The moderate centre-right party used to be the big beast of politics. It was the party of small businesses and farmers, the party of small towns and villages, and affluent suburbia. Across the West, it was the champion of globalisation, free movement of capital, goods and people. It was the party of the transatlantic alliance, and, in Europe, the party of European integration.
No longer. Its classic business model does not work any more because the various elements of this package have come into conflict. Pro-EU these days means being in favour of regulation that imposes costs and burdens on small businesses and farmers, while freedom of movement brought too many immigrants.
In the UK, the centre-right is represented by the Conservatives, who suffered an electoral bloodbath at the local elections last week at the hands of Nigel Farage’s Right-wing Reform party.
In Germany, the far-Right AfD has, for the first time, overtaken the CDU/CSU in some national opinion polls. Remember Forza Italia, Italy’s answer to the British Conservatives? Today, they are merely the junior partner in a coalition government headed by Giorgia Meloni and her Rightist Brothers of Italy. The French Gaullists are a small party nowadays, with ever-changing names that are difficult to remember. The Netherlands, often a bellwether of European politics, also ditched the traditional Christian Democrats for a collection of far-Right and libertarian parties.
What one might call the far Right is therefore taking over. We could invoke the image of Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each different in their own way, as a metaphor to describe this rump. But that does not quite capture it. The movements of this Right have their own national characteristics — the German version is protectionist; the French is socialist; the American libertarian. What matters more is what they have in common. Clearly, they are all anti-immigration. But they share something even more important: the desire to destroy the multilateralist liberal global order. On this, I expect them to succeed.
The mainstream media, and talking heads from the think tanks and the universities, are in denial that we are already moving in that direction. But optimism bias is the defining characteristic of the liberal establishment. The idea that the far-Right might win this epic battle offends them. It also threatens them personally. Donald Trump just cut the funds for the Voice of America, for National Public Radio and for the Public Broadcasting Service. The first action taken by Elon Musk’s DOGE was to cut funding for civil society projects in the US and abroad. Hungary and Georgia have passed laws to restrict foreign funding of think tanks and other non-governmental organisations. And, in Europe, most NGOs are at least partially state funded.
But it is this liberal blob of media, social and political action groups, and universities that pushes a country’s political narratives. It was their story-telling about national interest that lead countries, like the UK, to enter the EU, or indeed to exit it. It was their story-telling that encouraged Germany to rely on Russian gas, and not to see Vladimir Putin for who he really was. And they all keep on insisting that Ukraine will win the war against Russia — even though it has been clear for two years that this is not going to happen.
But stories serve a purpose. And the Western, bone-headed response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is, as I see it, the last hooray of the vacuous multilateralist construction called the West. Nobody supported this idea of the West more than the centre-right parties. Their fates are intertwined.
Much of what describes the centre-right also applies to the centre-left. But the centre-left has its own unique problems, like the loss of industrial workers as its traditional voters. The European centre-left has lost voters to the Green Party, or radical parties of the Left, like Germany’s Die Linke. In France and Germany, the decline of the centre-left preceded that of the centre-right. But they are both victims of the crisis of globalisation.
The end of hyper-globalisation was triggered by the financial crisis. It was not the crisis itself that did the damage, but the way governments reacted to it. They did everything they could to protect the financial sector. Central banks adopted policies of quantitative easing to protect sovereign debt markets. Governments imposed austerity to stop an otherwise inevitable rise in inflation. All the while, western companies drummed up another story: they needed to invest in China. Each was a monumental misjudgement.
But the unravelling of hyper-globalisation proceeds slowly. Five years after Brexit, the UK has still not disentangled from the EU. It still has the EU’s 10% car tariff. And it retains the General Data Protection Directive, one of the main reasons why Europe — including the UK — is falling behind the US and China in AI. Trump has just found out quite how difficult it is in practice to decouple from Chinese-dominated manufacturing supply chains. But the globalisation fanboys are quite wrong to think that it cannot happen, just because it is more difficult than Trump thinks.
