Progressives are still so pessimistic, but why? The populist right can and will be defeated

From the US midterms to Brazil and Hungary, extremists are floundering yet the left still overestimates their power. Reality is on our side

From Brazil to Hungary and Britain to the US, why are so many people so surprised by the right’s election defeats? Flávio Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán, Reform UK, the Tories and a vast array of Republican candidates have all been rejected in national or local contests this year, even in usually reliably conservative Mississippi. Apparently impregnable incumbents and populist insurgents alike have been beaten, often by big margins. The supposedly ascendant global right has been out-organised, out-thought, outmanoeuvred and outnumbered.

Yet each time this happens – which is more often than the usual gloomy narrative of our politics allows – many liberals and leftists absorb and share the good news almost with wonderment. Rightwing governments such as Donald Trump’s may have been struggling for many months, having made countless impossible or incompatible promises and strategic blunders, and opinion polls may have been consistently pointing towards a meltdown, but their actual election defeats are seen as miracles: unexpected moments of joy in the morning news, often followed over subsequent months by a creeping conviction that the right’s supremacy will inevitably return.

A similar progressive pessimism follows the right’s victories, whatever their scale. The 52% vote to leave the EU in the 2016 Brexit referendum set off years of centrist and leftwing soul-searching about why the right supposedly had a better understanding of the whole country. Boris Johnson’s 2019 general election win with a medium-sized majority of 80 seats – less than half the size of Tony Blair’s in 1997 and 2001 – was widely described as a “landslide” and a sign the Tories would stay in office for many years to come.

Then came Trump’s hugely hyped 2024 presidential victory. Despite him having run against a last-minute, less than compelling Democrat candidate, being ahead by just 1.5 points in the popular vote, and achieving an electoral share below 50%, his win was seen as signalling a profound shift to the right, not just in politics, but in American culture and society, from how young men thought to whom Latino voters supported. A brash but socially conservative, confrontational but entertaining counter-revolution was said to be surging in the US and far beyond, ideally suited to the online world.

The midterms haven’t made this movement disappear. But they are the latest evidence that its strength has been overestimated. Some of that error originates in the ultra-confidence of rightwing populists. Especially when amplified by a powerful rightwing media, it can convince some voters for a while, as the blustering Johnson’s relative popularity from 2019 to 2021 demonstrated. In democracies riddled with doubt and with a recent history of tentative leaders, the performance of certainty can be seductive – until its bluffing and self-delusions are revealed.

Many voters and journalists want to see politics in clear narratives. Believing that the right, or the left, is dominant is simpler and more emotionally resonant than acknowledging that many western democracies are closer to political stalemate, and have been for a long while. Over the past 50 years, the Republicans have won the US presidency seven times and the Democrats six, with the 2000 Republican win achieved only through a highly contentious ruling by the supreme court – itself a symptom of deadlock.

In truth, the battle for power in any democracy is much more complex and multi-dimensional than national contests suggest. Electoral politics happens at many different speeds and scales. Then there are public protests such as marches, riots and strikes; elite private lobbying operations; slow but potent changes in popular attitudes; culture wars in the media and other institutions; battles between ideas in books and online; shifting power dynamics within personal relationships; and evolving assumptions inside people’s heads.

If an ideology or political party significantly shapes many of these processes simultaneously, then it has achieved hegemony, as the term was understood and refined by the still influential Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci during the 1920s and 1930s. This century’s recurring transatlantic tendency to see the right as establishing a new era of dominance is a misapplication of this theory: a mistaken belief, across the political spectrum, that modern conservatism has come up with a formula as potent as those of the right’s last two hegemonic leaders, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, almost half a century ago. Yet unlike them, the right’s current icons such as Trump, Nigel Farage and the Argentinian president, Javier Milei, only seem able to achieve a year or two of decisive political momentum at a time, and even then never manage to shed their deep unpopularity.

With national elections looming in two important countries where the populist right is currently strong – France and Spain – it’s possible the movement will finally start reshaping societies for the long term. But even if the populists get into office, it feels more likely that their governments will quickly become incoherent and intensely disliked, as Trump’s has. Scapegoating migrants, “woke” elites and minorities can be an effective campaign strategy, but doesn’t solve a country’s cost of living problems.

The modern overestimation of the right also has consequences for left-leaning governments. It can make them too cautious, as if they are impostors who believe that society’s natural rightwing rulers will soon replace them.

So far, Andy Burnham has largely avoided this psychological trap, clearly relishing being prime minister, referring to Reform and the Tories strikingly little in his speeches, and ambitiously promising a 10-year plan, to be revealed next month. However, in some of his policies, such as on immigration and prisons, a deference towards the populist right and its worldview can still be discerned.

Successful centre-left politicians, from Blair to Bill Clinton to Burnham, have always argued that their illiberal moves are responses to voters’ concerns. But where do those concerns come from? Often, from the right’s fear-mongering about modern life, its exaggerations about migrant invasions and the extent of crime. This dystopianism needs to be called out by conservatism’s opponents, and the association of the right with realism – social, economic or electoral – needs to be broken, or at least weakened. After years of failed rightwing governments all over the world, it’s well past time.