Rahul Jacob: Liberals must combine compassion with aggression

Canada’s ruling Liberal Party not only turned its negative ratings around, but ended up winning 25 more constituencies than the Conservatives did.

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Half the world away but less than a week later, on 3 May, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese trounced the opposition Conservative Party. The latter’s leader, Peter Dutton, had aligned himself with some US Republican positions and even lost his own parliamentary seat. One of Dutton’s shadow ministers had borrowed the political rhetoric of Trump’s election campaign, promising to “Make Australia Great Again." 

The US administration’s controversial positions on free trade and the Trump camp’s anti-woke statements likely played less of a role in Australia. Unlike Canada, which shares an almost 9,000km border with the US, Australia has the luxury of viewing the perpetual news cycle of Washington DC as if it were from another world. 

But the US administration’s tariff wars and repeated signalling that it wishes to step back from joint security pledges to its allies have arguably made the rest of the world a more connected place. Analysts said that insecurity about Australia’s alliance with the US as well as a distrust of Trump made Australians coalesce around its incumbent government, despite a cost-of-living crisis and concerns over a housing shortage. Meanwhile, the opposition is falling apart; on Tuesday, the National Party ended its old alliance with the conservative Liberal party. 

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In his victory speech, Albanese said Australians had confronted “global challenges the Australian way." Then, taking aim at the Conservatives and implicitly at the US administration, he said that people had voted for “Australian values" and that “in this time of global uncertainty, Australians have chosen optimism and determination."

There are lessons to be drawn from these very different and yet similar elections. 

Even in the age of distortion and toxic social media, a message that is liberal and optimistic can triumph. But it must also use the tools of ugly caricature and, on occasion, a boxer’s aggression that is usually more characteristic of the right. In a column aptly titled, ‘Wanted: A mean liberal,’ the Financial Times’ Janan Ganesh called for centrist parties to display “ferocity in battle." Adapting Michelle Obama’s rallying cry of 2016—“When they go low, we go high"—Ganesh suggested that when right-wing parties aim low, their opponents should verbally “bash them on the head." 

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Indeed, it is partly because of the Democratic Party’s inability to distance itself from the woke cartoons painted of it by Republican opponents, especially on transgender issues, that it lost the last White House election and congressional seats across the US.

On the global stage, we see the peculiar phenomenon of countries coming together that have long been seen as US allies but have lately been unnerved by Washington’s rhetoric and erratic policies. 

This week, the EU- UK deal on trade and fishing rights suggested that the two were closer in spirit and intent than they have been since the UK’s Brexit vote in 2016. The Labour government in London argues that the package will make “food cheaper, slash red tape, open up access to the EU market and add nearly £9 billion to the UK economy by 2040." This may be true, but the ruling party must also respond to the widely held view that urban crime  is rising and immigration into the UK is out of control.

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In a stroke of poetic dissonance, Albanese’s win in Australia came on the day the right-wing Reform Party in the UK, a principal champion of Brexit, performed far better in local council elections. It remains to be seen whether this vote of dissatisfaction with the ruling Labour Party can translate into a general election majority for the Reform Party’s Nigel Farage, who was considered the poster boy for anti-immigrant rhetoric even before Trump’s 2016 White House win.

The drop in Labour’s approval ratings since its victory in last year’s national election would give most politicians vertigo. Anger against a perceived flood of immigrants and woke policies continues to bubble in the UK, though perhaps not as worryingly as it does across the Atlantic. But the UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer may need to show he can play nasty as well as nice.

If there is a warning in  the UK’s local poll results, there is another in this week’s first-round election in Poland, where a candidate backed by right-wing parties did far better than expected, ending just two percentage points behind Warsaw’s centrist mayor who is known for liberal politics.

Still, in Germany earlier this year, a pro-EU leader became the new chancellor. In Portugal, a centre-right alliance won the country’s general election on Sunday.

A global resurgence of centrist parties that rebut and challenge the politics of hate and exclusion may be underway. But the lesson remains that realpolitik today requires aggression. Even compassionate optimism must sometimes be laced with pessimism.

The author is a Mint columnist and a former Financial Times foreign correspondent.