As the French election heats up, Evan Davis speaks to renowned philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy about the rise of populism and the global march to the right.  

Politics is a noble, brave world, says Bernard-Henri Lévy – but that's not what we have here.  Levy's latest book is "The Genius of Judaism". 

Liberalism is embattled, says the French author and intellectual. As France faces its election year and the rise of the Front National, he argues that liberal politics have helped bring about their own crisis. But should liberals embrace the bans of the Hijab? And how should they respond to Vladimir Putin’s autocracy?

The French philosopher talks about his new film, Peshmerga, which follows the Kurds fighting Isis, and gives his thoughts on Brexit and the crisis of democracy.

What a pity if, after standing so courageously against an outside enemy, France were to yield to an inner enemy that dreams, in its way, of bringing the nation to its knees.

France must now recall these great moments in its republican tradition and hold them up as a model for today’s leaders. For what will be needed to hold the territory that the republic nearly lost to the FN is political courage of a sort that, for the moment, is in short supply.

It all begins now — if, in fact, this terrible crisis has served to reveal not just the economic but also the political, moral, and spiritual bankruptcy with which we have just had such a close brush, and if we know how to respond to it, above and beyond the Greek case, with real acts of recommitment and reform.

Leaving the Paris Agreement is like Brexit: It’ll take years. The rest of Trump’s term, at least. And because the climate revolution is supposed to unfold over the very long term, it is possible that the American president may simply not have enough time to sabotage the process or crush the spirit kindled in Paris two years go.

How does America look to foreign eyes? This year marks the bicentennial of the birth of Alexis de Tocqueville, our keenest interpreter. We asked another Frenchman to travel deep into America and report on what he found.

In recent years, parties and candidates challenging key democratic norms have won unprecedented popular support in liberal democracies across the globe. Drawing on public opinion data from the World Values Survey and various national polls, we show that the success of anti-establishment parties and candidates is not a temporal or geographic aberration, but rather a reflection of growing popular disaffection with liberal-democratic norms and institutions, and of increasing support for authoritarian interpretations of democracy. The record number of anti-system politicians in office raises uncertainty about the strength of supposedly “consolidated” liberal democracies and highlights the need for further analysis of the signs of democratic deconsolidation.

The citizens of wealthy, established democracies are less satisfied with their governments than they have been at any time since opinion polling began. Most scholars have interpreted this as a sign of dissatisfaction with particular governments rather than with the political system as a whole. Drawing on recent public opinion data, we suggest that this optimistic interpretation is no longer plausible. Across a wide sample of countries in North America and Western Europe, citizens of mature democracies have become markedly less satisfied with their form of government and surprisingly open to nondemocratic alternatives. A serious democratic disconnect has emerged. If it widens even further, it may begin to challenge the stability of seemingly consolidated democracies.

WASHINGTON — Yascha Mounk is used to being the most pessimistic person in the room. Mr. Mounk, a lecturer in government at Harvard, has spent the past few years challenging one of the bedrock assumptions of Western politics: that once a country becomes a liberal democracy, it will stay that way.

We have been surprised by the scale and intensity of attention our work has garnered around the world since the New York Times profiled it last week. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been. Our research, after all, helped contextualize the seismic shifts we’ve seen in some of the world’s long-standing democracies over the past year — and comes to some rather startling findings.

It might not be Trump, but our system is more vulnerable to a demagogue than you'd think.

America is on its way to a full-blown constitutional crisis.

Take it from a new American.

At this point, why would we expect anything else?

Yascha Mounk discusses the global turn against illiberal democracy and the rise of populism across the world on CNN's Global Public Square with Fareed Zakaria.

With Angela Merkel’s re-election almost certain, Germany’s election has been startlingly dull. But more is going on than meets the eye.

What the rise of populist movements means for democracy.

Four reasons not to be cheered by Emmanuel Macron’s election to the French presidency.

Dark days this summer showed how government by the people—beset by illiberal populists on one side and undemocratic elites on the other—is poised for extinction.

The world has just experienced a watershed year for populist politics, with antiestablishment challengers winning elections and illiberal regimes modeling an alternative, says expert Yascha Mounk.

On Wednesday [March 15, 2017]  at AEI, experts on European politics discussed the results of the Dutch general election.