The Liberal Saviour?

On the "Trump Effect", its reach, and its limitations

Donald Trump has the lowest approval ratings of any President after 100 days. He’s even beating his own woeful first term numbers. His signature tariffs policy has been a disaster, and polls terribly. Confidence in the economy has collapsed. Even on immigration he has negative numbers.

Sadly for America, they can’t get rid of him anytime soon. Even the midterms, which offer an opportunity to put more constraints on Trump’s behaviour, are still 541 days away.

There are plenty of elections across the rest of the world, though, and, given the global dominance of the US, the sheer lunacy of its government appears to be harming parties even slightly associated with Trump.

In Canada we’ve seen Mark Carney’s Liberals win an election that few gave them any chance of taking at the start of the year. Just a few months ago Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives were 25 points ahead in the polls, while the Liberals looked like they could lose second place to the left-wing NDP. But then Trump started a completely unjustified trade war and started to describe Canada as the 51^st state.

In the Australian election, Anthony Albanese’s Labor party overturned a smaller but not insignificant deficit at the start of the campaign to increase its majority against the centre-right Coalition. Like Poilievre, Peter Dutton the leader of the Liberals (who lead the Coalition and are, confusingly, conservatives) humiliatingly lost his own seat.

These resurgent left/liberal wins come after a year where incumbents seemed to lose almost everywhere, as voters vented their frustration at inflationary price rises. This particularly hurt progressive parties. Apart from the Democrat’s loss in the US we saw New Zealand’s Labour party lose to the Nationals, the SDP/Green/FDP coalition in Germany thrown out, and Emmanuel Macron’s party squeezed by the far left and far right in French parliamentary elections. Labour won in the UK but on a low share of the vote, with Reform on the rise.

So do the Canadian and Australian elections represent a turning point for global liberalism? Is Trump its unlikely saviour?

There are two questions we need to consider before getting too excited.

First, were Carney and Albanese’s wins really all down to a “Trump Effect” or were there other more important factors at work? Are we in danger of confusing correlation with causation?

Secondly, if there is a “Trump effect” will it work everywhere or is its application limited? Canada and Australia are unusual in that their traditional centre-right parties are currently largely unthreatened by a radical-right alternative. Neither Poilievre nor Dutton actively associated themselves with Trump (at least not recently), and both criticised tariffs. In Europe the centre-right has been overrun, in many countries, by more radical parties that have more explicitly associated themselves with MAGA. Will this magnify or weaken any Trump effect?

In the rest of this post I’ll take these two questions in turn, before looking at what the answers might mean for UK politics.