In a transit of Venus type event for the anglosphere, Canada, Britain, and Australia held elections within one week of each other in late March, early April. One way to understand these three elections is through the prism of what John O’Sullivan has described as the battle between “illiberal democracy” on the one side and “undemocratic liberalism” on the other. 

Both terms or concepts are slippery. But the general idea is that “liberalism” (or, for British and Australian readers, “progressivism”) favors hefty dollops of global governance and of judicial and other elite oversight. Here you find your Paris Accord that delivers the Net Zero agenda. You have the WHO and the various offshoots of the United Nations, including the UN Human Rights Council. There is the International Criminal Court, the World Trade Organisation, and the European Court of Human Rights. International law is treated as the equal, or superior, to domestic law. And, of course, all these supranational bodies will produce rules and decisions that, from time to time, conflict with decisions and rules that emanate from the elected branches of the nation state. 

As the name suggests, undemocratic liberalism tends to prefer the supranational over the national. Its adherents have a disdain for, even a fear of, majoritarian democracy. This is the home of the preponderance of those in the academy, the media, the lawyerly caste, human rights crusaders, the corporate top end of town, and even the bureaucracy. In this camp, national sovereignty is not, shall we say, the be-all-and-end-all. O’Sullivan also thinks that undemocratic liberalism tends towards being utopian, historicist (“we’re on the right side of history”), and highly willing to demand conformity. 

By contrast, illiberal democracy is the home of those who make pre-eminent national sovereignty and their nation-state. The outputs of majoritarian democracy are more highly valued than those of the supranational organizations. Here, domestic law trumps (or should trump) international law except where the former explicitly adopts and incorporates the latter. Translated loosely into more colloquial, or even pejorative terms, this is the struggle between insiders vs. outsiders. Or anywhere types vs. somewhere types. Or the elites vs. the populists.

When this divide is mapped onto today’s political spectrum, we can generalize and say that left-of-centre political parties tend to be comfortable with undemocratic liberalist positions. By contrast, right-of-centre political parties are torn between supranationalists and nationalists, insiders and outsiders, elites and populists, undemocratic liberalists and illiberal democrats. 

That takes us back to the three recent anglosphere elections in Canada, Britain, and Australia. All took place in the shadow of Donald Trump and his clear reshaping of the Republican Party into America’s outsider, illiberal democrat camp. Canada’s election came first. American readers need to realise that Canada today is a comparatively left-wing place. Its median voter would be to the left of California’s and conspicuously more left-leaning than Britain’s or Australia’s median voter. (This is why it was always obvious to this native born Canadian that President Trump was never remotely serious about wanting to make Canada the 51st state of the US. Bring into the Union Canada’s 38 million voters, another California, and Republicans would be out of office far into the future.) For proof, the left-leaning Liberal Party has formed Canada’s government for some two-thirds of the last 120 years. And it had won the last three Canadian elections under Justin Trudeau, though the latter two had been minority governments dependent upon an even more left-wing NDP party.

Against that backdrop, and a clear voter weariness with Justin Trudeau, the Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre (adopted by French Canadian parents but raised in Canada’s most conservative province of Alberta) had been leading by 20 points in the polls before Christmas. That’s a big lead for a conservative in Canada, but it disguised this truth. The left-of-center vote was being split with the NDP vote up to around eighteen percent in the polls and almost level pegging with the Liberals. Combined, the two leftist parties weren’t far off Poilievre’s Conservative tally. 

Then Justin Trudeau was more or less forced to resign. The reins were passed to Mark Carney, a political neophyte with impeccable “anywhere” globalist credentials as the former head of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, a big investment fund, and more. President Trump started trolling Canada. The tariffs came. And the result was a fourth term, minority government for the Liberal Party, and Mark Carney. 

Readers will know that outcome already. What is far less known is that Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives actually received over 41 percent of the vote. You have to go back to 1988 to find a right-of-centre popular vote that high. What happened is that the left-wing vote coalesced around Carney and the Liberals. The NDP vote dropped from 17.8 percent in the prior election to 6.3 percent. The Greens vote went down. The Quebec separatist vote fell.

So we had an election in which the Conservatives garnered their highest vote tally in four decades and yet were badly beaten in terms of seats in the legislature, barely holding the Liberals to a minority government. (For context, Stephen Harper won a solid majority government for the Conservative Party in the 2011 election with only 39.5 percent of the vote.) Everything was a result of the conservative vote being too concentrated in a few western provinces, and worse, the left-of-centre vote coalescing and not splitting. When that happens in Canada, conservatives have almost no chance. As I said, Canada is a very left-wing country, a fact brought home to this ex-pat Australian resident every time he and his wife go back to visit family. Did Trump and his tariffs and jibes help to bring the left together? Yes. But equally, and in the face of that, Poilievre kept to most of his outsider positions while trying to distance himself from the US President. In terms of the elite vs. populist split within the Canadian conservative party, therefore, this result offered something to both wings. A loss, yes, but also a four-decade high popular vote.

