This is a bad year for incumbents. President Trump is testing new lows in the polls as Republicans brace for tough midterm elections. But even with approval ratings in the mid-30s, by global standards Mr. Trump isn't doing that badly.
Look at Europe. As riots sweep France and bond vigilantes push up the interest rates on its debt, the flailing President Emmanuel Macron contemplates approval ratings in the mid- to high teens. Mr. Macron's German counterpart, Chancellor Friedrich Merz, fares even worse, with at least one recent poll showing only 10% of Germans satisfied with his performance. Former British Prime Minister Keir Starmer had to step down just over two years after his July 2024 landslide election victory. Spain's beleaguered Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called for early elections after a stinging defeat to his emergency renters' rights agenda.
In Brazil, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva looks unlikely to win an unprecedented fourth term after unexpectedly failing to lead in the first round in that nation's election. Flavio Bolsonaro, eldest son of the convicted former President Jair Bolsonaro, is positioned to take power on a wave of dissatisfaction with Lula's government.
Like the Bolsonaro family, Mr. Trump benefited from the anti-insider trend when he ran as an outsider but lost when running as an incumbent. As a charismatic outsider vowing to drain the swamp, he won voters over. As the swamp's proprietor, he loses.
The core problem for political leaders is that so many issues agitating voters are difficult or even impossible to fix. The rise of artificial intelligence and its potential effects on everything from employment and income distribution to national security is moving too quickly and disruptively for governments to develop effective policies around it. The return of great-power competition forces unpopular choices on governments trying to balance social welfare and national defense. Decades of mass immigration have scrambled politics and exacerbated culture wars in many countries. Islamist terrorism hasn't gone away. The so-called China Shock 2.0 -- as Beijing responds to mass overproduction and economic stagnation at home by stepping up exports -- threatens jobs on every continent. The great demographic shift has made the pension and welfare systems of many countries unsustainable. The Iran war has driven up energy prices worldwide, setting off inflation even as interest rates spike. And as voters become angrier and more fearful, social media spreads concern and further polarizes and energizes agitated societies around the globe.
We live in revolutionary, not evolutionary, times. This is an unpromising environment for pragmatic technocrats and moderates. More-charismatic types, demagogues not excluded, do much better. When you run low on bread, you need better circuses. Mr. Trump has filled that space in Republican politics for the past decade; a new generation of charismatic Democrats now seeks to make its mark. On the left and the right, in the U.S. and beyond, we are likely to face an era of more personalistic politics.
But as Mr. Trump and other insurgent politicians have discovered, popular slogans often turn into unpopular policies. Protectionism, especially when accompanied by undisciplined spending, can stoke inflation. A tough stance on national defense can lead you into unpopular wars. A popular crackdown on immigration can generate shocking examples of brutality and overreach that alienate key constituencies. A new round of anti-incumbent populists, mobilizing supporters with social media and the politics of outrage, will rise up and smite you in the next elections.
This kind of political competition -- if the U.S. and other countries alternate between waves of right- and left-wing populism -- is less a recipe for stable governance than for endless upheaval. Over time, it is more likely to destroy the institutional and legal frameworks that make democracy work than to solve the problems that have made voters restless.
America's disputatious political history suggests that we won't follow this ruinous road to the end. Through 250 years of economic upheaval and social change, the common sense of the average voter has ultimately kept the U.S. on a reasonably stable and reasonably democratic course. Great American presidents like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, the two Roosevelts and Ronald Reagan tapped into that reservoir of common sense to lead the country through difficult times.
Twenty twenty-six may be a bad year for incumbents, but the ability to throw the rascals out is a feature, not a bug. Even if the result, temporarily, is only to replace one gang of rascals with another, peaceful change in response to the will of the people remains the best mechanism humanity has yet found to weather the storms that social and technological upheavals inevitably bring.
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