How do we make sense of the chaos of global politics when the rules change every week? What role can Europe and France play in a multipolar world order? And how would a far-right French government  change the EU?

These questions were discussed with one of the most influential voices in debates on the future of Europe, Mark Leonard, the co-founder of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Leonard is also the author of the new book Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail, which we discussed at a remote event with AAPA members, on April 30.

Chaos is here to stay, he told us.

“We’re in a situation where there is no stable balance of power, there’s no agreement on what the rules are. The old order will not come back,” Leonard said, as he laid out a number of ideas for how a more pragmatic EU and a more assertive France could respond to this turbulent moment.

Leonard also recently published a report on the far-right in Europe, “The new right: Anatomy of a global political revolution.”

We discussed the recent election in Hungary, where the authoritarian nationalist Viktor Orbán lost after 16 years in power.

“The defeat of Orbán is not just a game changer for the European Union, because he’d been blocking various measures, like the loan to Ukraine and a whole list of things that the Hungarians are blocking which they won’t block anymore. It’s also a defeat for the ideas which shaped a sort of global revolutionary movement, and it’s halting a lot of the money that’s going into creating and curating this movement. But I think it would be wrong to see Orbán’s defeat as an end to this new right phenomenon,” Leonard said.