Is the Sudden Shift from Left Leaning to Right Leaning Governments Surprising? Not One Bit!

Take a look at the world around us, it seems a lot different than it did even just a few years ago. The change is not necessarily constituted under ‘good or bad’, but without doubt, it exists. In recent years, the political ideology of conservatism or ‘right wing’ culture has dominated over that of liberals. Tune back to 2012 and all the major countries of the world were governed by liberal parties. The United States President was Barack Obama, the French President was François Hollande, and the Chancellor of Germany was Angela Merkel, whose party is defined as ‘center of right’ but policies align with liberal ideology. A few conservative leaders at the time were David Cameron, who was not radically right wing, and Stephen Harper of Canada.

A common trend that has been seen is that people tend to get fed up of whichever party is currently in power, at least after some amount of time. No party or leader can get everything right and please everyone. But no single party has managed to control the government for upwards of 10 years (recently). In the USA, after 8 years of Bush, people were fed up with the Republicans and voted in Obama. In 2016, people were fed up with Democrats and Obama and voted in Trump. In France, the public were satisfied during a majority of Sarkozy’s term, but towards the end were not quite happy with the way the current party was governing the country. They voted in François Hollande, a left wing leader, to take charge of the government. This can be seen in numerous countries (excluding Russia and China of course), from Stephen Harper to Justin Trudeau and Brazil’s Workers Party (Lula da Silva and Dilma Roussef) to the Social Liberal Party (only in name) set to take charge with Jair Bolsonaro.

While it is fairly obvious that no government can please everybody, it is basically that each category of person gets their fair share of time with their preferred party or leader in charge. In 2008, everybody in America was sick of the war and the deficit it put the country in. They saw the election as a chance to end all of it and elect the Democrats so the fruitless war in the Middle East being funded by taxpayers could be put to rest and important issues like healthcare and overall welfare could be promoted to the center of issues to be tackled. What people didn’t expect was for universal healthcare schemes to put the country into an even more critical deficit. People got fed up once again, with the high deficit and taxation as well the overall lenience of the government. The citizens of the United States voted in the most radically right wing candidate of the last 20 years and possibly of all time (in USA), Donald Trump.

Ideological Shift

If you think about it, the change from left to right wasn’t all that sudden. It has developed gradually over time and is simply peaking at this point of time. The citizens of today are plagued by constant terror threats, shortage of vital resources, and highly concentrated industries. The reason for the shift from the left to the right was that citizens of each country, in some way or the other, felt like they were being taken advantage of and wanted to bring in someone who wasn’t scared to speak their mind no matter the repercussions.

In Europe, right wing parties are exploding with popularity due to the ongoing migration crisis. Germany allowed a startling amount of migrants into the country since the Syrian war broke out. The immigration rate has rose to 8.5% and a 75% increase in asylum seekers in 2017, which has now reduced during 2018. The German population is extremely fearful of crimes by migrants despite Germany’s crime rate falling to its lowest level since 1992. Everything was smooth sailing till 2015 when Merkel allowed 1 million immigrants into Germany to settle into Willkommenskultur. On New Year’s eve of the same year, in Cologne, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, and Dortmund, there were 1216 crimes committed by immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, out of which 497 were reported as sexual crimes. This was attributed as a result of Merkel’s lenience with immigration and Germans have since turned fearful of migrants for this as well as various issues. Top conservative officials in Germany have been pushing propaganda of immigrants being unwilling to integrate to German society into the public eye. Despite this, people had faith in the CDU and Angela Merkel and voted her back as Chancellor.

In Brazil, after one of the biggest government corruption scandals regarding the car wash scheme at Petrobras, the locals are sick and tired of being taken for a ride and have found their support going for the most radical right wing candidate that would govern today, Jair Bolsonaro. His victory was cemented by a considerable margin and will lead to a severe turn around in the way Brazil will operate. His policies seem quite moderate when you take into account his top agendas – strengthening ties with the USA, supporting the shift to renewable energies, and privatizing parts of Petrobras. At the same time, Bolsonaro has vowed to leave the Paris Agreement of 2015, which is critically impacted by and related to deforestation of the Amazon, the largest rainforest nicknamed as ‘the lungs of Earth’. Despite all these open claims, the people of Brazil have already fastened themselves for a radically right wing candidate due to them witnessing the major flaws in the actual liberal parties that governed Brazil.

Demographics

Today, demographically, it is incredibly tough to assign a majority to either left or right wing ideology. We see a lot of the 16-25 aged citizens coming in as either far right or far left. The Centrist is a concept left behind in the past. We are riddled by people who either are willing to take a hit on their own pocket to build a wall along the Mexico border or people who lie down in front of milk vans to prevent deliveries because they believe consuming other animal’s milk in unnatural and milking a cow constitutes a crime. Both of these are incredibly skewed to one side or the other and there is no way to find a compromise between these two sects of people. For this reason, the future seems to have more divisions in society than the past, which is surprisingly what both sides claim to have as a root cause of their interests for doing what they do.

Uncertainty

Right now, different countries are going through different phases of the political cycle. Germany is finally unsatisfied with the liberal Merkel government and Canada is quite happy with the left-winged Justin Trudeau. The global situation plays a major role in which party gets to form the government in a particular geography. In Europe, where the migrant crisis is rampant, the majority want conservative leaders with a no or low immigration policy. In the UK, the conservatives have had office since David Cameron in 2010, in Italy, Matteo Salvini of the far right is widely gaining support for his call for reduction in immigration. Spain has recently elected Democratic leader Pedro Sanchez through a no confidence motion while Belgium as well has Liberal party leader Charles Michel.

It’s quite visible that all of this is just a big charade of two sides exchanging power. A likely conspiracy is that while on the outside the two sides are largely at odds with each other, behind closed doors they maintain cordial relations and actually decide on policy and public reaction of the opposition together. This could hold true for countries with relatively diplomatic practices like the USA, UK, and Australia, but it is extremely unlikely in countries like India and Pakistan where a majority of political rebuttal is just vulgar name calling and a startling inability to come to a consensus on any single issue.

It is not likely that people will realize this is just a game of back and forth and the real problem doesn’t seem to be ideology or policy but the system by which countries are governed in general. But despite this, all the evidence points toward this theory being the current state of reality. Both sides have their wrongs and rights, maybe one more than the other, but the truth is that the world needs leaders who aren’t tied to which wing they lean towards, it needs more centrists who have the ability to stand right in the middle of the line and look either way to see a possible solution to a problem. Bias towards a particular school of political ideology is a recipe for long term failure, not just for the candidate and party, but for the country. There is no possible scenario where a single party can maintain control by popular vote, it is only possible in authoritarian states where the center is the de facto monarch. The point of this was not to take a particular side, as there are positives and flaws with each school of thought. The objective of this piece is to bring to light the failures of the current political system and the need for a revamp and complete turnaround of the process that dictates the fate of our planet.

NO POLITICAL BIAS IS INTENDED