It's perhaps not a fair question, but what is your sense of where the United States might be headed?

I mean, what we are seeing in the United States is deeply concerning with regards to the rise of the far right and even the capturing of the Republican Party.

I mean, what we see in parts of the Trump administration, I wouldn't even say it's not the full Republican Party, but like the ones who are really, really deep in the MAGA area.

I mean, I wrote my PhD back in the days about the rise of Trump 1 and trying to understand what's going on there.

And what we actually saw was a real transformation of the Republican Party over Ronald Reagan that became in many ways much more of a far-right populist party.

But what I would say there is very often in Europe we have that reflex of saying, oh, what's going on in like crazy America? And we would never be like that.

I mean, I think it's very helpful to see that actually a lot of the inspiration for the American far right is coming out of European movements, is coming out of the far right intellectual movements in Europe in the 1990s, in the early 2000s.

problem with climate.

It's perhaps not a fair question, but what is your sense of where the United States might be headed?

I mean, what we are seeing in the United States is deeply concerning with regards to the rise of the far right and even the capturing of the Republican Party.

I mean, what we see in parts of the Trump administration, I wouldn't even say it's not the full Republican Party, but like the ones who are really, really deep in the MAGA area.

I mean, I wrote my PhD back in the days about the rise of Trump 1 and trying to understand what's going on there.

And what we actually saw was a real transformation of the Republican Party over Ronald Reagan that became in many ways much more of a far-right populist party.

But what I would say there is very often in Europe we have that reflex of saying, oh, what's going on in like crazy America? And we would never be like that.

I mean, I think it's very helpful to see that actually a lot of the inspiration for the American far right is coming out of European movements, is coming out of the far right intellectual movements in Europe in the 1990s, in the early 2000s.

problem with climate.

Tobias, would you like to start with your first question?

Yeah, actually, uh, I have a question, uh, because I know that we've, we've traveled toge- together even to Ukraine on a mission, so I know that you are, uh, very strong points on, on support for Ukraine.

Um, but in Germany, for instance, right now, we have issues that a far-right party, the AfD, might participate in a state ele- in a, in a state government.

That means access to sensitive classified documents, and our secret services, our minister of defense is even saying, uh, maybe we should stop sending them such classified documents because there's a very high risk that these parties are giving them through to Putin.

So there's a very clear link.

There's even some debate whether th- they receive money from, uh, from Putin, and my question to you, even on a personal level, is how you feel that some people in the EPP are actually trying to work together with the AfD on some issues, and I'm really wondering, is this a trustworthy party if we at the same time have to wonder if they give s- classified information to Putin?

... as the point was made at this-

But I, I want to make the point about what we did in Germany, because what we didn't do was try to cannibalize on everything else and try to basically get the Putin speaking points of saying, "Oh, we, we cut, uh, pensions, we cut social coherence, we sh- we cut investments." No, we said these are two different things.

You write at one point early on in the book, "To capitalize on this new divide, right-wing populists employ references to Christianity in the context of a brand-new white identity politics as a secularized cultural identity marker." So there's a really interesting shift there, isn't there, between very religiously inflected politics that you might have seen, say, many Christian Democrat parties after the Second World War, to more secular parties that are still wearing a kind of Christian garb, right?

Yes, absolutely, and that's the fascinating part.

So what I did basically in my research, I interviewed about 120 senior politicians, faith leaders, et cetera, and one of the big questions for me was: What's the difference between the Christian references that the populist right is using right now, and is that at all similar or different to the traditional faith-based politics that we had? Christian Democrats, a strong tradition in, in Europe and Germany in particular, but even social democrats or liberals or greens often reference religion, and I was basically trying to see what are commonalities and what are differences.

And one question that I asked all of them when I started that is: How do you define the idea of the Christian West or Christian values? What does Christianity actually mean? And it was really fascinating that when I asked that question to clergy, but also really to mainstream party politicians, whether they're social democrat, Christian democrat, mainstream conservative, liberal, et cetera, they would start talking about matters of individual faith, belief, th- theology.

They'd start talking about, uh, forgiveness or salvation or the Second Coming, all of these things.

Some even referenced the institutional church, et cetera.

By contrast, when I asked the same question to proponents of the populist right in Europe, almost all of them would start talking about cultural markers.

Sometimes successfully, but as you said in your previous answer, a little less successfully now, yeah?