Lessons from 2025, outlook on 2026

Ivan Krastev, political scientist and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), in conversation with Mirjana Tomić on what affected European politics in 2025 and what 2026 might hold.

Mirjana Tomić: Last year you said that 2024 was marked by the speed of events, political ruptures and our difficulty to comprehend these changes. You predicted that the war in Ukraine would get worse and that President Trump would, and I quote, ‘change the nature of political discourse’. You also mentioned that the EU should learn to live as a middle power.

I have listened to your talks and read your articles from 2025 and you mentioned the word ‘revolution’ over and over again. Please explain the nature of this revolution. Who is going to be affected? How should we understand it? Where are we going?

Ivan Krastev: My predictions were so vague that it was impossible to be totally wrong. But what is important – and this is my take on Donald Trump – was the experience of what it is like to be travelling on a slow train and then suddenly being put on a fast train. We might not know the destination, but it is the speed that is overwhelming.

Just think, 2025 was the first year of Trump’s second term. Don’t you have the feeling that it has been longer? When I talk about revolution, I have three things in mind. One is that revolution is not a change of power. Power is changing almost all the time. It is the change of the identity of political actors that is revolutionary. Whether we like it or dislike it, in a period of just one year, Trump has managed to change the political identity of the US as a global player.

Secondly, I believe that revolution is about speed. Things start happening very quickly. This is also generational. I come from an Eastern European generation that has seen major political change in their lifetimes – change that took  different political directions. But what I remember from this period is how fast things changed – and not just events but also in our minds.

The third thing is that suddenly – and this is the art of every revolution – you start to understand that the future is going to be different than the way the world looks today. Nostradamus, of course, had a view on 2026. He said that there is going to be a swarm of bees; interpreters are talking about major political turmoil.

Our way of talking about the future is defined by two things. First, when you talk about the future, you normally look back to the past. And the most important thing in any prediction is that you never know what’s going to happen, but you have the illusion at least that you know what’s not going to happen. The famous joke about this is that we don’t know what would have happened if Khrushchev and not Kennedy was killed in 1963. But one thing we know for sure is that Onassis wasn’t going to marry Mrs. Khrushchev. I say this because our understanding of the future is very much based on certainties that we don’t expect to happen. And what we don’t expect to happen disciplines our thinking.

I was involved in a global survey of twenty-one countries run by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), which is going to be announced on 15 January. Here are four things that arose when comparing 2024 with 2025. The first is that the majority of people surveyed expect that next year China is going to rise. After the first year of Trump’s presidency about ‘America first’, opinion suddenly ends up focused on ‘China first’. Even Americans are starting to believe that China – because of its technology, because of manufacturing, because of trade – is on the rise.

Secondly, and even more importantly, is how those surveyed aren’t afraid of this change. Normally, in international relations, when you have some kind of new hegemon trying to take over, there’s a backlash against it. You create a coalition to contain it. This is not the case so far from our data on China in this survey.

Thirdly, pessimism and optimism are important. You have two groups in the world. There are some places where society is quite pessimistic: Europe, the US, South Korea and Turkey. And there are others that are extremely optimistic. The major champion of optimism right now is India, but you also have China and Brazil – and Russia and Ukraine, but I don’t take very much from this. Both of them are quite ‘optimistic’, because when you’re at war, you’re either optimistic or you’re dead. You can’t allow yourself to get pessimistic. What we see externally as negative about other parts of the world, might be seen positively internally: Mexico, for example, where there is quite a lot of optimism – not necessarily optimism for the world as a whole, but optimism for their place in the world.

And, finally, something that has changed dramatically is how Europe is viewed. For the first time we see from data that the majority of Russians believe Europe and not the US is its major enemy. Also, interestingly, while President Trump has become extremely negative on Europe, this is not a sentiment shared by all Americans: 40% still view Europe as an ally. But only 16% of Europeans view the US as an ally. This is a big change in just one year.

Mirjana Tomić: What are the most important, let’s say, phenomena from 2025 that will have the most durable effects? Will it be the personalization of power, disrespect for the rule of law, the encounter between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin? Or US hostility towards Europe? Or the reintroduction of the Monroe Doctrine?

