An unexpected Trump bump for the world’s centrists

London: In Britain, a languishing prime minister is suddenly a statesman, while his up-and-coming populist rival has been thrown on his heels. In Canada, the incumbent Liberal Party has a chance to win an election long thought out of reach. In Germany, the incoming center-right chancellor is dominating the agenda after an election many feared would be a breakthrough for the hard right.

As President Donald Trump’s “shock and awe” policies radiate around the world, they are reshaping global politics in unforeseen ways.

Trump’s sweeping tariffs and threats to the trans-Atlantic alliance have breathed life into centrist leaders, who are regaining popularity for their willingness to stand up to the US president. His clash with Ukraine and tilt toward Russia have thrown right-wing populists from Britain to Germany off balance, blunting, for the moment, their efforts to capitalize on Trump’s restoration to the White House.

“One of the great ironies of Trump is that he turns out to be the great unifier of Europe,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, an expert in trans-Atlantic relations at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “It is impossible to overstate how shocked Europeans are by what’s happening.”

The “Trump bump” goes beyond Europe. In Mexico, President Claudia Sheinbaum has won praise, and stratospheric poll numbers, for her coolheaded handling of Trump’s tariffs. Mark Carney, a former central banker, was catapulted to the leadership of Canada’s Liberal Party with 86 per cent of the vote on the belief that he can manage a trade war with the United States.

Carney’s party, which lagged the Conservatives by double digits under the premiership of Justin Trudeau, has recently closed the gap, putting the Liberals within striking distance of a victory in an election that Carney is expected to call soon. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has struggled to regain momentum, and Liberals have been quick to paint him as a Canadian Trump.

In Europe, which has appeared vulnerable to the same populist tide that swept Trump back into power, the president’s policies have steadied mainstream leaders who were struggling with stagnant economies and restless electorates. Facing the prospect of US tariffs and drawing together to confront an ally that is behaving more like an adversary has proved to be good politics.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s whirlwind of diplomacy — trying to marshal a European peacekeeping force for Ukraine while also working to salvage the alliance with Washington — has won praise across the political spectrum in Britain. Starmer’s poll numbers have bounced back from what was a dismal first six months in government, though he is still underwater in net approval ratings.

“He desperately needed something, and this appears to be it,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “It’s not nothing if a prime minister performs well on the world stage.”

Equally significant, Nigel Farage, the populist leader of the insurgent, anti-immigration party Reform UK, has stumbled for the first time since he won election to the British Parliament last July.

Farage, a longtime Trump ally, has struggled to fend off accusations that he sympathises with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He criticised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit to his meeting with Trump at the White House, even amid signs that the British public overwhelmingly sided with Zelenskyy in his clash with the US president.

Farage’s party was thrown into turmoil last Friday after it reported one its own lawmakers, Rupert Lowe, to the police for threatening a senior colleague — an allegation that Lowe denies.

Farage, analysts said, might feel threatened because Elon Musk, a billionaire who is Trump’s close ally, praised Lowe in January while withdrawing his endorsement of Farage, saying he “does not have what it takes.” Lowe complained in a recent newspaper interview that under Farage’s leadership, Reform has become a “protest party led by the Messiah.”

“To some extent, Farage has made himself quite vulnerable,” Bale said.

In Parliament last week, Starmer won raucous whoops and cheers from Labour and Conservative backbenchers alike when he scolded Farage for his history of friendly statements about Putin and reaffirmed Britain’s steadfast support for Ukraine.

“Zelenskyy is a war leader whose country has been invaded,” Starmer said, as a chastened-looking Farage nodded in agreement. “We should all be supporting him and not fawning over Putin.”

Tying Farage to Putin, analysts said, is more effective than going after him as an enemy of the political system, since like other populist politicians, he thrives on being vilified by the establishment.

“The strategy that has not worked is to point at the populists and say they are the enemy,” said Ben Ansell, a professor of comparative democratic institutions at the University of Oxford. “What works much better is to point at an external enemy and try to lash them to that enemy.”

Farage’s alliance with Trump is also becoming a burden, Ansell said, not just because the president is unpopular in Britain but also because his chaotic approach to governing deprives his allies abroad of conspicuous successes — on immigration, say, or economic policy — to which they can point.

Despite hard-right election gains in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Austria, Ansell said, there is a chance that Europe may have passed its moment of “peak populism.” In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party was locked out of government despite winning the most votes, after three mainstream parties stitched together an alternative coalition.

In Germany, the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, emerged as second-largest party in elections last month, trailing only the Christian Democrats, which are led by Friedrich Merz, the presumptive chancellor. But some analysts had expected the party to perform even better than it did, given that Musk and Vice President JD Vance endorsed it.

“It’s still bad enough that 20 per cent of the people voted for an anti-system, pro-Russia party,” Stelzenmüller said, “but it’s clear the AfD didn’t gain from Musk’s and Vance’s efforts to campaign on its behalf.”

Nor has the AfD been a central player since the election, as Merz tries to engineer a landmark relaxation of Germany’s debt laws to enable it to fund a mammoth increase in military spending. Merz has staked a claim to leadership with his call for Europe to take charge of its own security because of the threat posed by Russia and the unreliability of the United States.

To be sure, Merz is scrambling to act now because he would have more trouble getting such an increase through the next parliament, in which the AfD, which opposes the spending, would have enough votes to block it.

It is not clear that Merz has the votes to pass the measures, which will also need significant support from the Green Party to clear a two-thirds hurdle in parliament. Privately, Merz’s aides contend that Trump has given the would-be chancellor the only argument he needs to prevail. He is the first US president to so explicitly threaten to pull American support.

In Britain as in Germany, analysts said the political landscape could shift again. Starmer’s pledge to increase military spending, they said, will force the Labour Party into painful trade-offs on taxes and spending that are already exposing rifts within the party. And Starmer’s recent success on the world stage could prove fleeting if he cannot turn around the economy and rebuild public services.

In that sense, Starmer’s up-and-down government has something in common with Trump’s, even if the president’s chaotic debut has so far played to the advantage of the prime minister and other centrists.

“The shine, such as it was, of Trump’s first few weeks has emphatically worn off, and in both foreign policy and economic outcomes, the picture has turned very dark,” Ansell said.