The West staring down last-minute enormous changes

LONDON, U.K.—By July 5, we will know the outcome of the United Kingdom election. On July 8, we will know the result of the French election. And by the middle of the month, it will be clear whether Joe Biden remains the Democratic presidential candidate in the United States. If he does, then Donald Trump will probably win the election in November. Very little of this was planned. The U.K. election was expected this year, but in October or November, until Prime Minister Rishi Sunak surprised everybody—including his own Conservative Party—by calling it early. It was a gamble that will likely fail. No national election was expected in France until 2027, but President Emmanuel Macron called the National Assembly elections three years early after his party took a severe beating in the European elections early last month. Another dramatic gamble that is also doomed to fail. And the Democratic Party seemed certain to choose Biden as its candidate for the presidency again despite some muttered misgivings in the party about his age (81). That certainty imploded after Biden’s poor performance in the first TV debate with Trump last week, and there is now a panicky debate within the party about replacing him. Technically, it’s not too late for the Democrats to change horses—their nominating convention is in late August—but in practical terms, it cannot be done at this late stage without Biden’s full and willing co-operation. We’ll know within the next two or three weeks if there’s any hope of easing Biden out without triggering a war within the Democratic Party. If an exit deal is not visible by then, we can conclude that Biden will go ahead and fight—and probably lose—the November election. His mind may still be sharp most of the time, but perceptions matter more. So, there we suddenly are, with three of the four biggest western countries—containing about half of NATO’s population—facing elections that may radically change their political orientations. In the American and French cases, their next governments may be hard right, with fascist undertones. The U.K.’s election is the soonest and the least alarming, so let’s start there. The Tories have been in power for 14 years by now, so time would have eroded their popularity even if they had wonderful and successful policies. Their policies were neither of those things. They left the European Union via Brexit in 2020, and lost free access to Britain’s largest market by far. They imposed savage and needless austerity measures simply to serve their ideological goal of shrinking the state. British family incomes at the end of their 14 years in power, astoundingly, are actually lower than they were at the start. Things went crazy in the last five of those years, during which the country had four different Tory prime ministers but only one election. Once Brexit was done, the party ran out of ideas, so the Conservative members of parliament broke up into vaguely ideological gangs and started fighting each other. One prime minister—Boris Johnson—was forced to resign for serial lying, another—Liz Truss—for crashing the economy. The U.K. economy rotted, the National Health Service is near collapse, and Sunak’s final obsession was to “get the flights going” to export asylum-seekers from Britain to Rwanda. (Cost: more than $1-million per person.) That will never happen now, and the only question for the Conservatives is whether this election will be merely a catastrophe—two terms in opposition and then maybe a comeback—or a full-scale extinction event from which there is no return. The Conservatives have been in office for more than half the time since the “modern” party was founded 190 years ago, but apart from Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the years before the Second World War, they have never before had to face a challenge from the right. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party is nationalist, populist, and dog-whistle racist, but it is a far more sophisticated operation than Mosley’s ridiculous blackshirts. Farage’s goal is to supplant the traditional Conservative Party as the natural home for right-wing Britons, but he is not averse to achieving that goal by a hostile takeover of the Tories. There are prominent figures in the Conservative Party, fearing near-annihilation in this week’s election, who see this as their only plausible route back to power within the next decade. The populist wave that threatens to engulf the West is a long-term threat in the U.K., too—but for the next five years at least, the Labour Party is anticipated to govern with a massive majority. It will take longer than that to repair all the economic and social damage that has been done, but at least it’s a start. Elsewhere, the picture is darker. Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers. Last year’s book, The Shortest History of War, is also still available. The Hill Times

The West staring down last-minute enormous changes

Three of the four biggest western countries are facing elections that may radically change their political orientations.

Canada’s aging crisis and a call for reform in eldercare

As COP29 wraps up, will Canada finally stop funding fossils this fall?

Addressing the threat of antimicrobial resistance

The wisdom of Homer Simpson and Aaron Sorkin

Climate finance should target resilient food systems

Trump’s ‘America First’ plans may undermine global trade

U.K. change election highlights pattern of struggling incumbents

U.K. election could be an extinction-level event for the Tories

A remarkable, non-white moment in Britain’s leadership

Keeping Canada-U.K. trade issues in perspective

The jig is up on western imperialism

News

Get free news updates

Opinion

Submit a guest opinion article

resources

Advertise

subscribe

get help

Get free news updates

Submit a guest opinion article

The West staring down last-minute enormous changes

Three of the four biggest western countries are facing elections that may radically change their political orientations.

Get The Foreign Policy Newsletter