Voters aren’t just sick of the Tories. The Western model is broken

People across the West are venting their anger at the established parties. The rot is far deeper than we knew

ou might think that the Conservative party is facing a uniquely catastrophic fall in public confidence. But the scale of the collapse in its support is not exceptional – or even particularly remarkable – among ruling Western governments.

In recent years, we have watched time and time again as governing parties and coalitions in the major democracies have suffered either outright defeats or electoral setbacks of historic proportions. 

Centrist respectability has lost out again and again, often to populist forces. 

There is a common theme in these rejections of traditional parties and their leaders  who had grown almost indistinguishable from one another.

The assumption of the post-war West that the state could provide unlimited resources to insure its population against poverty, ill health and social disadvantage while maintaining a thriving market economy, has reached its endgame.

There is a real risk now that, with the disintegration of the old social democratic consensus, there will be a fragmentation of party politics that allows scope for sectarian religious parties to emerge. 

That would be a horrifyingly divisive development

Janet Daley Telegraph 4 May 2024

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/04/local-election-voters-western-model-broken/

Suella Braverman: Tories will be lucky to have any MPs at the next election

Former home secretary said she regretted backing Rishi Sunak for party leader but that it was not ‘feasible’ to change Prime Minister now

Telegraph 5 May 2024

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/05/05/suella-braverman-tories-will-be-lucky-any-mps-election/

The core confrontation in Western societies is no longer over internal issues. 

It is global vs. national, the connected living in the “somewhere” of the knowledge economy vs. the forgotten living “nowhere” in industrial wastelands and rural areas. 

There lies the frustration, even fury, on which a Trump, a Meloni, a Wilders, a Le Pen could build.

Progressive changes in social mores have offered a new rhetorical weapon to these leaders. 

For them, as for Mr. Putin, it has been easy to present a simplistic portrayal of the West of liberal urban elites as the decadent locus of cultural suicide, the place where family, church, nation and traditional notions of marriage and gender go to die.

Just How Dangerous Is Europe’s Rising Far Right?

Anti-immigration parties with fascist roots — and an uncertain commitment to democracy — are now mainstream.

New York Times  5 May 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/05/world/europe/europe-far-right.html