The Bottom Line
On the eve of Canada’s 2025 federal election, which took place on April 28, the Canadians’ voting results surprised not only themselves but governments worldwide. On Jan. 6, after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation at the end of his nine-year term following declining public support, Canada’s Parliament was prorogued until a new leader for the Liberal Party, which was the current political party under Trudeau, could be chosen. In essence, for that time being, all of Parliament’s actions and proceedings were suspended, though the Parliament itself was not dissolved.
On March 24, former central banker Mark Carney was voted in as the party leader, assuming the role of the next Prime Minister. However, due to the fact that he was not democratically elected, Carney called for a “snap election” (moving up the election that was supposed to happen in October to April) to secure legitimacy from the electorate.
It is important to note that the Canadian electoral system is built to resemble that of Britain’s Single Member Plurality system. Citizens do not vote for the prime minister directly but instead cast votes for candidates who represent different political parties. These candidates win seats in the Parliament, and the party that receives the most seats (plurality, not necessarily the majority), nominates their party’s leader, who then becomes the new Prime Minister.
In the months before the election, voter polls indicated that the Conservative Party, headed by Pierre Poilievre and leading the Liberal Party by 20 points, had the best chances of winning the majority of the overall 343 seats in the Parliament. This was due to his anti-Trudeau stance that served as a welcome contrast to the issues that many Canadians perceived Trudeau’s government brought about.
This changed when Trump was elected president and implemented controversial policies, such as calling Canada the 51st state of the United States, imposing 25 percent tariffs on Canadian imports, and threatening to withdraw from their common environmental treaties. It was the wake-up call that Canadians needed. Now connected by their common enemy, Canadians were swayed by Mark Carney’s unification campaign, which emphasized the importance of defending Canada’s sovereignty against the United States’s political betrayal.
The author of this piece believes that through observing the kind of negative effects that a pivot to the right of the political spectrum could have on a democracy, Canadians realized that they could not repeat the mistakes of their neighbors. Poilievre’s similarities with Trump worked against him, leading Canadian citizens to reconsider their ideological positions. In the end, the Liberal Party beat the conservatives by a slim margin, receiving 169 seats in the Parliament, while the conservatives remained the second-largest presence in Parliament, holding 143 seats.
The United States’s governmental shift to the extreme right not only impacts American citizens and Canadian elections but also the political climates of countries across the globe. For example, Ukraine’s survival against Russia’s invasion depends on the U.S. support, which, in light of Trump’s preference for a dictator like Putin over a democratically elected president like Zelenskyy, has been waning. Another example comes from Germany. As the country prepared for its Feb. 23 federal election, pundits were concerned that the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a nationalist and anti-democratic political party, was coming close to winning the majority of the votes. American involvement was clearly present in Germany as Elon Musk, an unofficially elected U.S. politician, publicly announced his support for AfD, encouraging German citizens to vote for this (as some say) far-right extremist party.
Similarly to Canada, Germany did not yield to the United States’s influence, and, ultimately, a liberal party called the Christian Democrats, headed by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, won a minority government in the Parliament. Nevertheless, the AfD came in second, which prompts the question of whether Germany will be able to hold on to its democratic principles in the next federal election.
Even though this trend of a political shift toward authoritarianism may not have begun with the United States, this author insists that it was certainly furthered by the newly elected American government, posing a threat to democracy in countries all across the world. Some politicians claim that Trump will be forced to make an early exit from his four-year term, due to the United States’s declining economy and deteriorating alliances with other nations. Others speculate that he will be able to carry out his presidency until the end, though at what cost to the American people — that remains to be the most significant and, frankly, disturbing question.
No one could predict what the next U.S. election will look like. If the recent global developments in politics are any indication, though, one thing is certain: American citizens’ choices will carry implications (let us hope not ramifications) for the rest of the world’s political scene. If the American government keeps shifting further to the right, the United States might not only lose its economic and political allies but also the very thing that shapes the country: its democratic beliefs. Whatever the outcome of the next election is, politics in the United States will be dealing with the consequences of these ideological changes for many years to come.