Politics and Passion

Why parties need to show they care

Preparations for the German election campaign in 1919. Img: © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, Photothek Willy Römer / Willy Römer

Even by the standards of recent politics, this week is shaping up to be seismic across the West.

In Austria, the anti-immigration Freedom Party (FPÖ) has been asked to form a government. Depending on whom you ask, their leader Herbert Kickl, who is now likely to be the next Austrian chancellor, is either ‘the next Orbán’, ‘far-right’ or a ‘Putiniser’.

Then there was Donald Trump’s press conference on Tuesday. Among many jaw-droppers, he casually suggested NATO partners spend 5 per cent of their GDP on defence, Canada joins the US and ‘all hell will break loose in the Middle East’ if the Israeli hostages aren’t released.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk continues to weigh into British politics. At the time of writing, his pinned post on X was asking people to ‘call your member of parliament and tell them that the hundreds of thousands of little girls in Britain who were, and are still are, being systematically, horrifically gang-raped deserve some justice in this world’ (sic). The issue has dominated the news and – if my local pub is anything to go by – people’s conversations.

While Musk is currently focused on Britain, he isn’t quite done with Germany yet. Today, he will host a live talk on X with Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD. A new YouGov poll indicates that the clear majority of German voters (59%) think that this will help the party. I think they are right though the party is already buoyant. In two new polls released earlier this week, the AfD is now comfortably over 20% of the vote, 2-3 percentage points up from polls taken just a few weeks ago.

I think what we’re seeing across the West right now is a belated response of politics to a ‘silent majority’ of voters that isn’t so silent anymore. Voters are lashing out at a political establishment that appears to have stopped to care for them.