COLLEGE PARK, Maryland — The former Mexican President Vicente Fox let the “globalist cat out of the bag” last night at Maryland University, heaping praise on the pragmatism of the authoritarian regime in China, while blasting democracy and the will of the people in a 90-minute-long debate against former UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage.

The two men locked horns in the “Nationalism vs. Globalism” debate series, hosted by the Steamboat Institute and moderated by Wall Street Journal’s Mary Kissell.

The two traded blows on issues like trade, democracy, the European Union and Trump’s border wall plans for over an hour before President Fox launched into a broadside against the idea of democracy.

“You visit China today, you visit the east. No more ideologies,” said Fox, moments after stating his support for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico’s upcoming Presidential elections.

While Fox defeated the 71-year-long “perfect dictatorship” of PRI, which governed uninterrupted for 71 years, he declared his support for the neo-liberal party which also curiously finds itself as a member of the Socialist International group, stating: “I know [the PRI candidate, Meade] has the burden on his shoulder of PRI corruption… I always go more for the person, not for the ideology.

“You visit China today, you visit the east. No more ideologies. They don’t fight like dogs and cats here, like Republicans and Democrats do every day. They are pragmatic governments. They work on technology, on exports, on trading”.

Kissell — who had declared her and the Wall Street Journal’s bias in favour of Fox at the beginning of the debate — intervened, “They’re authoritarian regimes. They put people in labour camps. They torture them”.

“Well,” replied Fox, “I began to doubt how smart is democracy, because democracy’s not delivering. That’s why in Britain they’re not happy with what’s going on. You’re not happy with what’s going on in the United States, you’re not happy with what is going on in Mexico… I see, pretty soon, something different… some other way we’re going to perform governance, that we’re going to take decisions, and how we’re going to manage our countries”.

Farage, who received the minority of the speaking time by some margin at the debate, hit back: “I think the globalist cat was just let out of the bag.

“We heard President Fox’s contempt for democracy and for what people think. I heard in previous debates he didn’t even think the Brexit result was a fair democratic result. And this is what the globalists want. I’ve no doubt most of them are terribly well educated and frightfully clever and well funded by giant multinationals and they think they know better than the ordinary peasants as to how we should live our lives.

“2016 was not just a short term kick back against that mentality. What we said in 2016, despite terrible threats of economic chaos and plagues of black locusts that would descend upon our countries, what we said is we’ve had enough of being talked down to by the globalists. We actually want to live democratically, in our own nations, we’ll co-operate with our neighbours. But honestly, President Fox, you talk about our referendum, and democracy, I think, in pejorative terms.

“For many of us, whether in this room or outside, actually, the vote is the most powerful thing we possess as free human beings. We value it. We showed in 2016 just how potent and powerful that can be”.

Kissell polled the audience before and after the debate, with over 90 per cent in the room declaring — to Farage’s victory — that the nation-state was not obsolete. Ms. Kissell was confused by her own terminology in assessing the audience vote, and accidentally declared President Fox the winner, despite him losing the vote by about a 90 per cent margin. Mr. Farage corrected her on stage, to the amusement of the audience.

President Fox has been a long-standing critic of U.S. President Donald Trump, repeatedly stating that Mexico will not pay for “that f**king wall”.

Fox was forced to apologise for his crude behaviour in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News. President Trump accepted his apology.

The full debate can be watched below: