The Beginning of the End?
“The Year of Elections” marked the eighth year since US President Donald Trump’s initial, remarkable rise to the American presidency. 2024 saw populist figureheads, from Trump to India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, swept back into power, entrenching the paradigm’s grip on many of the world’s most populous democracies. However, recent elections in 2025 have suggested a stark reversal of fortune for the seemingly invincible forces of populism that dominated elections the prior year. In Canada and Romania, the forces of establishment politics have surmounted crises and scandals to maintain their grip on power, narrowly preventing right-wing populists from supplanting them. Meanwhile, in Poland, the anti-immigrant and right-populist Law and Justice Party appeared to bolster its hold on fragile institutions after presidential elections that took place in June. Nevertheless, global trends suggest that populism, while still a potent force, is facing a powerful backlash that is gaining momentum after the second inauguration of Trump.
Things Fall Apart (for Pierre Poilievre) in Canada
Canada went to the polls on April 28, 2025, to elect its Parliament, which selects the prime minister. Three major parties contested the election: the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP), the center-left Liberal Party, and the right-wing Conservative Party. For more than a year before the election, polling had given the right-wing Conservative Party a clear lead over the governing Liberal Party, which had been plagued by scandals and economic mismanagement.
However, immediately after Trump’s second inauguration in January, the Conservative Party’s seemingly insurmountable 25-point lead began to evaporate almost overnight. By March 19th, after damaging rhetoric from Trump on the topic of potentially annexing Canada and slapping steep tariffs on Canadian goods, the Liberals overtook the Conservatives for the first time in polling averages. Ironically, the Conservative Party was polling at its highest average for the 2025 Parliamentary elections only a week before Trump’s inauguration.
The Conservative Party and its leader, Pierre Poilievre, were negatively impacted by Trump’s hostile rhetoric against Canada, and the party was haunted by its past courting of the U.S. Republican Party. Canadians who previously intended to vote for the NDP or even the Conservatives defected en masse to the Liberal Party, cementing the Liberals’ control over government for the immediate future. Ultimately, as voters went to the polls on April 28, the Liberals expanded their plurality in Parliament by 19 seats, winning a greater share of the vote than in the previous parliamentary elections of 2021. Ironically, Poilievre even lost his own riding, failing to return to Parliament. Instead, a Liberal candidate took his place in the House of Commons.
The Center Still Holds in Romania
In Romania, an election in late 2024 saw a right-wing, pro-Russian populist win a plurality of the vote with nearly 23 percent of the vote. However, the Romanian supreme court soon annulled the results of the first round due to Russian interference in the elections and banned the frontrunner, Cǎlin Georgescu, from running in new elections. The first round of the election was repeated on May 4, 2025, when the pro-EU, center-right Nicusor Dan, a former mayor of Bucharest, faced off against George Simion, another Eurosceptic populist who had the backing of Georgescu and drew from similar support bases. Simion was a self-proclaimed strong supporter of Trump. Dan, considered too fiscally conservative and pro-EU by leftists, was widely expected to lose to Simion in the second round.
In the end, however, Dan won a surprising seven-point victory over Simion, drawing deep support from Romania’s Hungarian and Moldovan minorities, as well as voters in Romania. Dan was able to eat into Simion’s sizable advantage in the Romanian diaspora vote, a demographic that leans right, allowing his domestic base to carry his campaign across the finish line. In Romania, debate around the country's relationship with Russia dominated the election, with support for Ukraine playing a key role in the contentious election. Ultimately, international populism has been closely connected to United Russia’s politics and Putin’s controversial image abroad.
Populism’s Resurgence in Poland
The final round of Poland’s Presidential election on June 1 stands out from the results in Canada and Romania. The center-left mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski, faced Karol Nawrocki, a candidate backed by the hard-right Law and Justice Party (PiS). PiS held power in Poland for nearly a decade, controlling the Prime Minister’s office from 2015 to 2023 and the Presidency since 2015. Under PiS leadership, Poland slipped toward electoral authoritarianism, with a crackdown on free speech, media, and political opposition.
