In our post-Covid economic (dis)order, cost-of-living crises cause electorates to lash out wherever and whenever they can. Until very recently, there was barely a popular incumbent leader in the Western world. Centrists and advocates of the status quo were falling like flies. Brexit and Donald Trump, once the enigmas of the Global North, now look the norm.
But Trump’s ascendancy to a second term has done something in neighbouring Canada, a contemporary liberal democracy, that doesn’t often happen. Trump’s volley against Canada’s status as an independent nation has inspired Canadians to rally around their collective confederal identity. Feelings of national pride have shot up. Trump as a voter issue is second only to the economy. If the country had gone to the polls just a few weeks ago, the incumbent Liberal Party would have faced a serious reckoning – just as happened in the UK and US last year. The Liberals were on course for a defeat that its leader Justin Trudeau was unsure of surviving.
But Trump’s return challenges all of those assumptions. To vote for the status quo in Canada now is to vote for everything Donald Trump isn’t. However irritated and exhausted Canadians are with income, prices and housing (and they are) the spectre of the US president is encouraging them not to risk a new government. Better the devil you know, and all that.
It’s a rally-around-the-flag kinda year. Canada’s Liberals were 23 points behind two months ago. They are six points ahead now. That’s a stark reversal of fortunes. Trump’s tariffs and threats about Canada becoming the “51st state” have restored the party to a competitive position. Replacing the unpopular Trudeau with the former central banker Mark Carney has also breathed fresh life into the Liberals. Though perhaps this has less to do with enthusiasm for the incumbents, and more to do with a reluctance to embrace a Conservative Party that is effectively in alliance with Trump’s Republicans.
Whatever it is, it’s happening in Canada. Meanwhile in Mexico, we are learning that playing strongman to the strongman also deals dividends. Mexican media coverage of its relatively new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, pits her in stark opposition to Donald Trump. In the week following Trump’s return to the White House, Sheinbaum’s approvals went from 77 per cent to 81 per cent. High already, I grant you. But when compared with other periods in her impressive honeymoon period, it is still the only significant shift of the last six months.
There is more. Morning Consult observes the improvement in net ratings of several world leaders, including Australia, where the prime minister Anthony Albanese is facing a tough election in the face of a cost-of-living crisis. Could he exploit the Trump tariff whirlpool for domestic gain?
Trump is the bogeyman that incumbents can rely on to sustain their polling position. In the eyes of her media and voters Sheinbaum, as leader of the left-wing Morena party, is the antithesis to Trump. To voters in Canada, Carney is the protector of all things Canadian in the face of a full-frontal Trumpian offensive.
None of this denies the extent of voter exhaustion with the status quo and our economic order. But this Trump effect might delay or stymie this irritability from spilling out into widespread indulgence of the radical right.
The US’s immediate neighbours always knew they were going to have to face the consequences of a second Trump presidency. Less so European or Asian leaders – until this week. The tariff imposition makes the latest resident of the White House a much more active force for European voters than usual. One consequence could have been that tariffs entrench voters’ sense of malaise with the economy. That would punish incumbents. So far, that’s not what we’re seeing. Perhaps the inverse will continue to bear out: voters will rally around their own leaders in the face of this foreign, 18th-century-style aggression. In Europe, where the radical right has been seen to embrace Trump, it is the radical right that could lose out most significantly.
[See more: The UK isn’t a winner from Trump’s tariffs]
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