Ben Curtis/AP Photo
From left, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, President Joe Biden, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, and President Emmanuel Macron of France pose for a photo as they meet at the Chancellery in Berlin, October 18, 2024.
Even though many economic metrics show Joe Biden’s term as president to have been a success (and a historic success by the metric of enhancing workers’ rights), by political metrics it has to be judged to be a flop. It’s becoming clearer that much of the reasons for that flop resulted from Biden’s age-related infirmities, which made him a very uncertain trumpet for his own policies.
But when Biden is put up against his peers, it also becomes clear that something more menacing than the travails of age is stalking the leaders of the foremost Western powers. The polling firm Morning Consult surveyed citizens of the world’s major democracies in late November and early December, and the results, even allowing for exceptional margins of error, show that Biden is anything but alone.
Morning Consult had Biden with a 37 percent approval rating, against a 55 percent disapproval rating. That dismal approval number, however, was roughly twice the size of the leaders of France and Germany, and higher than those of all the leaders of the G7 nations save Italy, with whom he was effectively tied. Here, in descending order of approval, are the numbers:
Italy’s Giorgia Meloni: 38 percent approval to 55 percent disapproval
America’s Biden: 37 to 55
The U.K.’s Keir Starmer: 30 to 59
Canada’s Justin Trudeau: 26 to 68
Japan’s Shigeru Ishiba: 24 to 53
Germany’s Olaf Scholz: 19 to 75
France’s Emmanuel Macron: 18 to 75
Most leaders of major democracies that aren’t members of the G7 also came in with a negative balance. Spain’s Pedro Sanchez put up a 32 percent approval rating to 63 percent disapproval; Brazil’s Lula (before his emergency surgery) was at 42/53, and Poland’s Donald Tusk almost broke even, 44/45. It’s important to note the vast ideological spectrum of these leaders, ranging from the democratic socialism of Sanchez and Lula to the right populism of Meloni.
By contrast, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, who is continuing the very popular left-populism of her mentor and presidential predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has an approval rating of 64 percent to a disapproval rating of 28 percent. Argentina’s Javier Milei, who mixes the ideology of Ayn Rand with the authoritarian swagger of Elon Musk, comes in at 66/29, though a December Gallup poll puts his approval rating significantly lower, at 48 percent. As over half the Argentinean public, by the government’s own measures, lives in poverty, and more than a quarter in “extreme poverty,” it’s likely that polling the poorer half of Argentineans is difficult.
That same prevalence of poverty may have led Morning Consult to overrate the popularity of India’s Narendra Modi, whose approval rating sits at 76 percent, though India’s recent parliamentary elections registered a significant drop in support for Modi’s party. Indeed, it’s notable that Morning Consult’s positive findings were achieved in nations with significantly higher rates of poverty and extreme poverty—and thereby higher rates of difficulty in reaching sub-middle-class residents—than the nations whose leaders placed lower on the approval scale.
What is beyond dispute is that the leaders in nations with what we call advanced economies, where it’s easier to reach a genuine cross section of the public, all bombed. That’s as true for elections as it is for approval ratings. As former Biden aide Bharat Ramamurti pointed out last week, every incumbent party in a developed nation facing re-election in 2024 lost, and Biden’s party actually fared the best among them all, losing the presidency by only 1.5 points in the popular vote and gaining seats in the House of Representatives.
In none of these developed nations are the economies performing to the public’s satisfaction, notwithstanding Biden’s significant achievement in the U.S., with the highest cumulative GDP growth since the pandemic. In most of these nations, immigration is also a source of considerable dissatisfaction, but it’s chiefly economic conditions, and the ineffectualness of governments in bettering them, that are bringing their leaders down.
The post–World War II welfare states in those nations have been eroded by capital’s escape from regulations, taxation, and employment standards that their governments once enacted, and none of those nations’ governments have been able to arrest the accompanying shift in income from wages to investments. Offshoring, but also the growing mechanization of manufacturing, has simultaneously reduced the number of and rewards for jobs in industry. The broad prosperity of the 30 years following World War II, when democracies with advanced economies saw real wages and median incomes increase due to those nations’ pre-global social contracts, has long since vanished in the rearview mirror.
In 1937, during Franklin Roosevelt’s second term as president, the economy, which had been recovering steadily since he took office in 1933, took a sharp turn downward, due chiefly to the government’s abrupt enactment of a balanced budget. Within six months, the reduction in spending that the budget cuts induced led to such a slump in consumption that more jobs were lost than had been lost during the first two years (1929-1930) of the Great Depression. Many Americans then feared that government, even a government headed by Roosevelt, who’d won re-election the year before by the greatest margin in American history, was powerless to reverse the dire economic conditions that were beginning to appear routine and perhaps even inescapable.
With Roosevelt uncertain as to how to proceed, and with Hitler and Stalin increasingly looming over Europe, Marriner Eccles, then chair of the Federal Reserve, and the most progressive Fed leader in its history, sent Roosevelt a note. “The greatest threat to democracy today lies in the growing conviction that it cannot work,” he said. “I urge that you provide the democratic leadership that will make our system function. Only in that way can the growing threat of fascism be overcome.”
Fortunately, Roosevelt did provide that leadership, persuading Congress to increase spending, which began again the reduction in unemployment that culminated with the massive job creation of World War II. But the shift in public allegiance from democracy to strongman rule against which Eccles warned is with us again today, and not just because the bottlenecks to effective government encased in our constitutional structure, and the right’s hundred years’ war on government, have paved Donald Trump’s path to power. That shift is also with us, and with all our peer nations, because national democracies have been rendered weaker by global capital.
In the roughly 70 years between the end of the Civil War and the coming of the New Deal, what had been an economy of local businesses morphed into one dominated by national corporations over which state and local American governments had little if any control. It was a time of great and rising economic inequality, and it was not until FDR’s presidency that the national government won the power to regulate those corporations and set standards that bettered the lot of most Americans. Today, like those local governments of yore, merely national governments lack the power and coordination to effectively regulate global banks and corporations, and economic inequality again has soared. Unless and until those governments can find a way to do that—presumably, in concert—the poll ratings of the leaders of democracies may continue to be depressed, and the toxic allure of autocratic rule may become a lasting feature of our times.
