Thirty six years ago, at the time of the velvet revolution in autumn 1989, people in Prague would constantly tell me they just wanted theirs to be a “normal” country. By normal, they meant like (West) Germany, France, Britain, Spain or Italy. Well, now it is. It’s just that the normality has shifted in the meantime. Back then, the prevailing western normal was liberal, internationalist, pro-European; now it’s increasingly anti-liberal, nationalist and Eurosceptic. In the Czech election campaign, the incumbent prime minister, Petr Fiala, tried to mobilise Czech voters by asking: “Do we want to move towards the east or towards the west?” . But what does that mean, when the west is the US president, Donald Trump, and the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, not to mention Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland and France’s Rassemblement National, all currently leading in opinion polls?