Europeans are rebelling. They are dumping their long-ruling liberal parties, sick of suffocating climate diktats that have driven costs higher, unchecked immigration that has driven wages lower and a loss of sovereignty to the EU. Can Americans be far behind? Will U.S. voters fire Joe Biden – fire his absurd EV mandates, his dangerous open border, his inflationary spending and his love of globalist institutions like the U.N. — and instead choose a return to Donald Trump and common sense? The polls suggest it could happen; it wouldn’t be the first time that Europe has shown us the way.
In 1979, the British people upended England’s dominant Labour Party, which had ruled for 11 of the prior 15 years, and chose Maggie Thatcher, leader of the Conservative Party, to be the country’s first female prime minister. Her party promised to promote growth, reduce the role of government, bolster the UK’s defense and uphold the rule of law. Eighteen months later, conservative Republican Ronald Reagan trounced incumbent Democrat President Jimmy Carter, winning 489 Electoral College votes to Carter’s 49, running on a similar platform.
In both cases, voters spurned the Establishment; in both cases, voters were proven right. Both Thatcher and Reagan were credited – by voters if not the liberal press — with turning around their countries’ economies by embracing free markets, less regulation, lower taxes and growth. Thatcher won landslide reelections in 1983 and 1987 and was the longest-serving prime minister of the 20th century. In 1984, President Reagan was also reelected in a landslide, carrying 49 of 50 states.
In June 2016, British voters again stunned the western world, in that year by voting to exit the European Union, again defying establishment voices on both sides of the Atlantic, including prominent think tanks, the liberal media, business leaders and even President Obama. Brits rebelled against mass immigration and also the micromanaging of their country by EU bureaucrats in Brussels who regulated every aspect of everyday life, including dictating food packaging, energy efficiency, how to care for ferret imports, cross border health care, safety at sea, labeling of fish for sale and so much more.
Six months later, Americans similarly ignored establishment voices and elected Donald Trump president. The New York Times confidently predicted 21 days out that Democrat Hillary Clinton had a 91% chance of winning; indeed, she was the pick of business leaders, Hollywood, academia and liberal elites everywhere. Where Hillary fell short was with average working-class Americans, who came to believe that the Democratic Party no longer represented their interests – the same folks who voted for Brexit.
The recent elections in Europe carry a similar message. Voters in Germany, France and elsewhere see their countries threatened by harmful green energy policies and unchecked immigration. They think their elitist leaders, like France’s Emmanuel Macron whose approval rating is now 24%, are out of touch with their needs and issues.
Europe has been held captive by climate alarmists for over a decade, which has caused the shutting down of fossil fuel plants, hasty and ill-planned conversion to unreliable renewable energy sources and strictures on appliance use. They also caused significant damage to their powerful auto industries. The upshot of this climate frenzy is that wholesale prices for electricity in Germany, for instance, soared from 37.8 euros per megawatt hour in May 2019 to 67.3 last month – an increase of nearly 80% over the past five years. The energy diktats from the government – banning fracking, shutting down nuclear plants and so on, also left Germany (and other European countries) vulnerable to the shut-down of Russian gas flowing into Europe because of the Ukraine War, an event that pushed German electricity prices to an all-time high of 699.4 euros in 2022. As in the U.S., Germans have seen their real incomes clobbered by rising prices, of which energy costs are a major but not the only component. Inflation nearly touched 9% in 2022 and again in early 2023. Real wage growth has been negative in 9 of the past 15 quarters since the pandemic in 2020. Worse, real wages have grown at only 0.23 percent from 1992 until 2023.
France is in the same boat. Protests against environmental regulations that drove up the cost of fuel inspired the anti-government working-class Yellow Vest movement beginning in 2018; this year it is farmers. The French and farmers across the continent have balked at climate initiatives aimed, in some cases, at driving them out of business. In the Netherlands, the government announced plans in 2022 to close down as many as 3,000 farms in order to meet controversial EU emission reduction goals; voters there responded by electing a far-right anti-immigrant leader in 2023. In the recent EU elections, they doubled down.
The Green parties of Europe recently lost about one-third of their seats in the European Parliament as voters came to see Europe’s extreme climate agenda as elitist and costly. The same trend may emerge in the U.S. Joe Biden’s White House has allocated hundreds of billions of dollars authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act to reducing emissions and subsidizing electric vehicles. Voters recently discovered, courtesy of a CBS “Face the Nation” interview with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, that even with a $7.5 billion budget, the government had only managed to build eight charging stations for EVs in three years. That does not inspire confidence.
U.S. voters, like Europeans, are also furious about uncontrolled immigration; with Biden’s open border, millions of people have entered the U.S. illegally. The collapse is a national security risk and has driven down low-end wages. Voters rate this one of their top concerns, and blame Joe Biden. In November, Americans will have a chance to change the direction of our country, as the Europeans recently voted to do. Polling suggests that right-leaning politicians will soon lead France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Hungary, Greece, and Bulgaria. Polls also suggest that Donald Trump will join them, again following their lead.
