Joe Biden had a disastrous night on the debate stage on Thursday. He may still be a more reliable president than Donald Trump, three years his junior, but that says more about Trump than anything else. Nor will it be easy to convince American voters that Biden is worth voting for at this stage.
However, replacing someone on the electoral list at this point is not easy in the United States. It is just one of the ways in which that country’s constitutional system is ill-adapted to the modern era. It is worth making a comparison with, for example, the United Kingdom, which has several times been able to change the way its parliamentary party leaders and therefore prime ministers are elected. The United States has much more rigid institutions and precedents, so it is, paradoxically, much more likely to elect a potential dictator.
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Three major democracies are likely to elect new leaders in the coming months. In all three, the incumbents appear to have been guilty of terrible errors of judgment. President Biden clearly should have started succession planning years ago: Few expected in 2020 that he would want to serve a second term and assumed he was only running for a single term to prevent Trump from being re-elected. However, at no point since has Biden built up the profile of his vice president, Kamala Harris, or allowed an overt or even covert competition for leadership within his party to choose a successor. Deciding to run again (which, in the American party system, means that the party automatically joins you out of loyalty) was clearly a serious mistake.
Meanwhile, in the UK, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party faces a defeat on July 4 — a defeat that may be of historic proportions. Some projections suggest they might not even be the second-largest party in Parliament once the election is over, with the centrist Liberal Democrats making a strong attack on Conservative strongholds in southern England and aiming for more than 50 of those seats. Constituencies that have remained Conservative for more than a century could swing to the Liberals this time around. Meanwhile, Labour has played a cautious game, preferring not to commit to anything before somehow upsetting its 20-point lead in the polls.
This situation has been caused by 14 years of bad government by the conservatives. But the magnitude of the loss is also due to the poor judgment of Sunak, who chose to call an early election before his party was truly ready and long before the economic news improved. Inflation is finally easing and rates could be cut in the fall, boosting growth. Sunak could have waited for this tailwind for the economy before going to the polls. But, for no reason that anyone can discern, he decided to go early.
The consequences for the world’s most successful political party could be dire. Some parties can survive total elimination. But they are never the same again. The Indian Congress has returned to having close to 100 seats in Parliament, compared to the 44 it had in 2014; The Pakistan People’s Party plummeted to 42 seats in the National Assembly in 2013, and has never regained its share of the vote since. The worst is possible. The Conservatives’ counterparts in Canada were eliminated in the 1992 federal election (with a whopping 27-point swing against them) and the party was replaced by a more populist right-wing bloc. That bloc centered on Preston Manning, of the Reform Party, and it is the British Reform Party itself, centered on Nigel Farage, that threatens the conservatives with extinction.
Meanwhile, in France, Emmanuel Macron may have finally made a mistake after years of skillfully balancing left and right. Macron unexpectedly called a snap election. It now appears that this was a major miscalculation: his centrist bloc may come a weak third in the election and lose many of its seats. His prime minister, Gabriel Attal, will almost certainly lose his post. Macron calculated, perhaps, that the left would not be able to repeat the alliance it had forged before the last election and that the right, which has multiple contenders, would be disorganized. Indeed, signs of this dissent emerged early on, but were largely buried as the campaign progressed. The center may all but disappear when the election results are announced on July 7.
The xenophobic and populist right may take control in France, will probably come to power in the United States, and could replace the traditional right in the United Kingdom. In each case, a single major miscalculation by leaders of the center-left or center-right must bear much of the blame.
