Martin Wolf

So I'm very clear that was a big mistake.

What worries me more about...

the concept of democracy that is emerging, which you see in the Trump camp, and you saw in some of the people he admired, like Viktor Orban, is the idea that if you are elected, anything you do by definition is democratic.

And that is absolutely incompatible, inconsistent with

obviously, the core premises of the Constitution, particularly what we would think of as the Madisonian principles, that there is such a thing as the tyranny of the majority.

So even if somebody has a majority, very rare that they do, that doesn't entitle them to do whatever they want.

Constraining institutions are the core of the Republican idea.

I am concerned that ideologies that reject that on the left and the right have been reborn over the last 20 or 30 years, perhaps a bit longer.

And that's what the Second World War was fought against in a very extreme form.

So I'm not comparing them with that.

And so while I agree that there are important elements of the critique which are serious and we should take seriously,

which I've mentioned, that the critique doesn't seem to me to be coming from an honorable place.

If the aim is to preserve republics, if the aim is to preserve ethno-national dictatorships, which Mr. Putin would certainly agree with, then that's something else.

But that's not my side.

Well, that's one possibility.

And it's a possibility that pretty well everyone who's a friend of mine who's European, and I suppose I'm one, would want to see.

I think it's important to understand why it's so difficult.

And this gets back to the sort of

if you like, the historical tragedy of Europe.

How did it get to be where it is?