The United Kingdom saw no such effort to “have it both ways.” What happened there was that an insurgent political party, Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage—the man probably most responsible for the Brexit vote to leave the European Union—caused a political earthquake. This happened not in a general election but rather in local elections in big chunks of England, together with a by-election in a very safe seat of the governing Labour Party. 

Reform exceeded all expectations and, in the process, put in serious jeopardy the long-term survival of Britain’s Conservative party. Farage’s party is an openly populist party that pledges to slash immigration and take control of the borders, eliminate DEI initiatives, disavow all Net Zero commitments, and fight the so-called “culture wars.” It had a stunningly successful result. At 31 percent, it got a noticeably higher share of the popular vote than either Labour or the Conservatives. It won 677 local council seats and two mayoral races (out of five). The Conservatives lost 674 council seats and now hold just 319. Labour lost 187, down to 98. Reform now controls 10 of the 23 councils that went to the polls, the rest having no outright control. But the biggest surprise came in a northern England by-election in the governing Labour Party’s sixteenth safest seat at the election last year. 

Reform overturned a 16,000-vote Labour majority, winning the by-election (after a recount) by six votes. On these results, pollsters estimate that Reform would win a massive majority at the next British general election. Indeed, and incredibly, Reform is now even polling in second place in Scotland behind the Scottish National Party. To say there is panic amongst the two established parties, and especially the Conservatives, would be something of an understatement.

In essence, then, Reform is an openly populist or outsiders’ party. It campaigns against the Conservative Party for being a Labour-lite or, in American terms, a RINO party that has consistently broken past promises, becoming too liberal/progressive and insufficiently democratic and responsive to its voters’ desires. It also campaigns against the governing Labour Party as a globalist, lawyers’ outfit, more supranationalist than nationalist. This has forced the Conservative Party to move sharply away from its own moderate, supranationalist elite wing towards its populist wing. But it may well be too late. 

On present trends, we could be seeing one of those events that First-Past-the-Post voting systems throw up only once in a century, namely the death of one of the two major political parties. Remember, the British Conservative Party dates back to the early nineteenth century and is generally considered to be the oldest political party still operating in the democratic world. But even the governing British Labour Party is feeling intense pressure from this Farage-led party that, unlike Poilievre in Canada, did not disavow the US President or his outsiders’ version of populism that attracts significant chunks of the working-class vote. Where Canada’s Conservative Party is still trying to ride both its illiberal democracy and undemocratic liberalism wings, UK Reform is all in with the former. And thus far, it is paying big dividends.

That leaves my home of Australia. As with Canada, the right-of-centre (and, when making comparisons with Canada, confusingly named) Liberal Party had a polling lead at the end of last year. Partly because of that, and partly because the party was internally divided almost right down the middle between populist outsiders and supranationalist insiders, from the start of 2025, the party opted to play it safe. It took an extremely minimalist position on immigration reform to the electorate, choosing not to promise big cuts in what is the world’s largest per capita legal immigration system, being run by the governing Labor party. It opted not to promise to abandon Net Zero. Nor did it promise to cut income taxes (which have a top rate of 47 percent that kicks in at $120,000 p.a.). It wholly ignored the issue of DEI hiring, state censorship, and all other culture-related concerns. 

International media made much of the Trump factor, but unlike the case with Canada, that is wrong. The Liberal Party leader, Peter Dutton, wholly abandoned any Trump-type policies in favour of a Mitt Romney-type offering, and a watered-down version even of that. He parked his party an inch to the right of the Labor government. The choice was a disaster. 

Conservative voters abandoned the Australian Liberal Party in droves. Initially ahead in the polls, it was slaughtered with barely 32 percent of the first preferences in this Ranked Choice Voting system. A Labor Party government that had overseen the biggest drop in living standards in half a century, almost the highest energy prices in the democratic world, and the world’s highest immigration intake, did not have to fight on any of those fronts and romped home. After the election, the Liberal Party was left divided down the middle between its two wings, the populist outsiders and the insider supranationalists. Leaders are chosen by the elected Members of Parliament, who convened shortly after the early May election and immediately held a ballot for the new leader. The insider, non-populist candidate won 29–25. My bet is that she will not last 18 months as the party base is seething with anger.

To sum up, then, recent elections saw Canada’s conservatives softly-softly moving towards the populist illiberal democracy end of the spectrum, at least to the extent a pretty left-leaning electorate will allow. Britain, by contrast, has a Reform Party that is all in on moving in that direction, the one that has been so electorally successful for Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Meanwhile, Australia’s right-of-centre party is torn down the middle, cannot seem to make up its mind what to do, and right now is a political mess.