NO figure has loomed as large on the right of politics as Donald Trump in recent years. Despite failing to achieve a second term in 2020 the years since have seen him inspire a conservative renaissance around the world. The surge of populist right-wing parties which has swept across Europe and South America has been driven by leaders capitalising on ‘Trumpism’ to forge or cement their election wins – from Argentina’s Javier Milei, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, France’s Marine Le Pen and Germany’s Alice Weidel. Trumpism on the march and the required mood music to guarantee election success. So it was thought.
Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, and Peter Dutton, leader of the Liberal Party in Australia, began the year as leaders in waiting. Self-professed fans of ‘straight talking’, both appeared to be riding the wave of Trump’s victory in November last year – amid the signs of a broader shift to the right in international politics.
Poilievre’s own message was sharply focused on former Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s near-decade in power. His speeches, vowing to end ‘woke ideology’ and to take on the ‘global elite’, along with the slogan ‘Canada First’, were straight from the Trump playbook.
Yet in about-turns during their recent election campaigns, he and Dutton both suddenly fought shy and distanced themselves from the progressive left’s bête noire. Trump’s first 100 days in office, particularly his tariffs blizzard, left them unable to deal with, let alone emulate, the man who could actually walk the talk.
The more tragic of the two is Poilievre who, unlike the unnoticeable Peter Dutton, had made something of a mark on the right. Last week he pulled off the most extraordinary feat of losing a 25-point lead in the Canadian federal election to the overrated global bureaucrat Mark Carney, a man who had never held elected office.
Poilievre’s disastrous election performance caused commentators worldwide to ask what on earth went wrong. The favoured legacy media narrative was predictable. Trump damaged his brand; Trump is no longer the saviour of right-wing politics; and specifically Trump’s compulsive rhetoric on the annexation of Canada and the imposition of tariffs had driven a stake through the heart of Poilievre’s campaign.
Of course they would say this. Anything to pin the blame on Trump. But it is a complacent and shortsighted excuse to explain away failure. The fact is that such anti-Trump narrative in the Western media – where Trump is most hated – had already done its damage by making these right-wing hopefuls nervous of him. Like Poilievre, Dutton was undermined by the anathema shown to Trump and decided to disown him at the last hour. He too has just delivered a disastrous election result.
Both election losses were entirely self-inflicted. In the case of Poilievre, a man who had everything going for him.
First elected in Ottawa in 2004 at the age of 25, he was widely acclaimed as Canada’s rising political star. A disciple of the two-term-winning former PM Stephen Harper, his almost preordained path to leadership came to be in 2022. Those close to him remarked on his oracy skills, his ability to talk about ‘big ideas in commonsense language’. His supporters believed he sounded every bit like Trump. They called him the ‘Maple Syrup MAGA’. Straight-talking, confrontational and great at picking fights with the establishment elites he disdained.
The mainstream media loathed him, and no better barometer is there of how well he was actually doing. They saw him as ‘belligerent, pompous and a showman that turned every interview into showbusiness’, like Trump in fact. They were right. His curt responses to their questions often went viral. Kemi Badenoch called him her ‘friend and new ally’. The Canadians called him their own Nigel Farage. The Americans loved him. Elon Musk retweeted him. Megyn Kelly applauded his bombast, even going as far to say, ‘Can we get him in our country?’. Poilievre’s supporters lapped it all up. His lead in the polls proved it.
Then came his first mistake. His campaign strategy, broadly based on parroting mainstream ‘easy peasy’ Conservatism soundbites – small state, low taxes, less government – was not the alternative message a desperate populace wanted to hear after years of Trudeau’s speech oppression and population replacement policies. Poilievre’s initial attack on Trudeau’s incompetence, woke ideology and globalist elite stance was not strong or lasting enough.
His second mistake – hubris. Trump taking office and becoming the Republican figurehead was the ‘vibe shift’ his party had longed for. Polling for Poilievre had risen and his campaign went into cruise control. ‘We’re all right!’, Poilievre proclaimed to his fans, displaying all the hallmarks of Neil Kinnock’s 1992 hubris-ridden, ill-fated, triumphalist speech which led to his catastrophic election defeat by John Major. What could possibly go wrong for Poilievre?
A final curveball from Trudeau was what could go wrong.
Trudeau stepping down as the Liberal leader left Poilievre bereft. With no whipping boy to focus on, his lacklustre campaign was exposed as having no distinct message and no sense of purpose.
Then, when Trump made controversial statements on Canadian sovereignty and economic interests and threatened to annex it, Poilievre lost his footing altogether. As the country and Mark Carney turned on Trump, Poilievre’s supporters looked to him for masterful rhetoric. He could have said yes, that Canada under Trump would be a happier, freer and more prosperous place than under the anti-nationalist, green-obsessed and uber-woke globalist banker, Mark Carney. He could have underlined the depths to which Canada had plumbed under Trudeau, that Carney would not and could not remedy. And yes, that Trump had a point, Canada had become a failed state. But in a supposed show of nationalism he took umbrage too, joining in the collective outrage. He could not, as Ben Shapiro remarked, do what is essential for any right-wing politician taking on the left, which is ‘walk towards the fire’. Instead he joined them. Without the depth of convictions or courage to sustain him, he panicked, went off message and joined in the attack on Trump, the very man he had relished being compared to.
Suddenly Poilievre’s biggest selling point of sounding like Trump became his dead weight. The public didn’t like his Damascene change. The result of the election was therefore inevitable.
There are lessons for leaders on the right to learn here. Firstly, have convictions and secondly, have the courage to ‘live’ them. Political conviction acts like a ballast for when a campaign is derailing. Conviction prevails. In the case of Poilievre, he exposed himself to having weather-vane beliefs. He talked big but didn’t see the big picture. As one critic put it, he is ‘a minor man with big dreams and a self-regard at odds with the limits of his talent’.
He is not the only such one. The establishment ‘right’ in the UK too is beset by self-regard and ‘Trump derangement syndrome’. A dangerous mix.
Leaders of the so called ‘right’ have also begun to distance themselves, if they had not done so already, afraid of being viewed in Trump’s image, and following what they believe to be popular opinion. But they should take heed. If they no longer support or believe in Trump’s radical agenda – anti-woke, anti-waste, tough-on-immigration, free-speech, fairer international trade balance, freeing the West from the economic yoke of China – what is it they do believe in? They may win supporters despondent with the uniparty status quo who have nowhere else to go, as witnessed in the remarkable local election wins by Reform, but without clear and deep-rooted convictions such support lasts as long as the weather is good.
That’s why the UK’s ‘right’ should stop being rattled by the supposed widespread public anti-Trump sentiment and look beyond to the storm clouds that have already formed only ten months into Labour’s five-year stretch. In Canada, where he has (nominally) morphed from uber globalist to supreme nationalist at breakneck speed, Carney’s cards are already marked.
So what is the lesson for right-wing leadership hopefuls? To defend yourselves Keynes-style by stating: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’ Not unless your alternative facts are compelling. As Poilievre and Dutton have discovered, the path of least resistance is unlikely to succeed.
