While the COVID-19 pandemic and the inflation-driven economic downturn have made political leadership harder than ever, the roots of its biggest challenge today stem from 2016.
That is the assessment of several B.C.-based political scientists, who noted that the last few years have seen a high number of leadership turnover at all levels of government – local and international.
Some changes are internal and not public-vote driven – B.C.’s switch to a new premier resulted from an incumbent’s retirement, for instance. But others were the direct result of elections where emotions in politics ran higher than ever.
In some instances, emotions are driving voting patterns like never before, said Allan Tupper, professor of political science at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the former president of the Canadian Association of Programs in Public Policy and Administration.
Tupper referred to the recent election in Vancouver where nascent municipal party ABC swept through mayoral, council, school board and parks board votes. Every candidate on the A BC ballot, including newly sworn-in Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim, emerged victorious and placed higher than candidates from other parties elected to their posts.
“In Vancouver, you have Sim as new mayor with no or minimal direct political experience,” Tupper said. “But on the other hand – and I’m saying this in the context of expectations – he had almost a straight slate vote in Vancouver. They won everywhere they had a candidate.... The point is, there was a high expectation [from voters] of a cohesive platform that will generate results more readily than what we’ve seen recently.”
The rise of the emotion vote, which in some cases now comes at the expense of detailed, indepth policy discussion, is a trend that exploded onto the scene in 2016 following two seminal global events, said Leslie Elliott Armijo, an international relations theorist and political economist, who is also a Simon Fraser University professor.
The two events – Donald Trump’s presidential election win and the U.K.’s Brexit referendum – inflated the influence of extreme populism in the mainstream Western political discourse in a way that cannot be overstated, Armijo said.
The phenomenon has since been amplified on social media, creating a snowball that now engulfs political discourse in many places, she added.
“The worry that I have as a card-carrying political scientist is that because of the era of social media and globalization, what we get is too many elections decided on the basis of who can out-shout the other guy,” Armijo said. “Elections have become more about, ‘I’m more nationalist than the other guy, God and country, vote for me,’ without any real details on policy.”
In 2022’s environment of economic downturn, high inflation and social-economic discontent, many countries are now seeing the impacts of 2016’s emotion-driven votes and many political incumbents have faced extraordinary headwinds as a result.
Election swings to the right this year globally included:
- Italy (Sept. 25), where rightwing Brothers of Italy candidate Giorgia Meloni emerged as prime minister of a conservative coalition;
- Sweden (Sept. 11), where moderate Ulf Kristersson now heads a right-wing bloc in which nationalist Sweden Democrats provide the most seats;
- Israel (Nov. 1), where ultra-nationalist Religious Zionist Party saw the country’s biggest jump in seats won in the Knesset; and
- South Korea (March 9), where People Power candidate Yoon Suk-yeol swung the nation back into rightist control after five years of left-leaning president Moon Jae-in.
There were also notable swings to the left in:
- Australia (May 21), which elected its first Australian Labor Party majority in 15 years under new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese;
- Brazil (Oct. 30), which, in a narrow victory, chose Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva over Jair Bolsonaro, who was often referred to as the Trump of Latin America for harbouring similar ideologies, personality traits and views on conservative nationalism and populism.
Armijo, who specializes in Latin American politics, said she isn’t surprised by how narrow Bolsonaro’s defeat was and how it highlighted the difficulty political leaders have in policybased debates when they are up against populism and emotion-based voting that are increasingly prevalent today.
“Bolsonaro’s appeal is scare tactics and uber-nationalism,” Armijo said, adding that Brazil’s demographic issues – a spike of Evangelicalism in a traditionally Catholic country, for instance – are also involved. “Economic issues are always at play in elections, but you can discuss them fairly or you can say, ‘Everything bad is happening because the other guy is not only wrong but also corrupt and evil....’ And people respond to scare tactics.”
The difficulty for leaders today, then, is how to govern and lead when emotion-based voting often separates public sentiment over what should happen and what the realities of governing are. It is a delicate web of interweaving political, economic, social and diplomatic factors that can easily be upset and create disaster.
Case in point, said Kurt Huebner, is Great Britain.
Huebner is director of UBC’s Institute for European Studies, and he noted any discussion on global leadership would not be complete without a look at London, and the historically abrupt rise-and-fall of former prime minister Liz Truss. The Tory MP’s ascension to No. 10 Downing Street and sudden ousting over tax policies that sent the country’s currency into free-fall took only 50 days. That sudden rise and fall highlighted just how problematic Brexit has been for the country that voted for it.
Huebner noted that, since the 2016 passage of the Brexit vote, four British prime ministers have resigned: David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Truss. All of the leadership changes had some links to, or were directly caused by, problems arising from Great Britain trying to execute the “leave the European Union” mandate as worded in the referendum.
“It goes all the way back to May, where she tried hard to find a way to execute or interpret the Brexit referendum,” Huebner said. “An interpretation is needed because it was never clear what it actually means. Leaving the European Union doesn’t automatically mean leaving the European single market.
“When she tried to negotiate something there, it was not appreciated by the strong backbenchers fighting for a harder version of Brexit. So Boris Johnson came in and went for a very hard break from the EU, but then that created problems with Northern Ireland [as it comes to creating a hard border with the Republic of Ireland] which created many new problems.”
Huebner added that while new U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has temporarily stemmed the tide of economic crises facing Great Britain, the fundamental root cause – Brexit and what it means – will continue to plague not only Sunak but also any future prime ministers from the Opposition Labour Party (likely leader Keir Starmer) in the foreseeable future.
“The polling data now shows the majority of British people are thinking this [Brexit] was not a good decision,” Huebner said. “But even the Labour Party so far has not really touched the Brexit issue in discourse. We can look at Norway or Switzerland to see that you don’t need to be in the EU to join the common European market. It might just be the pragmatic way to approach this while still following the spirit of the referendum ... but the Brexiteers, the backbenchers are enormously strong, so I don’t know if this is a realistic option.”
All of these cases, Armijo argues, give a full picture of what leadership in the new era of emotion-led voting and political decisions ought to be, and she hopes more politicians in all levels of government will show such leadership at this crucial time.
“It’s harder to put the populist genie back in the bottle than to keep it from getting out in the first place,” Armijo said. “But those who see the problem need to talk about the fragility of liberal democracy. You have to respect the rules of the game.
“I was talking to this young mother in the U.S., and she has been listening to a lot of populist Trump talk. When I told her my big issue is respecting the rules of the game, she said, ‘Oh, you are a single-issue voter.’ But it’s not a single issue; it’s a basic precept. If we say we are having an election – these are the rules, we vote, we count and whoever wins, wins, and everybody else go home and try again next time – if you call that into question, you don’t have a democracy.” ■
