Of late, centrist and centre-left political parties have been facing setbacks while centre-right parties have been in ascendency the world over. Comment. (2025, 20 Marks)
The statement describes a real shift in comparative party politics. Social democrats, liberals and Third Way progressives have lost ground across much of the democratic world, while the centre-right, and more strikingly the radical right it now leans on, has advanced. The claim holds as a tilt, but not as a uniform global law.
The evidence for the claim
- United States: Donald Trump returned to the presidency in November 2024 on a nativist, protectionist platform.
- Germany and Japan: in February 2025 the CDU/CSU came first under Friedrich Merz, the AfD doubled its share to about a fifth and the SPD fell to roughly 16%, its worst post-war result. In February 2026 Sanae Takaichi’s LDP won 316 of 465 seats, a post-war record.
- Latin America: the “pink tide” has ebbed. Javier Milei won in Argentina in 2023, José Antonio Kast took 58% in Chile’s December 2025 run-off, Bolivia ended two decades of MAS rule in October 2025, and Abelardo de la Espriella narrowly beat Gustavo Petro’s ally in Colombia in June 2026.
- India: the BJP won a third consecutive term in 2024 and took West Bengal in May 2026.
Why the centre-left is losing
- Economic insecurity: deindustrialisation, automation and the “China shock” left regions with lasting grievances. Dani Rodrik traces this to the distributive costs of hyper-globalisation. Hanspeter Kriesi identifies a new integration–demarcation cleavage between globalisation’s winners and losers.
- Cultural backlash: Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (Cultural Backlash, 2019) argue that the post-materialist “silent revolution” of autonomy, tolerance and self-expression provoked a counter-revolution among older, rural and less-educated voters. Immigration became the focal issue.
- The centre-left’s own convergence: once the Third Way accepted market orthodoxy, little economic difference remained. Thomas Piketty‘s “Brahmin left” describes left parties that became the home of graduates and lost working-class voters.
- Cartelisation: Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair show mainstream parties drifting from society into the state. Mair’s Ruling the Void (2013) describes the space this opened for anti-establishment challengers.
- Post-colonial cultural nationalism: outside the West, civilisational pride and memories of Western dominance feed the turn, along with a preference for the sovereign state over complex interdependence. Christophe Jaffrelot (Modi’s India, 2021) reads India’s variant as national-populism, and Suhas Palshikar describes a second dominant-party system built on Hindutva and welfare delivery.
Why the claim must be qualified
- Centre-right is not radical right. Cas Mudde defines the populist radical right by nativism, authoritarianism and populism. The real story is normalisation: centre-right parties adopting its agenda and dropping the cordon sanitaire. Hungary shows the difference: in April 2026 Péter Magyar‘s centre-right Tisza ended Viktor Orbán‘s national-populist rule with 141 of 199 seats.
- Counter-cases are many: Mark Carney’s Liberals in Canada and Anthony Albanese’s Labor in Australia (both 2025); the centrist D66 topping the Dutch poll in October 2025 as Geert Wilders’s PVV fell from 37 to 26 seats; and a narrow majority for the Social Democrat-led bloc in Sweden in September 2026. Brazil and Mexico remain left-led, and the Congress-led front swept Kerala in May 2026.
- Anti-incumbency, not ideology: post-pandemic inflation punished incumbents of every stripe. Because many incumbents were centrist, the swing reads as rightward. Britain’s 2024 Labour landslide against a Conservative government followed the same logic.
Conclusion
The evidence shows dealignment and volatility with a rightward tilt on the cultural axis, not a frozen global realignment. The centre-left’s crisis is real. It has lost economic distinctiveness and straddles the new cultural cleavage badly. Canada, Australia and Sweden show it is reversible where the centre-left speaks to globalisation’s losers without conceding constitutional liberalism.