WITH trade talks between Britain and the EU going down to the wire, there were sighs of relief in European capitals on Thursday that a second crisis had been averted.

In fact, the deal struck with the Polish and Hungarian governments not to veto the bloc’s budget and recovery fund for next year has kicked the can down the road in typical EU fashion.

The two hard-right regimes secured a political agreement that weakens a legal mechanism to halt disbursement of those funds to states deemed by the European Commission to be in breach of the EU’s version of the “rule of law.”

Still, EU officials are hailing its passing on paper as a blow against the “illiberal democracies.” That is the fashionable term for states such as Viktor Orban’s Hungary where competitive elections take place but the resulting authoritarian governments clamp down on fundamental rights and repress oppositional civil society organisations.

It has added to a concerted ideological effort to claim that Joe Biden’s victory in the US presidential election has finally signalled the end of what adherents of liberal capitalism bemoaned as the “populist tide” in the middle of this decade.

Boilerplate articles are mushrooming arguing that “populists” — a term now so elastic it has little meaning — may be good at winning office, but not at holding it: Trump. Second, that the “liberal fightback” that Emmanuel Macron’s election to the French presidency was meant to herald in 2017 is finally triumphing.

The most wishful thinking variant of this theme is that Biden’s victory and Keir Starmer’s counter-revolution against the “left populism” of the Corbyn surge together mean a renewal of the Third Way politics of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair that boosted an era of capitalist globalisation a generation ago.

Advisers and policy-wonks can get back to studying Chicago-school economics and ad-agency, Democrat political technique safe in the knowledge that “there is no alternative.”

As so often, in the space of a couple of years liberal-centrism has swung from catastrophism — fascist rule is imminent or already upon us — to triumphalism.

It is wrong on two grounds. First, Trump did lose but he also gained 11 million votes. His flailing now is not directed at actually holding on to the White House but at solidifying a hard-right base that has grown out of decades of radicalisation in the ranks of the Republicans.

Whether or not he intends to continue to lead it, others more deeply rooted in the Republican Party do. Trumpism is not dead.

Further, where there is effective opposition to “illiberal democracy” it is not primarily on liberal-capitalist grounds. In Poland it is the feminist movement and women’s strike. In India against Narendra Modi it is the biggest general strike in history and an enormous movement of poor farmers for whom global agri-business is not a god to be propitiated.

The second and bigger reason is that the supposed triumph of liberalism is through political forces and state actions that are themselves increasingly authoritarian. The threat to democracy is not simply illiberal democracies in far away eastern lands of which we know little.

It is also “liberal authoritarianism.” The outstanding case is France.

Macron was the great modernising liberal hope. The most gushing portraits of him three years ago betrayed an embarrassing, almost erotic investment from feted commentators.

Since then we have seen the deployment of militarised police — elite units especially — against the Yellow Vests and other popular movements. Thousands have been injured in ways that would bring calls for sanctions if happening in, say, Bulgaria. There has also been increased military deployment in former colonial Africa and the highest state honour paid to Egyptian dictator General Sisi.

Now hundreds of thousands have defied repression to protest against a security law that would ban citizens from videoing police and thus identifying what is routine brutality, especially against black and Muslim people. They have succeeded in forcing the government to retreat.

But authoritarian measures are still going through. Central to them is an assault upon the right to free expression and freedom of association of France’s Muslim communities.

It predates recent terror attacks and is explicitly aimed not at violent splinter groups but at the political participation of Muslims as Muslims or through community associations in French public life, and at beliefs deemed “against Republican values.”

A principle of democratic progress of 19th century France — the separation of church and state — is turned into its opposite: state control of mosques and of voluntary associations of a minority and racially oppressed religious group.

Macron faces re-election in 2022. He has been sliding in the polls and his government hit by one schism after another. Thus conventional commentators have little difficulty identifying his intensification of state Islamophobia as a naked attempt to win right-wing voters over from the fascist Marine Le Pen. Similar to what the Austrian government has done — a party rooted in Austrian Catholicism’s interventions in politics crusading against “political Islam.”

The radical left recognises it also is a smokescreen for an authoritarian offensive that extends to attacking trade union rights. In a welcome argument to hear in French, the left is fusing the rights of the Muslim minority with those of the working class as a whole. Last week’s convergence of various social movements on the streets brought a fusion in practice.

But it is deeper than just the electoral and political travails of Macron.

As with so much else, the pandemic has both taken an X-ray of and deepened our societies’ discontents and crises.

This crisis has seen a further upwards transfer of wealth to the billionaire class who have increased their largesse by a quarter.

It is thanks only to state action through central banks not seen outside total war that major bankruptcies of others have been delayed. The price is an ocean of debt that has made more unstable the complex financial dependencies of states (even big ones), banks and capitalist corporations.

It is why the argument from the left cannot simply be for more state intervention. That is continuing. With it is a growing economic dispute within the ruling class: how to “get back to normal” and when to allow “zombie firms” kept afloat by state-led bank lending to go bust. All sides of that argument are committed to making working-class people pay, whether or not the now swear word “austerity” is used.

The methods of recovering from the last crisis meant that was already a huge dilemma. It is greater now.

So too is the political problem facing governments, whether reviled Poland and Hungary or praised France and Greece, where another liberal poster boy is unconstitutionally deploying police against left-wing gatherings under the false pretext of Covid-19.

International surveys show a continuing deep alienation of popular opinion from official institutions across the advanced capitalist world. It is very pronounced in Britain. There we are again seeing a systematic gap between public opinion on many issues and the two historic parties of government.

As the late political scientist Peter Mair explored in his influential book Ruling the Void earlier this decade, that deep contradiction has led in Europe increasingly to the removal of instruments of political and economic power from democratic oversight.

It also produced declining engagement in party politics and, generally, in elections.

The high turnout in the “for or against Trump” US presidential election appears to refute that. Except: the most popular policy among voters — Medicare for all — was not on the platform of either candidate.

That is thanks to the other feature of this anti-democratic period — the insulation in the name of liberal-capitalist consensus of centre-left politicians especially from popular democratic opinion.

And that is the deeper meaning of Starmer’s restorationism in Labour after the Corbyn interregnum. It goes wider than the Kafkaesque banning of Constituency Labour Parties discussing a pro-Palestinian charity bike ride.

It’s not one policy or another. It is popular democracy against authoritarianism in both its liberal and illiberal variants.

Liberalism and democracy have always been two ships passing in the night. We can add today that liberal values — in the everyday sense of progressive — are more and more detached from self-proclaimed liberal governments as well as from anti-liberal election winners.

For at root is the fundamental mischief. Contemporary capitalism can fulfil neither the liberal values it proclaimed in its youth nor the democratic principles it has always been uneasy with.

There are profound consequences for the movements of the working class and of the oppressed. It means an anti-capitalist taking-up of questions that we are told should be left to conventional politicians.

It entails us seeing as global political actors, not as good causes, those like the Polish women strikers, the Indian farmers and working class, and all collective forms of struggle from below.

No pressure — but the responsibilities of the trade union and social movements in Britain could scarcely be greater.