From the US midterms to Brazil and Hungary, and from Britain to the US, the right has suffered a series of election defeats this year. Flávio Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán, Reform UK, the Tories and many Republican candidates have all been rejected in national or local contests, even in usually reliably conservative Mississippi. Incumbents and populist insurgents alike have been beaten, often by big margins.
Why progressive pessimism persists
Yet each time this happens, many liberals and leftists absorb the good news almost with wonderment. Rightwing governments such as Donald Trump's may have been struggling for months, having made countless impossible or incompatible promises and strategic blunders, and opinion polls may have pointed towards a meltdown, but their actual defeats are seen as miracles. A similar pessimism follows rightwing victories, whatever their scale.
The 52% vote to leave the EU in the 2016 Brexit referendum set off years of soul-searching. Boris Johnson's 2019 win with a majority of 80 seats – less than half the size of Tony Blair's in 1997 and 2001 – was widely described as a "landslide". Trump's 2024 victory, despite running against a last-minute Democrat candidate and being ahead by just 1.5 points in the popular vote with a share below 50%, was seen as signalling a profound shift to the right.
Reality vs. narrative
The midterms are the latest evidence that the right's strength has been overestimated. Some of the error originates in the ultra-confidence of rightwing populists, amplified by a powerful rightwing media. Many voters and journalists want clear narratives, but many western democracies are closer to political stalemate. 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 contentious supreme court ruling.
Electoral politics happens at many speeds and scales, including protests, lobbying, cultural wars and battles between ideas. If an ideology shapes many of these processes simultaneously, it has achieved hegemony, as the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci refined the term. The recurring tendency to see the right as establishing dominance is a misapplication of this theory.
Impact on left-leaning governments
The overestimation of the right can make left-leaning governments too cautious. Andy Burnham has largely avoided this trap, referring to Reform and the Tories strikingly little in his speeches and promising a 10-year plan to be revealed next month. However, some of his policies, such as on immigration and prisons, show a deference towards the populist right.
Successful centre-left politicians have always argued their illiberal moves respond to voters' concerns, but those concerns often come from the right's fear-mongering. This dystopianism needs to be called out, and the association of the right with realism needs to be broken.
