FILDEBRANDT: 2025 will be the Year of the New Right

The last few years have seen political and social earthquakes across the Western world. The most obvious was the comeback election of Donald Trump in November, but there are other major events pointing toward a (mostly clear) trend for 2025. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni led her ironically named Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) party to become that country's first woman prime minister. She is the first national leader of Europe's new right to take power in a major country. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's leftist coalition has fallen, and that country will have an election in February that will almost certainly see a new government markedly to its right. Elections in several eastern German states saw major gains and even outright victories for the Alternative für Deutschland, that currently sits in second place nationally. That party's rapid advance chills Germany's establishment parties to the bone and presents a major coalition-forming dilemma for the centre-right CDU, which currently leads in the polls. One way or another, Germany is moving right. Just how far right it moves remains to be seen. Javier Milei ran an (awesomely) insane libertarian insurgency against Argentina's kleptocratic establishment, becoming president in 2023 with a slogan of "Viva la libertad, carajo!", which translates as "Long live freedom, dammit!" He led a veritable revolution in that banana republic and made a remarkable turnaround in a breathtakingly short period of time. The UK saw Keir Starmer's Labour Party form a majority government after the meltdown of the interminable infighting and incompetence of the Tories. But the Labour vote didn't increase much; it was more that the rightist vote split between the Conservatives and Nigel Farage's upstart Reform Party. The Labour government's popularity fell off a cliff almost immediately after taking power as it implemented far-left totalitarian measures like throwing people in prison for saying politically incorrect things on the internet. Britain still has more than three more years of Labour to endure, but Reform is now effectively tied with them and the Tories in a three-way race. If the Conservative and Reform parties can form a union of some kind, the UK to could well see a new kind of right take power in the next election. Which brings me back across the Atlantic to Canada. Justin Trudeau has so thoroughly outstayed his welcome that the Liberals face electoral obliteration. Some projections even have them coming in fourth place, should current polling hold. Pierre Poilievre stands to potentially form the largest majority government in Canadian history with a new right coalition. What do I mean by 'new right'? Well, it's admittedly difficult to define and beyond the scope of this column, but I'd broadly outline it as a working and middle-class, nationalist and anti-establishment coalition. It is generally free-market, but less doctrinally committed to it as Reaganite conservatism. Importantly, the new right is far more electorally successful with young (and often non-white) voters than traditional conservatism.And 2024 was the year that the tide of the culture war turned. Peaking with the madness of Black Lives Matter racialism in 2020 and gender ideology run amuck, 2024 saw the fear that held together the false social consensus of 'wokeism' crumble spectacularly. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) regimes in major corporations are dropping like flies as normal people no longer fear to express their disgust.Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter in 2022 was perhaps the most important ingredient, allowing people to speak freely on the transformed X platform without fear of censorship. Almost as important was the radical social upheaval and loss in faith of institutions that came from lockdowns and mandates during the COVID-19 witch hunt that 'red-pilled' many normies into anti-establishment politics. The economic and fiscal fallout from government policies during the COVID-19 era is still acutely felt. Inflationary deficit spending by governments has driven up the cost of almost everything. Green-fad policies have added to it and are felt by many to be a 'luxury belief,' especially for young people who are realizing that they may never own a home until their parents die. The cross-partisan immigration consensus across the West has entirely collapsed. President Biden's decision to ignore illegal migration has seen the Republicans all-but-promise to double the size of the wall. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to throw open the door to an unlimited number of military-age "refugees" from the Middle East sparked an anti-immigration backlash in Germany that has been a verboten subject until recently. And Trudeau's decision to do away with almost any semblance of rational merit-based immigration has swamped this country to such an extent that housing availability, public services and social cohesion are collapsing. Where only an (actual) "small fringe minority" were vocally opposed to mass migration just four years ago, there is now a broad consensus that it's time to crack down. Faith in the legacy media has evaporated in many countries, exacerbated by the now self-evident lies that they parroted from governments during the COVID-19 years. Canada's Liberal government has managed to regulate and license the Canadian press into quasi-government employees in an effort to prop up the legacy media at the expense of the independents. But try as Trudeau might, it has only slowed the inevitable. When Poilievre takes power sometime in 2025, he promises to defund the (English) CBC and abolish the media subsidies and regulations. This would trigger an overnight apocalypse of the remnants of the Canadian legacy media and allow fertile soil for the independent media to resume its inevitable flowering. I don't know about you, but tomorrow's New Year's Day. And, I can't wait.

FILDEBRANDT: 2025 will be the Year of the New Right

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