“Even Donald Trump and Nigel Farage are backing away from Putin now and when rats that size abandon ship we know we are in uncharted waters.” Nick Cohen in the London Observer.
“The appeal of Putin’s revival of tsarism to the modern far right may be grotesque but at least it makes sense. Putin is anti-democratic and so are they, as Orbán’s quasi-dictatorship and Trump’s attempts to overturn elections show,” argues Nick on our features page.
“Putin despises human rights and so do they. Putin trades on a dark nostalgia and so do they. Above all, Putin is a strongman and it is as the tough guys who make their countries great again through a sheer act of will that they have sold themselves to tens of millions of voters.”