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Václav Klaus: Cap Ferrat, Tito Tettamanti and a Stagnating and Dedemocratizing Europe

English Pages, 6. 9. 2025

It’s great to be in Cap Ferrat. The beauty of this place remains unchanged in spite of all the dramatic events in the world since 2016, when I was privileged to be here for the first and only time.

It is also encouraging to see our host, Tito Tettamanti, in such a good shape. While all of us are getting older, he remains the same. Not just physically. His mind is as sharp, as we have known it for decades. The small book he sent me as 2025 New Year’s greetings “Confessioni di un conservatore” proves this quite persuasively. Even my poor Italian made it possible for me to appreciate it.

The world is in a process of rapid change. Even the naïve American progressivists must accept that there is no end of history. When I left Cap Ferrat nine years ago and was driving to the Nice airport, I got a message informing me about the anti-Erdogan coup in Turkey. I was supposed to visit this country the following week at the invitation of the Turkish President and – due to this news – I cancelled my trip there at the very moment I was sitting in the car driving from Cap Ferrat to Nice. (I don't even want to think about what might happen this Sunday.)

Let me – for the sake of not losing the whole context – briefly recapitulate the relevant moments of the last decade as I see them:

- this visit of mine here took place before Donald Trump’s first term;

- Great Britain was still in the EU and its newly approved Brexit was greeted by many of us as a proof that even the EU empire could be voluntarily and non-violently left;

- the artificially created and wrongly interpreted COVID epidemic, misused by governments all over the world to supress human freedom and to block the search for an optimal medical reaction to it, endangered the future of all of us. As I used to say, not because of Covid, but because of Covidism (this means because of human behaviour, not because of a virus);

- the Green Deal, the culmination and final victory of the totally misplaced climate alarmism, has conquered Europe and created a huge problem for all of us, for our living standards and for our industries;

- the world failed to avoid the tragic Ukraine war. It should never be forgiven that leading world politicians and powerful global organizations did not exhaust all possible alternatives to prevent this tragic armed conflict. Before it started. It is too late now. These politicians demonstrated that they did not have sufficient interest in doing this. When talking about it, we should not forget that it is a war between the West and Russia and not between Russia and Ukraine;

- I must also mention the Gaza disaster, the consequence of decades of irresponsible developments in this complicated region. It has become an issue which is profoundly affecting the whole world – not just the direct victims of the fighting there.

Any of you could, I am sure, easily add other events, which you consider relevant. I certainly forgot something important.

All of that happened in a distinctive context, which I call the self-destruction of the West. It is not destruction, but self-destruction. We are not being invaded by other empires or civilizations. This destruction is home-made. It has been made in the West itself. We are no helpless victims attacked by foreign invaders. I am talking about the whole West, but Europe seems to me to be the most deeply affected. It has become – for many reasons – the most fragile and vulnerable part of the world.

This is for me – in brevi – the main context and frame of reference when discussing the topic of this morning – whether the “new” right-wing parties are (or eventually can be) on the Right, on the right of the political spectrum, and whether they will be able to adhere to fundamental political positions of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As it was written in the invitation letter. An economist like me would like to add, “to the economic ideas of Mises, Hayek and Friedman”. Is it possible? Or are these parties destined to fall into the very leftist trap of progressivist liberalism, which many of these parties, consciously or not, seem to embrace these days? This is – at least as I understand it – the concern of the organizers of this gathering. And certainly also my concern. This issue was also raised in one of the chapters of Tito Tettamanti’s Confessioni. One of the chapters is entitled Il recente successo dei partiti “di destra”. But I noticed that he put the term “destra” (on page 63) in quotation marks. He did not do this by accident I suppose. Many of us have doubts about it.

These parties often openly declare their support for the revolution Donald Trump has been making in America since his inauguration this January. I am fascinated by his election victory and by the radical measures he already succeeded to introduce, but he is not a believer in free markets. I see Trump as a supporter of industrial policy, of activist government interventions in the industrial structure of American economy. In this respect, he is a supporter of public investments in a neo-Keynesian style. I don’t want to trivialize this complicated issue, but we shouldn’t make the debate easier than it really is.

I don’t pretend to know every European political party which deserves to be included or tries to be included into the pro-Trump group. These parties are, however, not ideologically well-defined. They are still “movements” searching for unifying principles. What keeps them together now is their much needed criticism of the policies of the ruling mainstream parties, not a forward-looking ideology. It bothers me. As we know, criticism is not a program. These parties are characterized by a very diverse mixture of ideas, by ideologically inconsistent programs, by members and supporters united mainly by discontent. History teaches us that this is not sufficient.

Any speculation about the future depends on the level of optimism and pessimism in each of us. I belong to the pessimists. I see many aprioristic prejudices, personal and national misunderstandings, a lot of mistrust and suspicion among these parties. Some of them even like me but for very differing reasons. Why can no one cooperate with German Alternative für Deutschland? Why do so many European opposition politicians dislike Nigel Farage? Why is Geert Wilders so unacceptable abroad? To my great regret, they are not doing enough to find common ground. The Left is doing that. The Right isn’t.

The criticism coming from these parties is loud, but superficial and shallow. They are not alone in this respect. The current political, economic and social situation in the West is not being well-understood, described and interpreted. As – originally – a scientifically oriented academic economist, I feel it very strongly. This topic is discussed mostly in talk shows and podcasts, not in serious journals whose standards are to some respect guaranteed by their editorial boards. Podcasts are a kind of modern samizdat, which is a form of escapism, because there are plenty of journals where there is a chance to publish his or her text. The problem is that talking seems to be easier than writing a coherent text. There should be something deeper behind the new political parties than what we see in these talk shows.

What is even worse, I don’t see any clear vision of the future in the new generation of these opposition politicians. None of them has been able to articulate and offer a clear vision of the future they want to fight for. Is it anything else than parliamentary democracy and free markets? Isn’t it a brave new world of philosopher-kings of the contemporary progressivists?

Let me recall my personal experience from the era when I had a historic chance to formulate the principles of transition from an oppressive and inefficient communist system to a pluralistic parliamentary democracy and free markets in my country. It was 35 years ago. I understood very rapidly then that it was necessary to explicitly say where we wanted to go, to outline how to get there and to build a political party capable of implementing such a program. Something like that is missing now.

As a tentative conclusion, I find it difficult to believe that these new opposition parties will be able and ready to defend the classical ideas of what some of us consider the Right. There is a long journey ahead of us. I don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel yet. Hopefully, the younger generation in this group does – and I suppose Tito does as well.

Václav Klaus, IBL Seminar, Villa Alapia, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, September 6, 2025