Three elections, three mistakes

Xenophobic populist right is set to take control of France, the US, and the UK - thanks to critical miscalculations by centre-left and centre-right leaders

Joe Biden had a disastrous evening on the debate stage on Thursday. He may still be a more reliable President than Donald Trump, three years younger than he is — but that says more about Mr Trump than anything else. Nor will it be easy to convince American voters that Mr Biden is worth voting for at this stage.

Yet replacing someone on the ticket at this late stage is not easy in the United States. It is just one way in which the US’s constitutional system is poorly adapted to the modern age. The comparison with, say, the United Kingdom — which has several times been able to change how leaders of its parliamentary parties, and thus Prime Ministers, are chosen — is worth noting. The US has far more rigid institutions and precedents. It is thus, paradoxically, far more likely to elect a would-be dictator.

Three large democracies are likely to elect new leadership in the coming months. In all three, the incumbents seem to have been guilty of horrific misjudgements. President Biden, clearly, should have started planning for a succession years ago: Few expected in 2020 that he would want to serve a second term in office, and assumed he was just running for a single term to stop Mr Trump from re-election. Yet at no point since has Mr Biden either built up the profile of his vice-president, Kamala Harris, or allowed an open or even covert leadership contest within his party for a successor. Choosing to run again — which, in the US party system, means that the party automatically rallies to you out of loyalty — was clearly a grievous error.

In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, the Conservative Party under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is staring at a defeat on July 4 — a defeat that may be of historic proportions. Some projections suggest that they might not even be the second-largest party in Parliament once the elections are done, with the centrist Liberal Democrats energetically assaulting Tory strongholds in southern England and aiming for more than 50 of these seats. Constituencies that have stayed Conservative for more than a century might go to the Liberals this time. Labour, meanwhile, has played a cautious game, choosing to commit to nothing rather than in any way disturb its 20-point lead in the polls.

This situation has been caused by 14 years of poor governance by the Conservatives. But the magnitude of the loss is also down to the poor judgement of Mr Sunak, who chose to call an early election before his party was really ready and well in advance of improving economic news. Inflation is finally declining, and rates might be cut in the fall, boosting growth. Mr Sunak could have waited for this tailwind to the economy before going to the polls. But, for no reason that anyone can discern, he chose to go early instead.

The consequences for the world’s most successful political party might be dire. Some parties can survive complete wipeouts. But they are never the same again. The Congress in India is back near 100 seats in Parliament from 44 in 2014; the Pakistan Peoples Party collapsed to 42 seats in the National Assembly in 2013, and has never recovered its vote share since. Worse is possible. The Conservatives’ counterparts in Canada were wiped out in the 1992 federal election there — with a massive 27-point swing against them — and the party was replaced by a more populist right-wing bloc. That bloc was centred around Preston Manning of the Reform Party, and it is Britain’s own Reform Party, centred around Nigel Farage, that threatens the Tories with extinction.

Meanwhile, in France, Emmanuel Macron may finally have made a mistake after years of balancing left and right expertly. Mr Macron unexpectedly called an early election. It looks now like this was a major miscalculation: His centrist bloc may be a weak third in elections, and lose many of its seats. His Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, will almost certainly lose his job. Mr Macron calculated, perhaps, that the left would not be able to repeat the alliance it stitched up before the last elections; and that the right, which has multiple contenders, would be in disarray. Signs of this dissension did in fact emerge early on: But they have largely been buried as the campaign continued. The centre may practically disappear when the election results are announced on July 7.

The xenophobic, populist right may seize control in France, will likely storm to power in the United States, and might replace the traditional right in the United Kingdom. In each case, a single major miscalculation by leaders of the centre-left or centre-right must bear a large part of the blame.