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Winning the 2024 election was only the beginning – the Trump effect is now sweeping the globe.
From Canada to the U.K. and continental Europe, left-liberal governments are tottering while right-leaning voters, especially young men, gravitate toward populist politics and take inspiration from Donald Trump’s success in America.
It’s almost as if Trump himself were on the ballot in other advanced democracies.
Recent polls showing Trump to be more popular in Canada than the country’s own prime minister, Justin Trudeau, presaged Trudeau’s announcement this week of his resignation as Liberal Party leader and impending replacement as head of government.
Will Britain’s Keir Starmer, who’s only been in office since July, ultimately face a similar fate?
Starmer’s dismal, Biden-like – and Trudeau-like – poll numbers suggest so: In mid-December, YouGov measured the Labour prime minister’s net favorability at minus 41%.
Left-liberal leaders like Trudeau and Starmer are architects of their own ruin, to be sure: Like their counterparts in America’s Democratic Party, they’ve shown themselves to be economically inept and wildly out of touch with voters’ desires to limit immigration.
Yet that’s true of the center-right parties in all too many parts of the world, too, which is why Britain’s Conservatives lost the last election and Canada’s Tories have been out of power for a decade.
Voters already know how inadequate the leadership of a Trudeau or a Starmer is.
But to mobilize voters’ dissatisfaction requires a strong voice in opposition to the left – someone willing to mock the pretensions of these worse-than-mediocre premiers and offer a stark alternative on immigration and other urgent issues.
Trump may not be able to run for office in Britain or Canada, but he can and does provide that voice for the right even beyond America’s shores.
Calling Trudeau the “governor” of Canada, as if our neighbor to the north were merely the 51st state, was one way Trump highlighted Trudeau’s weakness.
Canadian conservatives do not, of course, think of their country as just an appendage to America, but the effect of Trump’s jibe was to make Trudeau look like the lightweight he is, setting him up for his downfall at home.
After Trump’s humiliation of Trudeau, the prime minister’s standing in his own party collapsed, with Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland resigning from his cabinet.
Now Trudeau himself is heading for the exit: Trump has peacefully brought regime change to Canada, though as always, the hard part will be what comes next.
Trump has a grasp on the future, however, thanks to the support of young men even in places where the populist right has so far enjoyed only moderate success.
Britain is one such place: Reform UK, the immigration-restrictionist party Nigel Farage leads, won only a handful of seats in last year’s parliamentary elections, despite the success of the Brexit movement under Farage eight years earlier.
Farage and Reform UK are far from displacing the Conservative Party as the leading force on the British right.
But shortly after the U.S. presidential election, Jim Blagden of the think tank More in Common released polling data showing that fully half of British men aged 18-35 would have voted for Trump if they could have done so, while only some 25% voted for either the Conservatives or Reform in Britain’s own election.
Trump also had a lead over the Conservatives and Reform together, albeit a narrower one, among British men aged 35-44.
Polls weeks before the U.S. election, meanwhile, showed that altogether about a third of young British people would have voted for Trump – which may not seem so impressive until one considers that the Labour Party won a commanding majority in Parliament, more than three times as many seat as the Conservatives, with a “popular vote” total of just 33.7%.
Will the Conservatives take this as a signal to move in a more populist direction?
Doing so would help them thwart the challenge from Farage, who may not win many seats but does cost the Conservatives seats by splitting the right-leaning vote.
Yet the Conservatives may be content to let Starmer defeat himself with his unpopular policies – that could work in the short run, but it would only postpone a populist reckoning.
Trump didn’t start a new party. He took over and remade America’s existing right-of-center vehicle.
If some Trump-like future leader in Britain or Europe can do likewise, the result could be a generational realignment similar to the one America has seen.
Until then, though, Trump himself will continue to be the leader of a transformation that is remaking more than just American politics – and which has now unmade Justin Trudeau’s premiership.