Ivan Krastev: Ok, let’s start with something that you didn’t mention: tariffs. Interestingly enough, this major change has had an effect that is very different from what both its critic and proponents expected. Many liberal economists believed that Trump’s tariffs were going to produce a major rapture to the markets. That hasn’t happen.

Mirjana Tomić: At this point, do you know what tariffs there are against certain countries? There have been so many changes. The Swiss brought Trump a present, then their tariffs were lowered, for example.

Ivan Krastev: I don’t know, but, believe me, companies that are trading, they know. Trading is about expectations. People in this room probably don’t trade on the market every day. But, even if you don’t know how trading is going to change, you’re likely thinking about it and trying to plan ahead. One of the problem with rapid changes, however, is that you cannot plan your life.

Inflation is so painful for politics because it becomes very difficult for people to plan. And when you can’t plan, you become extremely nervous, you get anxious. Inflation is more painful than recession in political terms exactly because it destroys everyday expectations. From this point of view, tariffs were important. They didn’t work in the way they were expected to work; people were ready to adapt and have adjusted incredibly to what happened.

The fact that the US’s national security strategy positions Europe as a major problem was going to come as a surprise to everyone who had read the previous doctrine, the previous national security strategies. The US national security strategy is worth reading, because it reads like a transcript of President Trump’s mind. Unlike other strategies in which others are trying to shape his mind, here you have his advisors trying to put on paper how he sees the world. He has the right to see the world as he wants and it’s up to the US to decide on their national security strategy. But there are three things from this strategy that are very important.

I’ll start from the most surprising: there was only half a page on Africa. This should come as a surprise for anybody who knows the predictions for 2100: it’s estimated that 40% of the world’s population is going to come from Africa. In 1900, only 8% of the world’s population lived in Africa. Back then, 25% of the world’s population lived in Europe. In 2100, only 6% of the world’s population is expected to come from Europe. Its something if a national security strategy ignores a continent where a major demographic boom is going to happen. Latin America is, of course, also critically important.

People are talking about the Monroe Doctrine and about sphere of influence. But what does it mean to be a sphere of influence these days? During the Cold War, it was very clear. You were either going to mostly trade with the Soviets or the Americans. You were going to have a political regime that goes one way or the other. Now, the world is not like that. Almost everybody trades with China now: almost 50% of the industrial production of the world comes from China. It’s about something else, which, in my view, is very much about technology. Tell me with whom you share data and I’m going to tell you where your geopolitical loyalty lies.

Mirjana Tomić: One of the objectives of this new Monroe Doctrine is to stop China’s influence in Latin America.

Ivan Krastev: What can you stop them doing? Taking natural resources? You can try to keep Chinese technologies out of Latin America, and I’m sure that they’ll try to do that. But it isn’t so easy. Awareness of spheres of influence is much easier when you’re writing about it than when you’re practicing it.

And then comes the idea of Europe. And, of course, here is a big irony. The major accusation of the American president about Europe is that it has become too Americanized. The story about multiculturalism and going beyond a certain type of classical nation state was very much perceived in Europe as Americanization. Then, suddenly, America discovered that it doesn’t like an Americanized Europe and that we should go back to how we were.

We’re living in a world where everyone is a migrant. The major difference now is that most migrants come from outside of the West. They come in the hope that they’re coming to the future. Most right-wing voters are voting for migrating back in time. So you have migrants in space and migrants of time, but, basically, nobody feels comfortable where they are.

As you said, one of the interesting stories from 2025 was that the American president suddenly started to behave like a monarch. Don’t forget, America was created as a new world against the old world of European monarchies. He’s doing things in a way, I would say, which are surprising like taking a gift, a plane from Qatar. But I’m Bulgarian, and, to be honest, I can’t get outraged about corruption; I also know positive things connected with it. But this is about naked power. And this is the message too, of course – that some people are more important than others.

Mirjana Tomić: What was the most important conversation of 2025?

Ivan Krastev: For me, it was the conversation between President Xi Jinping and President Vladimir Putin when they didn’t know that the mic was on and started talking about how some people are probably going to live to 150 years old, and it’s all going to be about the transfer of organs and so on. This was a dramatic conversation. Imagine for a moment that political leaders believe that they can live till 150. Imagine how much that changes your idea of power and legacy.

Or if some people could live till 250 years old. Could everybody live to 250? The transfer of organs is not a simple thing. Suddenly we would end up in a world that looks like Ancient Greek mythology. You’d have a few ‘immortals’ and a lot of mortals. And the relations between them would be a totally different level of social inequality than that which we talk about today.

Mirjana Tomić: Let’s come back to mortals in Europe. You wrote that Europe, once a peace project, is becoming a war project, triggered by Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We talk a lot about war these days. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said that the war could be like that which our grandparents or great-grandparents endured. The French Army Chief said that young people should be prepared to die. I’m paraphrasing. But at the same time, in Germany and France, according to a Politico poll that I read this morning, 45% of people in Germany and 37% in France are against increasing the level of support for the war in Ukraine. In fact, they’re in favour of decreasing the level of support for Ukraine. As mortals, are we preparing for war? Should we prepare to fight? Or should we be getting the last boat or plane to Latin America?

Ivan Krastev: In my view, the biggest success of the European project was that it made war in Europe unthinkable. Europeans weren’t so naive to believe that there is no war. But it became difficult for us to imagine not a conflict but a big war. And what we see in Ukraine is a big war. By January next year, Russia’s war against Ukraine is going to have lasted longer than the Soviet-Nazi war of 1941-1945.

What has changed is the fear that war is now possible. And European societies are very much divided due to their comparisons to war and are coming to totally different conclusions. Are we living in the equivalent of 1913, where Ukraine, as Serbia, is going to get us into a war? This is part of the story for those who say we shouldn’t provoke the situation and fall into the same trap. People don’t need to be pro-Russian to believe this. It is the fear that if we buy more weapons and give more support to Ukraine, the war is going to come even closer.

Others say, no, it’s not 1913, it’s 1939 and what is happening in Ukraine is like Munich. And if you’re not going to stop them now, they’re going to come over and they’re going to…

Mirjana Tomić: What do you believe?

Ivan Krastev: I don’t believe it’s like 1913 nor 1939, but these type of stories reflect the basic reaction of people. Part of these reaction are individual, but most of them are national. I have said this before, but I believe in Europe we may well have common dreams, but our nightmares are strictly national. You can’t blame the Poles for feeling that it’s like 1939, because they were shaped by 1939. When the war started, the ECFR made an opinion poll asking what people feared the most. In Germany and France, the biggest fear was from nuclear war. In Poland and the Baltic Republics, it was occupation. These aren’t the same fears. I’m not going to say that this is a divide that can easily be overcome. And all of these people can be right.

If you’re a government, you should try to take a position. But I have questions about defence spending. Keep in mind that you can end up with spending that isn’t going to be popular with the population, and, as a result, an extremist government coming to power. You don’t want to have a lot of weapons, for example, in Germany when the far right has their day in government.

On the other side, people are asking whether Russia is ready to do this or that? We don’t know what Russia is ready to do. By the way, Russia is not a person. But there is a person that makes most of these decisions. We don’t know what’s in his head. But in political science, you know one thing: you’re not analysing intentions but capabilities. The question is not what he wants. The problem is what he could do. And if you believe that he could do it, you should be prepared to react to this. It’s about capabilities. As political scientists say: capabilities define intentions.

Mirjana Tomić: Yes, but the declarations from politicians that the war is coming – and we as mortals have to listen to what they say – are increasing.

Ivan Krastev: On one level you try to mobilize the population, but people aren’t ready to die. Since the end of the Cold War, sacrifice is not part of the social contract anymore. Governments don’t feel that they have the right to ask people to sacrifice their lives. This is a major change. By the way, this was the major success of the European project. We are living in post-heroic societies. Societies are becoming aware of a growing threat, but, at the same time, they don’t feel that they can mobilize the younger generation.