While polling revealed a tight competition, with Trzaskowski slightly ahead, Trzaskowski began to see his lead slip closer to election day. While early exit polls projected a victory for Trzaskowski, the election was won in favor of the populist, right-wing candidate from PiS. Only two years before, in 2023, Polish voters gave an anti-PiS coalition control of Parliament, overturning PiS’s control of the Prime Minister’s office with the centrist Donald Tusk, a former prime minister.
Interestingly, Poland presents a clear case of populists rallying their base to recoup power, even amidst Trump’s unpopular global tariffs and international backlash against populist forces. Fortunately for PiS, Polish voters had grown frustrated with Prime Minister Donald Tusk, head of the coalition opposed to PiS, and his inability to pass his most important reforms, which had been stymied by President Andrzej Duda, a PiS official. Additionally, elections in Poland underlined a stark electoral shift, common across many Western democracies—swaths of rural regions in Western Poland that had once provided vast vote sinks for center-left parties gave PiS sizeable gains, while metropolitan areas consisting of urban cores and their suburban belts drifted toward the Civic Coalition, PiS’s main competitor.
The Emerging Limits of Populist Endurance
In Poland, domestic considerations likely trumped international events, explaining why Polish voters returned to hard-right Eurosceptic populism and rejected a centrist coalition even amidst a wave of pushback against Trump’s unique brand of populism. Interestingly, PiS, diverging from many of its political brethren in Europe, has a history of opposing Putin and backing Ukraine—a potential explanation for why Polish voters, supportive of Ukraine, were relatively indifferent to PiS maintaining its tenuous hold on the Polish Presidency. Moreover, wartime weariness is taking its toll—the Polish public no longer overwhelmingly supports assistance to Ukraine or its ascension into the EU and NATO. PiS took note of this shift in public sentiment and began to subtly adjust its rhetoric against support for Ukraine in this electoral cycle.
Meanwhile, in both Canada and Romania, international dynamics, especially around right-wing populism, cast an outsized influence on vote shares. In Canada, backlash from events south of the border in the United States caused a momentous shift in voting intentions that preserved the Liberal Party’s decade in power. Meanwhile, in Romania, the election was dominated by pro-Ukrainian versus anti-Ukrainian sentiment, with populist George Simion nominally claiming to oppose Putin, but pledging to take steps to weaken the European Union and stymie Romanian aid to Ukraine. These elections portray a significant shift in global perceptions of populist leadership.
The political survival of establishment leaders in Canada and Romania can be closely linked to the second Trump administration. Global polling by Ipsos traced a strong reaction against Trumpist-inspired populism, with an especially pronounced trend in the so-called “Free World,” where enthusiasm for forceful leaders who disregard the rule of law is down 38 percent in France and 26 percent in Italy since 2016. While concerns about the economy, rising costs, immigration, and frustration at establishment politics have continued to rise since 2016 in Western or Western-aligned democracies, some of the countries facing these rising sentiments have been ones that have also shown increasing distrust in their own homegrown versions of Trump.
Conclusion
For nearly a decade, right-wing populists have become entrenched in the politics of the “Free World.” Yet, since Trump’s second inauguration, the international political forces that have rallied against right-wing populism have begun licking their wounds and rebuilding strength. The commencement of full-scale hostilities in Ukraine in 2022 has served as a pivotal turning point in rallying the electoral bases of establishment parties across Europe and North America. This trend has accelerated after recent policies from the Trump Administration that have proven harmful to the image that right-wing populists carefully cultivated to Western audiences, from the “Liberation Day” tariffs to publicly lambasting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House.
Still, the rise of parties such as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, a right-wing and deeply Eurosceptic political party, in the United Kingdom and the recent presidential elections in Poland should serve as a solemn warning to those seeking to reverse the formidable gains made by right-wing populists throughout the past decade. Perhaps more so than ever before, Western voters expect domestic prosperity and rapid improvements in living conditions before casting their ballots in response to events on either side of the Atlantic or across the steppes of Ukraine.
