A New Center-Left Rises in the West to Counter Putin, Illiberalism
Australia’s ousting of a conservative government on Saturday leads us to return to a theme we first wrote about a few weeks ago — the center-right/far-right has been repeatedly losing elections and steadily losing influence in the West. It’s our belief that the 2018 Putin-Trump Summit in Helsinki, and Trump’s subsequent very public illiberalism, helped waken Western voters to the threat of Trumpism/Putinism, and they have been consistently voting in center/center-left governments ever since. This year we’ve seen the right defeated in Australia, France, Germany and Slovenia, and there are now center/center-left governments in power in Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the US. In the UK Labour/Lib Dems/Greens lead the 3 right parties in current polling by 57–37. The right is more out of power today in the West than it has been in a very long time.
The rejection of the American right, MAGA, has been arguably the central driver of American politics in the last 3 elections. Since Trump became the Republican nominee, the average Democratic electoral margin has been 5 points. Democrats won the last two elections by 8.6 and 4.4 points in very high turnout elections. There is a clear anti-MAGA majority in the US today, and more people have voted against MAGA than any other political movement in our history.