World leaders at Cop27 have exuded a sense of silliness rather than politicking, from reluctant guest Rishi Sunak – impeached by Boris Johnson – to Germany’s Olaf Scholz, who is embroiled in an ugly showdown with eco-protesters at home. With the UN admitting there is “no credible pathway” to meeting the 1.5C warming target, the era of bold zero commitments has ended in a row over reparations. Even woke capitalism has lost its luster: Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of the event has added a farcical new layer to Cop’s theatrics. Greta Thunberg boycotts the whole affair amid accusations of “greenwashing”. This cop fiasco feels like a symbolic moment. Although “rational” politicians are broadly in control across the West, having wrested power from failed populists like Donald Trump, both their power and their aura of control are evaporating. It is increasingly clear to Western electorates that the managerial, technocratic elite do not have the compelling answers to the biggest challenges of our time, from climate change and inflation to immigration. First, there’s the basic, creeping realization that the centrist heroes of the moment are painfully mortal. It’s old hat that Joe Biden perfectly represents the fading and cohesiveness of American culture. But in Germany too, the political class is wilting under pressure, as politicians take sick leave with anxiety, depression and tinnitus, complaining that they can no longer “meditate the burdens”. As Emmanuel Macron’s government struggles to push reforms through parliament, meanwhile, the French press sneers that the “godchild” is “cooking” as the “corruption of power” takes its toll. In Britain, Sunak’s Tories are so tired and jaded that they seem almost determined to lose the next election. But most worryingly for the “reasonable” class is that their secret superpower may be waning: their uncanny ability to present themselves as the elegant solution to the messes of their own making. Far from being experts in damage control, they have presided over a series of historic mistakes. Stimulating inflation with excessive quantitative easing programs while governments accumulated massive amounts of debt without regard to how it might be repaid. They arrogantly believed that Russia could be absorbed into the rules-based order, even after its invasion of Crimea in 2014. They imagined that the benefits of globalization had no limits and paid no attention to the downsides. Now the music has stopped, their hubris becomes apparent for all to see. The welfare capitalist model, paid for by City revenues, that has sustained the UK since Tony Blair collapsed. The German export machine has run out of steam as industries starved for cheap Russian gas are on the brink of collapse. France’s directing regime is finally facing collapse under the weight of debt and its own inefficiencies. When voters realize that this is more than a passing storm, how will Western leaders respond to the charge that they squandered a golden age by failing to take advantage of low interest rates and relative geopolitical stability to make their economies more dynamic and resilient? ? As European economies face blackouts or massive reductions in energy supplies, how will they explain their woefully myopic approach to energy security for decades? After years of pretending that entitlement spending could continue indefinitely even as the population ages, how will they square with the public that the current punitive tax burdens will only be the beginning? And how will they square the circle between the continued over-reliance of Western economies on cheap foreign labor with growing anger among voters about the consequences of mass immigration? The inability to seize the Channel crossings is already threatening Sunak’s premiership. Biden faces midterm punishment as “war zone”-like conditions continue to worsen on the deadly US-Mexico border. Governments in countries such as Spain also risk a backlash as they try to loosen immigration rules to cover labor shortages in tourism and construction. As attitudes toward immigration become toxic among some groups, thanks to the establishment’s failure to crack down on illegal immigration, the West is beginning to bear more than a whiff of the late Roman Empire. It also seems “doomed to play a defensive game with fewer and fewer resources” and to “create what it fears” by failing to assimilate outsiders into its own image. One of this establishment’s few remaining arguments for staying in power is that its populist opponents would be even more incompetent. After all, Tory “populists” spent six years botching Brexit, and Liz Truss ultimately left Britain’s broken economy worse off than she found it. Across the pond, Donald Trump’s potential re-election pitch is drenched in sadness rather than ambition, weighed down by the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was “stolen.” On the continent, radical bids have a dark side. Last week, a newly elected member of France’s National Rally was suspended for shouting “back to Africa” as a black colleague posed a question to the government about migrant arrivals. Although Italy’s flamboyant new prime minister Georgia Meloni tries to pass herself off as a moderate, seeking to work with EU institutions and navigate disorderly financial markets to implement her modest tax cut program far more deftly than Truss, the far-right brothers her. Italy’s party comes with some nasty baggage. In any case, for now, many Westerners have no choice but to live with the status quo. That includes British voters, who can only hope to swap Sunak for the uninspiring Keir Starmer at the next election. And yet, from London to Lyons, one realizes that the technocrats no longer know what they are doing, if they ever did. We should not be surprised if the second coming of populism happens sooner rather than later.
