Australian politician Pauline Hanson has been kept largely at arms-length by the electorate ever since she declared, 30 years ago, that her country was ‘being swamped by Asians’. But her exodus to the political fringe appears to have ended. A recent poll put her party, One Nation, in second place, which has rocked the political establishment.
Canada is experiencing a period of political turbulence that is easy to misinterpret precisely because it lacks spectacle. There have been no sweeping electoral realignments, no mass populist insurgencies, and no wholesale rejection of democratic institutions like we’ve seen in other peer countries. Governments continue to function, elections still confer authority, and leaders continue to win votes, leadership reviews, and confidence tests.
Yet beneath this surface continuity, leadership authority is being challenged. Leaders survive procedurally while struggling to retain confidence, coherence, and durability. What defines the current moment is not a single crisis, but the slow accumulation of internal fractures: leadership reviews that resolve little, caucus dissent that spills into public view, and parties that appear organizationally intact yet directionally adrift.
Earlier this year, a striking 28-year-old woman, dressed head to toe in a vivid shade of crimson, stepped up to the podium at a conference in Hungary. “Ladies and gentlemen: hello Budapest. I’m so thrilled to be here again,” she began, adjusting the twin microphones and gently swiping a strand of long blonde hair from her forehead. “As some of you might remember, last year I gave here a speech as well, about the ‘great replacement,’” she continued, confidently glancing around the assembled audience. “I wanted the whole world to know that the ‘great replacement theory’ was, in fact, not a theory, but reality. White people are becoming a minority in their own homelands at an exceptionally fast rate.”
Everything about this woman – her honeyed tresses, the impeccably tailored suit, the precisely arched brows accentuating a dewy, youthful glow and, of course, the words she was actually saying – might have situated her squarely within the heart of the MAGA playbook. Everything, that is, except the lilting accent and occasional grammatical flub betraying her European origins.
Not much of a sell job is required given the evidence of Europe’s decline and our own is plain to see as is the role of the Great Replacement in hastening our demise.
Is Great Britain on the brink of a Trump revolution?
The president’s visit to the U.K. coincides with indications Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government is tottering.
Farage is in the driver’s seat. He is an opportunist and not to be trusted.
As liberals scoff, the Right is rising
The edifices of the age of globalisation are toppling one by one. The institutions of our multilateral world are fading. The cult of diversity, equity and inclusion is going into reverse. The liberal media has lost its monopoly on setting agendas as people turn to alternative news sources. After the murder of Charlie Kirk, things will only get worse.
At this moment, when we can hope that the era of our U.S. educated class has been consigned to the dustbin of history, it’s time to get nostalgic. Remember the WWII Vera Lynn song?
When the lefty hate is gone, all over the world
And the wokey drains are flushed, all over the world
Oh wait, I guess that’s the Taylor Swift Era version.
As our federal elected representatives prepare to once again convene in Ottawa next week, a recent interaction in my neighbourhood may serve as a harbinger for the exhausting political discourse headed our way.
Several weeks ago, my neighbours congregated in our several-hundred-strong Whatsapp group to celebrate a rare win for sanity as the Ontario government announced our local, publicly-funded drug den would be closing. In the ensuing discussion, one person shared her view that while the announcement was an important step in the direction of public safety, the motivation for it was likely driven more by a desire to woo voters than to keep us safe.
It’s not often that German regional elections capture the world’s attention, but establishment parties all across the West have good reason to be terrified by Sunday’s results. In the east German states of Thuringia and Saxony, the three ruling parties – the Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and Liberals – came under assault from both ends of the political spectrum. The right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) scored an historic victory in Thuringia, winning its first-ever state election. Just as striking was the success of another consciously populist party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which emerged from the rubble of the German left.
She preaches old school leftism. Pro-worker, anti-open borders/mass immigration and an avoidance of foreign entanglements.
BERLIN—Antiestablishment populism is on the rise in Europe, fueled not just by migration and economic and security fears, but by a deeper trend: Eroding confidence in governments’ ability to overcome those challenges.
In Germany on Sunday, the far-right AfD and a new far-left populist party obtained almost half the votes cast in the eastern state of Thuringia, and together also took more than 40% in neighboring Saxony. In Thuringia, the AfD finished first, the first time a far-right movement has won a state election in postwar Germany.
In France, a legislative election that returned a hung parliament and gave the far-right National Rally almost a quarter of all seats—up more than 50% from the last election—has yet to yield a government two months later.
Results of the French legislative elections show something surprising: nearly a third of voters under 25 back Marine Le Pen’s national populist Rassemblement National (RN), led by the youthful Jordan Bardella.
Meanwhile, closer to home, a new JL Partners poll of British 16- and 17-year-olds shows that fully 23% of this school-age group would vote, if given the opportunity, for Nigel Farage’s immigration-restrictionist Reform UK. Labour’s manifesto commitment to lower the voting age to 16 could therefore prove a boon to the Right-wing party.
There has been an earthquake in British politics, reporters say. Everyone from the Guardian to the Sun to CNN is reaching for the metaphor of shifting tectonic plates to describe Labour’s victory over the Tories in the General Election. And in a sense they’re right. The political ground has shaken. Rumblings have been felt. But it wasn’t drab, grey Labour that did it – it was the millions of voters who rejected both Labour and the Tories and in the process delivered one of the most devastating sucker punches to the political duopoly in decades.
France is being rocked by a political earthquake. Earlier this month, the right-wing populist National Rally (RN) surged in the European Parliament elections. Marine Le Pen’s party not only topped the polls – it also won double the vote share of President Emmanuel Macron’s liberal, centrist Renaissance. In the immediate aftermath, Macron dissolved the French parliament and announced snap legislative elections, the first round of which take place today. He had hoped to rally voters behind him against the spectre of the ‘far right’. But all the polling suggests his gamble is set to fail. RN is on course to come top, and may even win a historic parliamentary majority.
Populism was supposed to be the preserve of the old, uneducated and unenlightened. Apparently, it was for ‘gammons’, your xenophobic uncle and the ‘left behind’ of deindustrialised towns, bitter that the world has changed beyond their recognition. The results of last week’s European elections have shattered that myth.
It was telling that the right-wing populist party that surged in Portugal’s general election in March 2024 is called Chega! (Enough!). The message millions of Europeans seem set to deliver to the EU establishment in the June elections is that they have all had enough of being dictated to.
The populist democratic revolt is spreading into almost every EU member state, upending the political order with the rise of sovereigntist and conservative parties—even in such bastions of socialism and social democracy as Portugal and the Netherlands.
Europe’s populists are on the cusp of real power
Of the torrent of elections scheduled throughout the world this year, the most transformative promises to span an entire continent. In all of the 27 nations which constitute the European Union, and which will ask their citizens to vote for EU parliamentarians in early June, at least one New or far-Right party is now active. In several (Finland, Italy, Slovakia, Sweden), they form part of a coalition government of the Right. In three (Hungary, Italy, Slovakia), they lead the government.