The European policy establishment has persuaded itself that it can counter the rise of the anti-globalists. The Romanian constitutional court just banned a Right-wing politician who was leading in the polls; a French court banned Marine Le Pen from running for the presidency. In Germany, last week, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, its domestic secret service, declared the AfD to be a Right-wing extremist party. This declaration could trigger legal proceedings that might end with a ban. In the US, meanwhile, the establishment went after Trump through the legal system. But doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results, is Einstein’s definition of insanity. Not only are these ploys unlikely to succeed, they won’t solve the problem of providing voters with the economic security and the social stability they crave.
“Doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results, is Einstein’s definition of insanity.”
Equally idiotic are the political firewalls the German CDU and CSU erected against the AfD. This story pretends that if you never form a coalition with the AfD, they will never get into power. If the democratic parties in Weimar Germany only had firewalls in place, Hitler would not have been able to take control. Germans like to think of the rise of the Nazis as a technical accident, rather than as a consequence of a failed democracy: one that did not provide economic security for its citizens.
Each country has its technical-constitutional obsessions. The Italians are obsessed with electoral systems and have kept changing them. They tried virtually every system, but voters always found a way to vote for the parties or coalition they wanted. That’s because voting systems can at best only postpone the inevitable. First-past-the-post elections, such as those in the UK or the US, generally favour establishment parties: but this is only true until it is not. Reform UK had 14.3% of the votes in the UK general election last year, but only 0.8% of the MPs. The maths flipped in the local elections last week, when Reform took the lion share of the seats. Labour won a landslide victory in the general election last year, with only 33.7% of the vote. That was also the approximate vote share Marine Le Pen’s party got at the French parliamentary election last year, yet they are not in power.
While the US system favours the two-party duopoly, Trump managed to confound it by infiltrating the Republican Party and changing it from within. If he were European, he would have had to form his own party. The route would have been different, the result would have been the same. Ultimately, electoral systems, constitutional safeguards, and devices like political firewalls cannot protect an unpopular centre. But instead of solving the problem of dysfunctional globalisation, the centrists are still doubling down with the same old policies. I just read a report from Germany where 130 refugees are about to descend on a Bavarian village of 280 inhabitants. That’s another 280 voters for the AfD.
The far-Right has identified the centre-right as its main political target — and the latter has responded as any offended monopolist might. In the UK local elections, the losses of the Conservatives were almost identical to the gains of Reform, while Labour’s losses matched the gains of the Lib Dems and the Greens. Actual voter movements are more complex. In German industrial areas, we have seen the AfD picking up votes from the centre-left. But the AfD’s essential rival remains the centre-right.
Probably the single biggest big mistake made by the centre-right was the failure to address the downsides of globalisation when voters stopped believing in that win-win fairy tale.
The current system works well for those working in the service sectors of global cities, or in Silicon Valley. It also works for people who work in lithium mines or have manual skills that are currently high in demand. But it does not work for Ohio or Michigan; for Yorkshire or Lincolnshire; or Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia.
Britain attempted to disconnect itself from the current system with Brexit. But to work, that would have required a different economic model. The Conservatives did not deliver a new model. Labour isn’t either. The difference between the centre-left and the centre-right in the UK boils down to relatively minor shifts between spending and taxation, but there is no fundamental disagreement about the model.
It’s the same in Germany, which hasn’t reinvented its dying industrial model. France has gone way past the limit of what the state can and should do for its citizens. In all of these countries, what happened is that stable sources of income have become less stable. The German car industry, for example, was the cash cow of the economy — but now it struggles to compete.
The decline of the centre-right, and to an extent the centre-left, mirrors these dying economic models.
None of this is new. We saw it in 2016, when Americans first voted for Trump, and when the UK voted for Brexit. Terminally complacent liberals mischaracterised these events as electoral accidents, the result of biased media reporting, or worse, of Russian intervention. There is always a story that politicians can tell themselves to avoid having to solve the problem. The surest sign of political decline is an obsession with who is to blame: as opposed to what needs to be done. The centre-right was once the natural party of government. Today, it is the party of excuses.
