The fool’s-based international order

First Biden, then Macron and next week the unfortunate Rishi Sunak. Japan’s Kishida, Germany’s Scholz and Canada’s Trudeau remain in office only because the election cycle doesn’t require them to assay the voters.

For the first time since modern European states were defined by the Treaty of Westphalia, every government of every major Western country is falling or would fall if it had to hold elections. What collective curse has befallen the leaders of the West such that all of their voters have come to despise them by enormous margins?

There is a simple explanation for the collective ruin of the governments of the West: All of them agreed to an agenda that their voters reject because it has degraded the quality of their lives. Spontaneously and simultaneously, the voters of the West are rising up to repudiate their leaders.

The damage to the world’s political class is breathtaking.

The first returns from France indicate that Emmanuel Macron’s bubble party of the center drew just a fifth of the national vote in the first round of the snap election that Macron called following the disastrous European Parliament election of June 9. Le Pen’s National Rally, tendentiously labeled the “extreme right” by the media echo chamber, came in at 34% while the leftist coalition garnered 28%.

72% of Americans, meanwhile, think that Joseph Biden isn’t mentally fit to be president (the other 28% presumably includes a large number of dementia victims). 56% of Americans disapprove of his performance.

The three parties that comprise the German governing coalition together polled just 30% of the vote in the June 9 European Parliament elections. The country’s second-largest party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), has 16% of the vote, enough to force itself into a coalition that the formerly mainstream parties have sworn never to consider.

Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has an approval rating of 13% and the support of just a tenth of voters in his own party. Canada’s Justin Trudeau looks like the leper with the most fingers with an approval rating of 28%.

What is the agenda that the voters of the West have repudiated? America’s elite set out to remake the world according to its own imaginings after the fall of Communism in 1990 and had sufficient power to frog-march the rest of the industrial world into its plan.

The first is a global agreement to isolate and debilitate Russia, expanding NATO to the Russia-Ukraine border. As Donald Trump declared on June 21, that is precisely what provoked the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In March 2022, Biden promised that sanctions would cut the Russian economy in half; instead, Russia’s economy has grown and is now larger than Japan’s, according to the World Bank, and Moscow has the upper hand in a grinding war of attrition. The war is vastly unpopular in Europe and the surge in support for alternative European parties on June 9 was largely a peace vote.

The second was a global agreement to put the climate change agenda ahead of industrial productivity. In the US, the Biden administration hobbled the extraction of hydrocarbons. US petroleum exports doubled during the Trump administration; under Biden, exports have barely recovered to the Trump peak after a sharp fall.

In Germany, the Ukraine war shut off Germany’s access to cheap Russian energy after the Merkel government acceded to the Green Party agenda and shut down the country’s nuclear power plants. Energy prices played a major role in the inflation of the past three years.

The third agreement responded to the demographic decline of the industrial nations. All leaders of the major Western countries agreed that they would absorb large numbers of immigrants from poor countries to their south, Middle Eastern Muslims and sub-Saharan Africans in the case of Europe, Central Americans in the case of the United States.

This is not quite the so-called “Great Replacement Theory” of conspiracy theory lore. Still, it comes close: The elite envisioned a new global melting pot of cultural admixture that would dilute and degrade the cultures of the West.

Immigration is by far the most important of these three: It implies the reconfiguring of social and economic life in the industrial world and the erosion of the national foundation of the advanced states.

By no coincidence, the populist rebellion against this global pact among the elites focused on immigration, with Donald Trump in the US and Viktor Orban in Hungary leading the charge. It is also the issue for which the elites will throw themselves on their swords.

In the wake of today’s election catastrophe, Macron’s premier Gabriel Attal ordered candidates of his party who came in third to withdraw from the second round of voting on July 7 in order to throw votes to the left-wing National Front, preferring the extreme left to the nationalist right.

At the same time, according to Le Monde, “Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the radical left party La France Insoumise (LFI), called on left-wing candidates who ranked third but still qualified for the second round to withdraw, to support the better-placed candidate to beat the RN. ‘Not one vote, not one seat more for the RN,’ he said.”

The socialists, after all, are globalists of a different stripe, with some serious objections to economic management by oligarchy but equally hostile to national sovereignty. Globalists of Macron’s (or Angela Merkel’s, or Rishi Sunak’s) stripe agree with the socialists on the most compelling issue: The dissolution of national boundaries, national cultures and national populations in the great wave of migration that they have done so much to encourage.

France is now 8% to 10% Muslim; according to the Pew Survey, it will be 18% Muslim by 2050 in a high migration scenario while Germany will have a 20% Muslim population. Migrants are core constituencies of left-wing parties, which puts the socialist left in alliance with the capitalist center.

The center-left alliance of desperation cannot govern France, to be sure. Nor could a similar coalition govern Germany, where a split-off from the traditional Left (“Die Linke”) led by Sahra Wagenknecht is now polling at 9% of the federal vote.

The Wagenknecht group combines traditional socialist politics with a strong anti-immigration stance and has taken some votes from the AfD, now at 17% of the total. Germany has a strong anti-immigration left that precludes the center-left alignment that Macron is trying to promote.

Whether the alliance of desperation between the ex-investment banker Macron and the leftist firebrand Mélenchon will stop the National Rally from winning the July 7 round or not is far from clear.

Perhaps France simply will descend into chaos rather than coalesce around a populist government. Germany faces a long interregnum before its next national election at the end of 2025, with the AfD leading by wide margins in polls in three key state elections scheduled for September 1.

American politics, meanwhile, is in chaos after Biden’s stupefying display of dementia in his debate with Trump on June 27. The Democrats cannot live with Biden as a candidate but they cannot live without him, making Trump’s election highly probable.

 And Trump has no use for the global agenda that the American elite imposed on the world after 1990. The message coming from Washington is: You’re on your own and it’s every man for himself.

Spengler is channeled by David P. Goldman. Follow him on X at @davidpgoldman