by these terrible energy price spikes because Russia controls her energy. And yet she's won. So the normal story would be, well, technocrat, World Bank, cost of living bad, energy bad. She's going to be booted out by the populace.

6:59And that, as we transition to the Czech Republic, is broadly the soaring of the Czech Republic. So all my friends who are kind of educated university professors and journalists in the Czech Republic will say basically about the last four years Czech government, the sort of things that one might be tempted to say if one was defending Keir Starmer, which is really good on foreign policy, serious people, but unfortunately have a real problem in communicating. And they've had a tough time with costs of living and energy prices in the Ukraine war. So this is Peter Fiala, the Keir Starmer figure that you're talking about.

7:32And he's up against Bavis, who has been prime minister before. I wonder whether the Moldova election will have a bit of an impact on this, because I get the sense, and this may be wishful thinking, but I get the sense that the sense of Russia being related to these populist parties of right and left, I think is out there. Maybe not yet in the UK as out there as it should be, but it's getting there. And so we'll see what happens in the Czech Republic, because the reason why Europe is watching this so closely is because if the pro-Russian, the more pro-Russian candidate gets in, then you have this little grouping of FICO in Slovakia, Orban, who, for a leader of a country of 5 million, we talk about an awful lot in this podcast, for a very good reason, by the way, and then Babis.

8:25And you've got a little kind of Eastern Bloc that is, frankly, you know, tending to act as a break on what the European Union is trying to do. So, yet again, this is essentially, with all the domestic stuff going on, there is also this battle between Europe and Russia. And this is a kind of bit of a proxy vote. Yeah. The Czech tradition since the fall of the Berlin Wall has been two totally separate traditions. The one that listeners will be very familiar with is the tradition of Václav Havel, who was president for 13 years, extraordinary writer, dissident, and who really was a visionary in international affairs, helped to bring the Baltic countries into the European Union.

9:08Czech Republic very much performing at a much bigger scale, extraordinary for quite a small country, that it was really shifting the world. And then there was an alternative nativist tradition represented by a guy called Vestal Klaus, who I think you would have dealt with when you were in government. And we have this kind of playing out again. You know, yet again, we've got a president who's a sort of rather respectable senior figure who gives speeches at Harvard. We've got a prime minister who's been there for four years, who was the head of a big university and wears a very formal suit all the time and gets huge respect for what he did standing up to Russia because the Czech Republic was very, very quick to sign up to the Ukraine war, to production of drones.

9:53A lot of his party's policy is about investing in defense, clear funding for the Czech army, and then against him. Again, an oligarch, basically, or maybe an oligarch is a strange way of putting it, a multi-billionaire. It's a man worth approximately$4 billion. That will put him in probably the top thousand wealthiest men in the entire world. That's putting him into the level of the big, big American guys. I mean, slightly below the level of Elon Musk's, but well up. And below Trump since his second term. Below Trump for his second term. And Trump's granddaughter, who's now advertising her wares in the White House.

10:26Colossal, unimaginable amount of money. He's a guy who has now started appearing at conferences with Orban. As you say, people like Anne Applebaum, who we interviewed on the podcast, when we spoke to her, picked him out as somebody who's very much a fellow traveler now of Russia. And I suppose final thing as I come back to you is this story that Fiona Hill, who we interviewed on leading, has now really been pushing, which is to say we are basically now at war with Russia. And we've seen that with drones going into Denmark. We've seen that with incursions into Poland. We've seen this with incursions into the Baltic.

10:59And we've seen it with this electoral interference, which has gone Moldova, Romania, et cetera. Any final thoughts on that one? Well, just on that, the disinformation and misinformation in this election is off the scale. Conspiracy theories abounding, real attempt, not necessarily just to undermine the other candidates, but also to basically try to undermine the institutions. And there was one report that said that fake news, fake news outlets controlled by Russia were producing more content within the Czech current debate than the entirety of the Czech conventional mainstream media. Now, it doesn't seem to have worked in Moldova.

11:40So we'll just we'll see whether it whether it works here. I'm actually reading this amazing book at the moment. I've nearly finished it. It's quite short. It's called Ven Rusland Gevint. What if Russia wins? And it's written by this. He's actually a lecturer in international politics at the Bundeswehr University of Munich. And it's half geopolitics and half novel. Essentially, what happens is Ukraine is forced to make peace at this peace conference in Geneva. Not implausible. Not at all implausible. And it's forced to make peace because a lot of the European countries and America basically think we can't just keep doing this.

12:14Zelensky has to go. Zelensky goes. Not implausible again. Not implausible. And then this is possibly implausible. Based on what is projected in Russia as this massive triumph, Putin steps down and he makes way for this financial figure. 47-year-old guy comes along. Then what happens? You have all these different plot lines going, one of which, this relates to our discussion with Gerald Knauss, where the Russians in Africa, Wagner Group type people, are basically putting lots of Africans onto boats. and flooding them into Europe as refugees. And of course, the example of that is we did see this through the Belarusian border, where the Russians and Belarusians were pushing migrants up against the Polish border.

