We have a unique vantage point at our end of the planet to assess what all these elections do and don’t mean in terms of trends that might wash up here. We obviously don’t live in the likes of Britain, France or the US, so our knowledge of the nuances of each country is necessarily limited. But that may help us sift the wood from the trees.
When divining the meaning of election results, commentators and politicians alike often forget that elections involve giving citizens a binary choice between a few imperfect options. The winners might take the result as a brilliant endorsement of them and their policies, but for the voters they might simply have been the least worst on offer.
Take the British election. On the face of it, the UK Labour Party has just been given a thumping mandate. They went from 200 seats to 411, a majority of 174 over the Conservatives – a huge result. Look a little deeper though and the electorate’s endorsement is much less than it appears.
Labour in the UK actually achieved one million fewer votes than they did under the hopeless leadership of Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, and only one-third of the total vote. The reason for their “landslide” success is the number of voters peeled away from the Conservatives by the UK Reform Party. Nigel Farage and his mates kneecapped the Conservatives, letting Labour win by much more than they otherwise would have. Tellingly the Conservatives and Reform together outpolled Labour by a comfortable margin.
The more you look at it, the 2024 UK election is reminiscent of our own election of 1984. Back then New Zealand had become tired of the increasingly dictatorial and socialistic Rob Muldoon, who was at odds with much of his voting base and his party’s brand. Labour had a new Leader in David Lange who united his fractious troops and looked a presentable alternative to the incumbents. But it took the maverick Bob Jones and his New Zealand Party to peel a big chunk off National’s vote and propel Lange and his crew into government, under the same first-past-the-post voting system the UK has today.
In short, then, it would be dangerous for Keir Starmer and his Labour Party to see their mandate as anything more than a referendum on the last 14 years of mostly chaotic Conservative rule. They clearly have much to do to win the wider British public over and that should give them pause when enacting their agenda.
The French election is another example of pragmatic voters making the best of the poor choices they have been given. Macron’s impetuous decision to call a snap election pretty much invited the people of France to give him a bloody nose, and they duly obliged. With some last-minute tactical politicking, the result was not so much a victory for either Marie La Pen’s far-right or the extreme left, it was a referendum on the governing style of the French President. Which appears to be widely disliked.
There is a discernible wider trend of the rise of populist right-wing parties, be it Reform in the UK, Le Pen in France, the AFD in Germany, or Trump’s version of the US Republicans. But that, too, doesn’t necessarily indicate that the electorate has become more radically right-wing. It may just indicate an abdication of mainstream voters by the traditional centre-left and centre-right parties.
The centre-left the world over has become consumed by university-trained social scientists with notions of identity politics which appeal to the denizens of social media but are far outside the experience of many of their traditional supporters. It is not surprising that the people who call themselves working class do not see much to identify with in today’s labour parties, be they in the UK or New Zealand. Why else, when they got sick of the Conservatives, did middle-income Brits choose Farage’s party over Keir Starmer’s Labour.
Similarly, the centre-right has often got confused over what it means to be conservative, economic and social realists who focus more on being respected than telling people what they think they want to hear. Centre-right parties are at their best and most electable when they take pragmatic and sensible economic decisions which enhance the lot of ordinary citizens. There has been little sign of that in the UK or the US recently, and the French centre-right has given up the ghost.
No wonder voters throw their lot in with populist and nationalist alternatives, like Farage or Trump. You might not be any wealthier, and, in fact, you are likely to be poorer, but, given a lack of sensible alternatives, it feels good scratching your immediate itches and giving the outside world the fingers.
In this context, immigration is the obvious flashpoint. It is understandable that voters don’t want to feel their culture is being overwhelmed by mass immigration. However, it is also true that with rapidly sinking birth rates, Western nations can’t sustain their current standard of living without importing some of the best and brightest from the rest of the world. Just ask Japan or Italy.
There is a legitimate debate to be had about levels of immigration and what the social contract should be for immigrants in terms of adopting the social mores of their new home. Conservatives should be well placed to lead that discussion, but too often they have defaulted to cheap nationalism which winds people up without offering a solution.
Back in the world of imperfect election choices, Americans are now only notionally being asked about any of this. They are instead being invited to decide between 81-year-old Joe Biden and 78-year-old Donald Trump for the post of leader of the free world.
People on both sides of the political aisle want the US election to be about all sorts of important policy matters, like how to handle immigration, the rule of law, abortion rights, income distribution or tax. But as things stand it will simply be about which candidate is most likely to still have a pulse at the end of their presidency. And Democrats may be finally starting to realise that if that’s the choice the public is offered, there will only be one winner, and it ain’t their guy.