Opinion polls might be saying that people support going back to classic mobilization, an army and defence spending. But look to see who is in agreement: mostly older generations. The people who are least enthusiastic about militarization are those who would serve. Talking of predictions, this is why I believe in the next ten years we’re going to see a major proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Every government owes its population a certain level of defence and protection. Our view of NATO has changed dramatically in 2025. In Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe, NATO had become a religion. Any type of questions about security, you’d mention NATO and the conversation was over. But if you read history, you’ll know about another kind of religion: the famous Maginot line for the French, which, when it was built, everyone said would protect them. NATO is as effective as the commitment of the Americans to fight in Europe. There is no treaty that can defend you. The only thing that can defend you is the readiness of your major security partner to be part of it. And with Donald Trump, you cannot take this for granted.

One of the reasons we believed that the Americans were going to come was because there are a lot of American soldiers on German territory, on Polish territory, and they were going to defend their own. But with the threat of US military withdrawal, Europeans – especially when it comes to some smaller countries like in the Baltics – are being forced to try to imagine their defence in the absence of Americans, when talking not of total nuclear war but aggressive provocation. Europe has become a war project not simply because you can start to imagine that war is possible but also because you’re trying to imagine a war in which the Americans aren’t coming. For people who do this professionally, this is like somebody changing your map of the world.

Mirjana Tomić: Do you have a vision of the European defence strategy if the Americans don’t come? Do you think Europe even has a strategy?

Ivan Krastev: You can have a strategy. Everybody has a strategy. A strategy is a document. But what we don’t know is what people will do or how institutions are going to react. When the Russians escalated their invasion in February 2022, everybody began talking about the way Ukrainians reacted. We made jokes about the assumptions of the Russians. Don’t believe opinion polls on how people are going to behave in a moment of war.

I’m going to give you the Ukrainian data from 2021: 25% of the population was very sceptical about the government. Many people were saying that this was a country that couldn’t defend itself. And then comes the moment. You suddenly have a leader, which doesn’t come automatically. These people risked their life, they volunteered. They’ve been fighting a much bigger country with a much bigger army and economy for four years now. There is a psychological moment that you cannot easily predict in war, which isn’t in any strategy. Historically, we know that this is something you cannot predict.

I’m sure that Europe is going to increase its defence capabilities. The problem is who will decide what kind of weapons you need. In the American case, this is the Pentagon. They’re going to tell the companies, ‘we need drones’ or ‘we need planes’. Because the other thing that is changing dramatically is the very nature of war. In Europe, I believe we’re in a moment in which defence companies decide what to produce, because we don’t have a European army, we don’t have one government that can decide this.

And taking the boat or plane to Latin America? The other thing that has changed is where we could go. Imagine that you have a major crisis now. In Vienna, some decades ago, a lot of people were asking themselves this question: where to go. Usually, people would say, ‘go to America’, but now you can’t be sure this is a good idea. Europe may be the place where you feel the crisis, but, seen from the outside, it is also the most prosperous, in a way, most stable place. So this is a paradox. It’s not easy to go anywhere.

Mirjana Tomić: I want to return to this psychological aspect. Are we learning to live with wars and the far right approaching power as something normal? Is it like saying ‘the wolf is coming, the wolf is coming’, and we don’t think the wolf will really come?

Ivan Krastev: I believe that this is a very exceptional period of history, taking on the look of normality. Not having a war in Europe, particularly in Western Europe, outside of those in Yugoslavia for ten years, was not how the world functioned before. As the famous military historian Sir Henry Maine said: ‘War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention’.

Mirjana Tomić: But we have media now and see wars in real time. It’s a bit different.

Ivan Krastev: I don’t know what we’re seeing exactly, because we are so overloaded with different types of cruel material, but almost everything that we see is out of context. We are very much bombarded with images and some of them are shattering.

