Donald Trump's Worldwide Election

        Winning the 2024 election was only the beginning -- the Trump effect is
now sweeping the globe.

        From Canada to the U.K. and continental Europe, left-liberal governments
are tottering while right-leaning voters, especially young men, gravitate
toward populist politics and take inspiration from Donald Trump's success
in America.

        It's almost as if Trump himself were on the ballot in other advanced
democracies.

        Recent polls showing Trump to be more popular in Canada than the country's
own prime minister, Justin Trudeau, presaged Trudeau's announcement this
week of his resignation as Liberal Party leader and impending replacement
as head of government.

        Will Britain's Keir Starmer, who's only been in office since July,
ultimately face a similar fate?

        Starmer's dismal, Biden-like -- and Trudeau-like -- poll numbers suggest
so: In mid-December, YouGov measured the Labour prime minister's net
favorability at minus 41%.

        Left-liberal leaders like Trudeau and Starmer are architects of their own
ruin, to be sure: Like their counterparts in America's Democratic Party,
they've shown themselves to be economically inept and wildly out of touch
with voters' desires to limit immigration.

        Yet that's true of the center-right parties in all too many parts of the
world, too, which is why Britain's Conservatives lost the last election and
Canada's Tories have been out of power for a decade.

        Voters already know how inadequate the leadership of a Trudeau or a
Starmer is.

        But to mobilize voters' dissatisfaction requires a strong voice in
opposition to the left -- someone willing to mock the pretensions of these
worse-than-mediocre premiers and offer a stark alternative on immigration
and other urgent issues

        Trump may not be able to run for office in Britain or Canada, but he can
and does provide that voice for the right even beyond America's shores.

        Calling Trudeau the "governor" of Canada, as if our neighbor to the north
were merely the 51st state, was one way Trump highlighted Trudeau's
weakness.

        Canadian conservatives do not, of course, think of their country as just
an appendage to America, but the effect of Trump's jibe was to make Trudeau
look like the lightweight he is, setting him up for his downfall at home.

        After Trump's humiliation of Trudeau, the prime minister's standing in his
own party collapsed, with Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance
Chrystia Freeland resigning from his cabinet.

        Now Trudeau himself is heading for the exit: Trump has peacefully brought
regime change to Canada, though as always, the hard part will be what comes
next.

        Trump has a grasp on the future, however, thanks to the support of young
men even in places where the populist right has so far enjoyed only
moderate success.

        Britain is one such place:

        Reform UK, the immigration-restrictionist party Nigel Farage leads, won
only a handful of seats in last year's parliamentary elections, despite the
success of the Brexit movement under Farage eight years earlier.

        Farage and Reform UK are far from displacing the Conservative Party as the
leading force on the British right.

        But shortly after the U.S. presidential election, Jim Blagden of the think
tank More in Common released polling data showing that fully half of
British men aged 18-35 would have voted for Trump if they could have done
so, while only some 25% voted for either the Conservatives or Reform in
Britain's own election.

        Trump also had a lead over the Conservatives and Reform together, albeit a
narrower one, among British men aged 35-44.

        Polls weeks before the U.S. election, meanwhile, showed that altogether
about a third of young British people would have voted for Trump -- which
may not seem so impressive until one considers that the Labour Party won a
commanding majority in Parliament, more than three times as many seat as
the Conservatives, with a "popular vote" total of just 33.7%.

        Will the Conservatives take this as a signal to move in a more populist
direction?

        Doing so would help them thwart the challenge from Farage, who may not win
many seats but does cost the Conservatives seats by splitting the
right-leaning vote.

        Yet the Conservatives may be content to let Starmer defeat himself with
his unpopular policies -- that could work in the short run, but it would
only postpone a populist reckoning.

        Trump didn't start a new party. He took over and remade America's existing
right-of-center vehicle.

        If some Trump-like future leader in Britain or Europe can do likewise, the
result could be a generational realignment similar to the one America has
seen.

        Until then, though, Trump himself will continue to be the leader of a
transformation that is remaking more than just American politics -- and
which has now unmade Justin Trudeau's premiership.

        Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.

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