The illusory triumph of the center: they won, but delivered the world to the right

Centrist victories hide a deep political collapse: the system that sustains them is in crisis and pushes voters to the extremes

When Emmanuel Macron defeated Marine Le Pen with a break to regain the French presidency in 2022, the liberal stablishment went into ecstasy. His verdict that the political center remained firm was as understandable as unfounded. In fact, Macron’s second term helped the far right become the strongest political force in France. Last week, Mark Carnery and Anthony Albanese defeated their trumpland rivals to keep prime minister positions in Canada and Australia respectively. Once again, the news of the rebirth of the political center may prove to be a centrist illusion.

It was a long time ago, it was reasonable to expect voters who considered to vote for a right -wing extremist to protest the centrist policies that oppressed them to return to themselves as this extremist seemed close to reaching power. Something like this happened in France in 2002. At the time, middle-class socialists, young and working-class ecologists aligned at the polls alongside conservatives to give 82% of the votes to the directionist Jacques Chirac and keep the ultra-rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen-the father of the current French right leader-far from the Elisha palace. But that did not happen in France 25 years later, neither in Canada or Australia last week.

Macron’s trap and the rise of the far right

In 2002, six years before the almost death of Western capitalism, Chirac defeated Le Pen because the socialist and communist parties direct their voters to him. Under the slogan “We voted for you today, but let’s fight you tomorrow!”unhappy voters with Estabishment voted in a figure of Estabishment to keep a neo -fascist away from power – without abandoning his loyalty to the left. Already Macron won crushing the left parties.

Voters of the working class, suffering from the austerity policies of the centrists, revolted against Macron, a former banker who imposed “green” taxes on them as he gave tax benefits to the bourgeois elite. With no alternatives, they migrated mass to Le Pen. So something surprising happened: Macron and Le Pen became codependent, despite their mutual dislike. The more austerity he imposed, the greater the discontent and the greater the support to it. And the more Le Pen grew, the more Macron appealed to anti-fascists to vote for him, even grudgingly, to keep her away from power.

This dynamic led the far right to gain impressive 40% of the votes in the parliamentary elections of June 2024. Nothing indicates that this trend is losing strength. Thus, the story may remember Macron not as the Savior, but as the gravedigger of the liberal center.

Fragile victories in Canada and Australia

Last week, the right -wing parties of Canada and Australia, who tried to surf the Trumpist wave, were defeated. Carney and Albanese won because Donald Trump practically secured their victories – by threatening the attachment of Canada and imposing tariffs on Australia, an ally who has always struggled to please the US.

However, behind these victories, it is easy to discern social trends similar to those that made Macron’s triumph a Pyrro victory. In Canada, after 11 years in power, liberals lost support from the working class, who chose to abstain or vote for conservatives. They kept a minimum majority just by cannibalizing the left (the NDP and the Quebequense party), just as Macron did.

In Australia, the overwhelming victory of the Labor Party hid a crucial fact: he obtained the smallest percentage of primary votes in history. Although he won most of Sydney and Melbourne workers’ districts, it was thanks to secondary preferences, while losing traditional voters – especially immigrants, who were once his most faithful base.

The global mechanism that feeds the crisis

These similarities occur in very different economies: France, linked to Germany and EU; Canada and Australia, resource-based and integrated economies with the US energy-industrial-industrial complex. But they are all stuck in the same global surplus recycling mechanism, centered on the United States – a system in crisis that undermines centrist perspectives.

Since the 1970s, US commercial deficits have ensured demand for exports in Europe and Asia, while these countries reinvested their profits on Wall Street. A high Chinese employee described this agreement as a “Dark Pact”: The US maintained their deficit to support demand, and China invested its dollars in the US financial sector.

But this system required increasing imbalances – and its collapse was inevitable. In 2005, Paul Volcker, former Fed President, warned: “This comfortable pattern cannot continue indefinitely”. Three years later came the 2008 crash.

Trump and the end of centrist denial

Trump’s great strength is to ask the question that the centrists refuse to face: What comes after the “dark pact”? His Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent summed up: “The status quo of great imbalances is not sustainable”.

Trump’s solutions can be mistaken, but your team at least identified the problem. Meanwhile, the centrists, like King Canuto, order the tide of discontent to retreat – and are still losing ground, even when they win elections.

While the global economy is unbalanced, politics also collapses. Macron, Carney and Albanese can celebrate victories, but have no plan to curb the decline of their power over increasingly rebels. And in the end, those who reap the fruits of this crisis are precisely the forces they swear to fight.

With information from UNHERD*