That is one thing, but it is a totally different thing to try to imagine yourself in a war. War is not only what happens on the battlefield. At the moment, in most of Ukraine, particularly in eastern Ukraine, there’s electricity only six to twelve hours a day. You don’t know how long this is going to continue. It changes your life. Broken sleep is a problem. Imagine all these bombing attacks and that you should go to the shelters almost every night with your family. You’re not on the front line, so the risk of being killed is not particularly high, but this totally changes your way of life. Just try this for one month – getting up every night at 12 o’clock, spending four hours somewhere, then coming back – and you will see, this is already a different world. Your imagination changes dramatically. You see everything differently. This isn’t television. You can switch the television off.

I remember a beautiful, old film about a guy, a gardener, who spent all his life either gardening or watching TV, switching channels on his remote all the time.1 When he goes out onto the street and is attacked, he tries to change the channel, but it doesn’t work. From time to time, I have the feeling that Europe is slightly in the position of this gardener. When we see a major crisis, we simply try to change the channel. But this is not television. We are on the street.

Mirjana Tomić: What do you expect for Europe in 2026 now that we are moving at this incredible speed? Might we even fall off the train if it gets even faster?

Ivan Krastev: I’m going to focus on just three things. I expect that we are going to have a type of ceasefire in Ukraine, one way or the other – probably not now as expected, but later. And it could have very different contours. If it’s going to be a dirty kind of peace that Ukrainians aren’t going to buy, then there’s going to be a major migration crisis with people moving to Europe. And this time it won’t be wives and children. Given the kinds of political dynamics we have in European countries, a wave of ex-soldiers coming to Europe is going to be a big issue. But I don’t believe that the same intensity of fighting can be kept up for the whole of 2026.

Secondly, the Hungarian election in April is going to be critically important for Europe for many reasons. The Hungarian government is very important in Europe’s new political constellation, where President Trump has made it very clear that he has certain political preferences and political friends. Mr. Orbán is not simply Trump’s oldest friend in Europe but he’s, in my view, also the most strategically on side. A lot of intellectual, financial and institutional infrastructure of the European far right is based in Hungary. The major relations of the European far right with the American MAGA movement goes through Hungarian channels. If Orbán wins the election, this is going to consolidate the Trumpian right in Europe, having an effect in other countries. If Orbán loses – and this, of course, would be one of the ironies of history – it would be in the ‘Orbán, far-right moment’ of Europe. But history is famous for its sense of humour. So we shouldn’t underestimate this possibility. It could go both ways.

Mirjana Tomić: Before you go onto your third point, just a quick follow up: do you think that the US or Russia has more influence on upcoming elections in Europe?

Ivan Krastev: It depends on the country, but I believe it’s the US.

My third point is the American mid-term elections. They aren’t going to change much in the US. But if the Democrats win big time, President Trump will look weak. Then the major story will be how the European, Trumpian right is going to decide what their strategy should be. With a highly polarized US, the risk is that every change of American president becomes a regime change in Europe. Republicans come along and push a strong anti-liberal movement. And then the Democrats come and go, pushing against the far right.

At this moment, I believe we could have major renegotiations within European political parties, including the far right, to see if there is some European consensus? Is there something that we can agree on about the role of Europe in the world and its strategic relations with the US, regardless of who is in power? Isn’t this an opportunity? Part of the story is that our politics has become so polarized that there’s almost no external threat that can consolidate us. This is what you see in many countries like Poland.

But I believe that we should look out for these three things: the prospect of a certain type of ceasefire – I’m not going to say peace – in Ukraine; the Hungarian election that could go either way; and what is going to be the impact if Trump looks weaker – not so much what will happen in the US – but what is going to be the impact on the calculations of different political parties and political leaders in Europe.

And here comes the most important thing. I’m sure that the most important thing about 2026 is going to be something that we’re not talking about today. Because also psychologically, normally we see best what we don’t expect. If you are preparing to see something, regardless of how it will go, you are never going to be surprised. And this is the surprise, the unexpected that to a great extent shapes political reality.

This event, part of the Music and Politics series organized by Dessy Gavrilova and Mirjana Tomić with music by Vikram Rajan, was supported by the Erste Foundation, Forum for Journalism and Media (fjum) and Presseclub Concordia, where it took place on 16 December 2025.