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07/15/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 07/15/2024 19:38

Right-Wing Candidates Lost in Several Recent Global Elections. Does That Mean Anything for the Upcoming US Presidential Election

Right-Wing Candidates Lost in Several Recent Global Elections. Does That Mean Anything for the Upcoming US Presidential Election?

BU political scientist Erik Peinert cautions against reading too much into these international results

People gathered on the Republique Plaza in Paris following the second round of the legislative elections on July 7, 2024. In contests in France, Britain, and Iran, voters rejected far-right candidates-but the trend likely isn't a bellwether for the looming presidential election in the United States, says a BU political scientist. Photo via AP/Aurelien Morissard

Politics

Right-Wing Candidates Lost in Several Recent Global Elections. Does That Mean Anything for the Upcoming US Presidential Election?

BU political scientistErik Peinert cautions against reading too much into these international results

July 15, 2024
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Recent elections around the world-in France, Britain, and Iran-show signs of a sea change for far-right populist regimes. Voters in the three countries largely rejected candidates who are sympathetic to (or have outright embraced) authoritarian ideals, opting instead for leftist reformers, often to the surprise of local pundits.

But with the US presidential election looming large, Erik Peinert, a College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of political science, cautions against reading too much into these international results.

"I probably wouldn't put too much stock in these elections, in part because there's a strong argument that some of this is anti-incumbent voting," he says.

And in the United States, where voters currently have a choice between two people who have held the presidency, it could be that "voters are simply blaming those currently in office for what they perceive as a negative situation.

"So while both [Donald] Trump and [Joe] Biden have been in office, voters dissatisfied with the current state of affairs might simply vote against the person currently in office, which is Biden," says Peinert, a comparative and international political economist.

It's too soon, however, to tell how Saturday's assassination attempt on Trump may change the electoral and political landscape in the United States.

In France, voters turned out in support of the country's left-wing New Popular Front, a move that relegated Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally party to third place overall. In Britain, a romp for the center-left Labour party ousted the Conservative party after 14 years at the helm. And even in Iran, where voters were offered limited choice in a circumscribed presidential election, the more moderate candidate won out, displacing the country's late hard-liner Ebrahim Raisi.

To some extent, Peinert says, these results can be read as an expression of voter frustration with the way things have been going.

"The Conservatives in Britain have been doing a really terrible and incompetent job for many years now-that's well known. And this is somewhat just years of incredibly bad governance that's coming home to roost," he says.

And in France, the election results can be more clearly understood as a vote against Le Pen and her extremist party, he says. Unlike a similarly extreme US candidate, Donald Trump-who is propped up by the ultraconservative members of his party-Peinert says Le Pen hasn't crossed that threshold of being acceptable in the hearts and minds of French voters.

"Le Pen and the far-right is still viewed as incredibly toxic by an overwhelming majority of French voters," he says. "So, a lot of voters went to the polls not liking who they were voting for, but wanting to keep the far-right out of office."

Since these elections weren't clean sweeps by any means, that makes sense.

French voters split the legislature on the left, center, and far right, leaving no faction even close to the majority needed to form a government. This has caused chaos-no party has a clear path forward, and French President Emmanual Macron has asked Prime Minister Gabriel Attal to stay in the office until some sort of resolution can be reached.

And in Britain, Labour party candidates won by narrow margins in many constituencies-results that point more toward frustration over the last decade and a half than enthusiasm for Labour policies or campaign platforms. What's more, it's now clear that an insurgent party, Reform U.K., which is even further to the right than the Conservatives, likely ate into the latter's support.

Where Peinert does see overlap among European election takeaways and the upcoming US contest is in voter fatigue with the options presented to them.

"The center-left and center-right parties across the advanced industrialized world have sort of burned out any program that they had for social economic reform or progress," he says. Over the past several decades, these more moderate politicians have enacted so-called "neoliberal economic policies" that essentially shift fiscal responsibility to the private sector or to other institutions that "don't face a lot of democratic accountability," Peinert adds.

The 1980s economic policies of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan are prime examples of neoliberal economics, as is the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, (1994-2018).

Now, though, voters are eager for change and are looking for candidates who can offer concrete pledges-and then follow through.

"I don't think there is a single left- or right-wing voter in the United States who is going to go to the polls for a new trade agreement," Peinert says. "The success of the extreme parties lately has been in part because they are offering things that sound concrete. Whether or not they can deliver on them is a whole different question."

This interview was conducted before the July 13 assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

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  • Molly Callahan

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    Molly Callahan began her career at a small, family-owned newspaper where the newsroom housed computers that used floppy disks. Since then, her work has been picked up by the Associated Press and recognized by the Connecticut chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2016, she moved into a communications role at Northeastern University as part of its News@Northeastern reporting team. When she's not writing, Molly can be found rock climbing, biking around the city, or hanging out with her fiancée, Morgan, and their cat, Junie B. Jones. Profile

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