The far far far right is losing elections. And voters appear to be losing patience. First Viktor Orbán in Hungary, after 16 years in power. Then Flávio Bolsonaro in Brazil, where voters rejected another attempt to return the Bolsonaro dynasty to the presidency. Now Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia, whose authoritarian grip on the country has been broken by a student-led democratic movement. Three countries. Three defeats. And across the Atlantic, Donald Trump’s Republicans are bleeding support. When a billionaire receives another enormous tax cut, somebody still has to pay for public services. And that somebody is you! There is only so long you can convince ordinary working people that making the extraordinarily wealthy even wealthier is somehow an act of economic patriotism. There is something else these defeats suggest. People are growing tired of politicians who admire dictators, attack democratic institutions, manufacture enemies and treat public office as their personal property. It is 2026. Most people want competent governments, affordable lives and a future for their children. They have remarkably little appetite for aspiring wannabe strongmen.

Mitch McConnell has just delivered a warning Trump cannot afford to ignore. In The Wall Street Journal, the veteran Republican senator warned that Trump’s continued submission to Putin could jeopardise his entire legislative agenda. McConnell calls Trump’s Russia policy strategically naive and morally bankrupt. More importantly, he signals that Republican senators may withhold their support unless Trump changes course. This is no longer merely about Ukraine. It is about whether Republicans will allow an American president to keep rewarding a Russian dictator while undermining America’s allies. For once, Trump may discover that Congress has a spine.

Putin, Trump and MAGA love repeating the story that NATO betrayed Russia by expanding eastwards, supposedly breaking a promise never to admit countries once trapped under Soviet communist rule. There is one rather inconvenient detail they always leave out: those countries desperately wanted to join. And with good reason. They remember Soviet occupation, political executions, mass deportations to Siberia, forced collectivisation, prison camps, secret police, censorship and generations of lives destroyed by Moscow’s glorious socialist paradise. Families disappeared. Countries lost their independence. Ordinary people could be imprisoned for expressing the wrong opinion. When communism collapsed, these nations did not need NATO to persuade them to escape Russian influence. They practically ran towards the door. Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechia and the others understood something the MAGA intellectual establishment apparently struggles with: living next to Russia is considerably more pleasant when Russia cannot decide how you live. And that brings us to Serbia. Aleksandar Vučić, a leader who spent years cultivating Moscow while balancing Serbia’s European ambitions, has just been defeated by a student-led democratic movement. The celebrations in Belgrade tell their own story. Serbia has its own complicated history, and nobody should pretend this election settles every question about NATO or EU membership. But it exposes the central absurdity of Moscow’s worldview. When a European leader continually argues against Western integration while protecting Russia’s influence, the obvious question is whose interests he actually serves. There is no need to invent secret payments to recognise a politician doing Moscow’s work. NATO did not expand eastwards because Washington forced unwilling nations into an alliance. It expanded because countries with experience of Russian domination wanted protection from ever experiencing it again. Putin, Orban, JD Vance, Hegseth and Trump calls that Western aggression. Russia, meanwhile, has spent centuries discovering that keeping its neighbours within its sphere of influence generally requires threats, repression or an army. That tells you almost everything about which civilisation has something worth offering.