President-elect Donald Trump's victory in November along with Republicans taking control of Congress capped off a year in which right-wing political groups worldwide gained more power than at any time since the end of the Cold War.
Left-wing parties in 2024 suffered a record-low average vote share of just 45.4%, according to an analysis by The Telegraph of elections in 73 democracies. Right-wing groups earned more than 1.5 billion votes in 2024, the most on record in a year.
In Western Europe and the U.S., left-wing parties earned just 42.3% of the vote, and the right won 55.7%, which is the widest gap in vote share since 1990, according to the analysis.
Further losses by left-wing parties are expected after Trump's inauguration Monday in Canada, Australia, and Germany, which has the European Union's largest economy.
"The trend is up. There is no real reason to expect that it will stop anytime soon," Matthijs Rooduijn, a political scientist from the University of Amsterdam, told The Telegraph.
Jeremy Cliffe, editorial director and senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank, told The Telegraph the global right-wing shift is because of three trends.
"The globalization-driven decline of organized labor, rising identity politics harnessed more successfully by the right than the left, and a general tendency among leftist forces to fragment rather than unite," he said.
Pierre Poilievre, a populist dubbed Canada's version of Trump, is the favorite according to polls to replace liberal Justin Trudeau as prime minister after Trudeau announced his resignation earlier this month. In Australia, conservatives have pulled ahead of the Labor Party government in polls before elections, which are expected no later than May.
In Germany, the conservative CDU Party is expected to win February's general election, and the far-right Alternative for Germany Party is polling in second ahead of unpopular left-wing Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democratic Party.
Voters across the EU handed overall victories to center-right parties in June's European Union Parliament elections, but France's National Rally Party also had big gains.
Emmanuel Macron's decision to call snap assembly elections after Marine Le Pen's National Rally Party won the EU vote in France left French politics in disarray and Macron a lame-duck president.
The National Rally Party was kept from seizing power only by a ragtag coalition of all the left-wing parties, but Le Pen's party is the largest in the assembly and brought down the new minority government after just three months.
The left's stranglehold on Latin American politics since the late 2000s has also waned after victories by leaders such as Argentina's Javier Milei, Paraguay's Santiago Peña, and Ecuador's Daneil Noboa.
Dr. Christopher Sabatini, senior research fellow for Latin America, U.S., and the Americas Programme at Chatham House, told The Telegraph that leftist parties have seen their vote share decline as a result of inept governing, overpromises, and corruption.
"In the last two decades, voters' concerns over crime and violence have shot up," he said. "That is an area in which the left has failed to produce many results or a viable answer."
Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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