12:58Correct. And Gerald said that Putin wanted to get 10 million Ukrainians into Russia. He ended up getting four and a half. And just on this, I mean, in the Czech election, one thing that we haven't talked about is that although there isn't a traditional migrant issue in the Czech election, they have accepted 350 ,000 Ukrainians. That's about 3 % of the Czech population. That would be like about two and a half million Ukrainians coming to Britain. So then what happens is that the West, a bit like we did with Putin, we think there's a thaw. And we think this new modern guy from the financial sector is going to be okay.

13:31Turns out Russia is rearming. Three years later, they take a small town and an island in Estonia. And then he then provokes this Article 5 debate where the American president, who's never named, but one assumes it's Trump, and the new president of France, who is Rassemblement National. Sort of Le Pen figure. Le Pen figure. Yeah. They basically do not think that a small town in Estonia is worth protecting through Article 5. Cut a long story short, the end of the book, the new president comes forward with Putin, now this aging sort of hero in Russia. and Lukashenko from Belarus to announce that Russia and Belarus are uniting as one country for the next stage of the Russian programme within Europe.

14:20It's an amazing book. Now, next question. Lukas van den Hoijve. Does the Netherlands still have the political stability to be a serious player in Europe, or is its fractured system now the biggest threat to its influence? Well, I'm guessing that Lukas van der Hoijvo is probably a better place to answer than us because he sounds very Dutch. And we have a lot of Dutch listeners. We do. I've just come back from Rotterdam. Yeah. Extraordinary. Have you been to Rotterdam? Many times. Yeah. It's a very striking city. I really... Yeah, you like it, do you? This is going to get me in hot water. I prefer Rotterdam to Amsterdam.

14:54Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Because it's quite... I mean, people who know it's quite a gritty port city. It's a real... Yeah. I mean, Amsterdam's lovely. Don't get me wrong. I was sitting over the cadavs and all that stuff. But I found Rotterdam. I once played the bagpipes at a football match in Rotterdam when I was a student. I was drunk. Anyway. So yes, I've just come back from Rotterdam talking at Erasmus University with something called the Nexus Institute. I had 450, mostly young people there. A lot of them listened to the podcast. I think we did an hour and 45 minutes of really interesting conversation about populism, elections, European politics.

15:28But of course, the big story in the Netherlands is Hert Wilders, of course, got most votes in the last election. His position in the polls hasn't really gone down very much. A bit. Gone down a bit, but probably still as they go into the next election, he will come out with the most votes. So he's a far-right anti-Islamist populist. And actually, in some ways, I hadn't quite got my head around this, but the Netherlands is quite lucky because the right is actually, the far-right is split. Because a guy called Joost Ederman has taken some of Hurt Wilders' vote. And then there's a guy called Thierry Bode, who's well out there.

16:03You know, he's a self-styled conspiracy theorist, but loves the British-American philosopher Roger Scruton, talks a lot of the J.D. Vance language, very, very interesting sort of theories of conservatism. Put all those votes together, in fact, the right-wing votes in the Netherlands might well be well up above 30%. They might well be, but then none of the other parties, they're all now committed to saying they would not serve with Wilders. So the last election, it took them seven months to form a government, and it came together of four parties in the coalition. But part of the deal was that Wilders could not be prime minister.

16:37So Dick Shoof, this former intelligence chief, he was the prime minister. The coalition has achieved next to nothing without being too rude about it, and it's disintegrated in stages. But the fact that they're all saying they won't serve with the Wilders Party means that it's likely, you're right that he'll probably come first in the poll, but it's likely that whoever comes second is likely then to be asked to form a government. And that might be the guy we had on leading, which is Franz Timmerman, who put together this coalition of this alliance of Labour and the Greens. There's this new guy on the block called Henry Bonantal, who's a kind of conservative leader, Christian Democrat, but the big losers...

17:16More sort of centrist. Centrist, yeah, yeah. And he was a guy that I got, it seemed to be, certainly within my sort of tiny student audience poll of that, seemed to be getting a wonderful sort of Nick Clegg effect. I agree with Nick as they go into the election. That's exactly what's happening. That's exactly what's happening. So he actually might end up as being the one that kind of emerges as the leader of a possible government. And he's come out of nowhere. Looks like on track maybe for 20, 24 seats. I don't know. But the big loser since the election is your friend Mark Rutter, Trump daddy.

17:50His party, the VVD, have really suffered for having gone into coalition with the elders. Well, I mean, this is a story we have to keep coming back to because it's a sort of parallel to what seems to be happening to the Conservative Party in Britain in relation to reform. It's certainly an absolute parallel with what's happened in France, where the traditional right-wing party that dominated government for many years vanished in the face of the right. What do you think about how Franz Timmermans, who we've been interviewing on leading, how he's been doing? Well, listen, I like him and I enjoyed the interview that we did with him.

