Parents usually have two wishes for their children: that they should neither be a politician nor a lawyer.
And for good reason. Politicians are awfully unpopular people, and now more than ever. Indeed, if you look at the approval/disapproval ratings of political leaders around the world, you struggle to find any with positive ratings. Indeed, outside countries where the population are… nervous… to record their views about the leadership (*cough* Russia and Iran *cough*), there seems be only two examples of politicals leaders with positive approval ratings: Modi in India and Obrador in Mexico. (I thought Meloni, in Italy, was above the zero line, but she too has now dipped below.)
If you look at the list, you will notice something: whether you are Left wing or Right wing, whether your country is struggling with immigration issues or not, governments are unpopular.
Some of this, I suggest, is the global consequences of inflation. Thanks to both the end of Covid and commodity impacts from the Ukraine war, inflation shot up everywhere in 2021 and 2022, only subsiding in the second half of last year. Wages – inevitably – lagged inflation, and this has meant that people have felt poorer.
The other element is that people in the developed world have not had a great fifteen years. Whether it’s because we need to compete with Chinese and Indians for scarce commodities; or whether it’s because the neoliberal consensus no longer works; or perhaps because government budgets are being squeezed by ever more old people is beside the point. People got used to ever rising living conditions. Now they – understandably – are unhappy that the path to prosperity seems to have vanished.
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