18:22And he's showing guts because they had these pretty bad riots, worse than the kind of Tommy Robinson stuff here. Yeah, I arrived just a day after those riots. Yeah, and they were bad. And a lot of it was football hooligans coming together. Some of them were doing Nazi salutes. Some of them were carrying the flag, the pre-Tricola flag, which is the old kind of, you know, we support the Nazis flag. A lot of violence. And then other sorts of flags, which are quite complicated, because a bit like in Britain, where there's controversy now about very straightforward things like carrying the Union Jack or the flag of St.

18:56George. One very popular flag they were carrying was traditionally just one of the flags of the House of Orange has suddenly become politicized. Yeah. And when in the aftermath of these riots, the right wing parties did not want to say that this was far right violence. They wanted to kind of somebody called it. They were trying to whitewash it under the banner of football hooligans. And Timmermans stood up in really, really strongly and just called it out for what it is. And I think we'll get credit for that because the more centrist parties were sort of basically a bit worried about offending these people who'd been out sort of beating up policemen.

19:35Final thing, just the culture war thing. I was talking to people who were really cross with Franz Timmermans because I think it was Amsterdam had published a series of leaflets on religious festivals in Amsterdam. And they had every religious festival imaginable from every religion imaginable, except they decided not to mention Christmas and Easter. And they were talking about how Timmermans seemed to find it sort of impossible to take a pretty obvious line, which is to say, why don't we include the Christians as well? But maybe that was unfair to him. Anyway, you can see the culture war stuff going there.

20:06The Netherlands is such an extraordinary country. The average person in the Netherlands works, I think, an hour less a week than the average person in Britain, and is 20 % wealthier. Lovely book, actually, by a former conservative spad called Ben Coates about the Netherlands, which I share with people. Lowest debt in Europe. Lowest debt in Europe. Has these sort of extraordinary stories, I mean, 100 % of the key printing for the chips, which are right at the core of the AI revolution, are produced in the Netherlands. So in a sense, they have a stranglehold over the American economy, or is it the other way around?

20:43Shell, people know about. And then other bits are quite complicated. There's Catholic-Protestant split, what's going on down in the South, where the famous Philips electronic factory used to be, now fall on slightly hard times. But the thing that struck me most is that there is still a bit of an undercurrent of who are we? What do we stand for? You know, older people grumbling that in order to study Dutch now in the Netherlands, you have to study it in English. Basically, everybody's now studying English. And that they are worried they've become a little bit too sort of bland and global. What do you mean at a Dutch university if you're doing a degree in Dutch literature, you have to do it in English?

21:21Well, somebody can feed back in to explain what this story is and whether it's fake news, but all the older people around the table… You can't just spread fake news like this. These were professors around the table. All of them nodded at this statement that basically you can't really study Dutch and everything's now in English. And they were blaming Mark Grutter for it. I don't know whether he's basically pushed more and more education away from Dutch and into English. I have to say, when I was a busker nearly 50 years ago now, the Netherlands was my favorite country because the gilder was just the perfect busking currency.

21:52Why? Because it was worth, you know, everybody gave you a gilder and it was just worth more than franc, I mean, certainly the lira. Busking in Italy was a nightmare, throwing you sort of bucket loads of paper. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've always liked the Netherlands. I actually wonder if Wilders cannot make the election about Islam, which is his big thing and about migration, I wonder if he will do as well as last time. We both thought that if he won the last election, which he did, but didn't get into power himself, that that would then fuel this sense of grievance, which he would exploit. I think he struggled to do it this time because the framing of political debate has been so much more about international stuff, Ukraine and Gaza.

22:32Gaza has become a massive issue within this election. I mean, I saw a poll, something like 40 odd percent saying that the different parties' stance on Gaza will impact the way that they vote. Now, I think that says to me that probably means they're leaning more towards the left than towards the right. Final point is the odd parallels with Nigel Farage, which is, again, it's a one man party headbuilder. It's not really a party at all. It's just him. And he seems to find it very difficult to get on with other people, which was always traditionally the story about Farage. And the question is, will Farage be able to overcome that in a way that Wilders has not?

23:05Well, we shall see. The other thing, Rory, you'll love this. In fact, you should put this in the updated version of Politics on the Edge. One of the big moments in the campaign will be on the 10th of October, something called the Central Plan Bureau, which sounds like a sort of OBR for campaigns. They independently present the results of all the different party programs. And they say how much they think they will cost, and whether the claims about how they will fund them are credible. Wow. Brilliant. That's quite good in a world of fake news, isn't it? Absolutely, yeah. But they've got 27 parties.

23:37Yeah, that's a lot. 25 parties running the Czech election. Anyway, time for a break. This episode is brought to you by Google. We won't fully realise the potential gains of AI unless we make it accessible and useful for everybody across the whole UK workforce. That's why Google, for example, are working closely with trade unions. AI and trade unions may not sound like the most natural of partners, but the union movement has got a proud history of supporting members from across the economy and preparing them for the ever-changing world of work. That's why Google partnered, for example, with the Community Union in the UK on a people's first skills pilot called AI Works.

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