This is how democracy goes

Donald Trump’s references to Canada as a possible 51st state of the United States have hurt Canadian nationalists and conservatives, those in Canada who advocate the same things he advocates in and for the United States and who were well ahead in the polls when Trudeau left. An American nationalist has to respect a Canadian nationalist, or he will end up ceding ground to the globalists in the name of nationalism.

Another election lost by the Conservatives was in Australia. Although the American president denied any affinity with Peter Dutton (the Australian Conservative candidate, defeated in last weekend's election) and declared himself a friend of the winner (Labor's Anthony Albanese), the fact is that Dutton claimed to be pro-Trump – which, with the controversy surrounding tariffs, may have become a toxic asset.

The image of Trump dressed as a pope, in an unspeakable, gratuitous and offensive mix of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Stupidity, was also in bad taste. However, the American president has already reacted, and with enthusiastic restraint, to the election of his compatriot Robert Francis Prevost as Pope Leo XIV. The choice of name is auspicious – Leo XIII was the great social pope of the late 19th century who, with the encyclical Rerum Novarum, outlined a “third way” between Marxist socialism and liberal capitalism, in line with several thinkers and lay Catholic movements, such as the Cercles Catholiques d'Ouvriers. The 1891 Rerum Novarum marked the social doctrine of the Church, which today's world sorely needs.

The rates

Trump seems to be proving his critics right in applying the famous tariffs. The use of tariffs, barriers and customs duties as an instrument of economic and financial policy to achieve certain objectives, such as reducing the external deficit or reindustrializing certain activities, is justifiable and defensible, but their determination and application cannot be generic, indiscriminate, as if there were a balance of duties and responsibilities between America and the rest of the world or as if “the rest of the world” were an entire bloc.

The man behind this tariff model and the President’s main advisor on the matter is Peter Navarro, whom Elon Musk was quick to call “moron” (imbecile). It is true that Navarro called the owner of Tesla “car assembler”, but that does not explain everything. Scott Bessent, Secretary of State for the Treasury and a highly experienced and prestigious financier, appeared after the announcement of the 90-day suspension of tariffs to justify Trump. Bessent went to Florida and returned with Trump to Washington before the suspension was announced, acting as a kind of mediator between the radical positions of Musk and Navarro. In his meeting with journalists, he tried to give the President’s negotiating tactics as the reason for the tariff back-and-forth, but there is no doubt that the reaction of the markets was decisive in the strategic retreat. In any case, as we have now seen with the trade agreement with the United Kingdom, the Trump method seems to be working.

The friends

Another interesting point is the selection of the American president's European contacts, not based on the importance of the country, but on their greater or lesser ideological proximity. POLITICO recently presented the list of Trump's European "friends".

Unsurprisingly, Giorgia Meloni is the top pick. Meloni has had several private meetings with Trump in Paris, at the reopening of Notre Dame, at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, at the Inauguration and, most recently, at the height of the trade war, and has been a good Euro-Atlantic mediator between the American trio Trump-Vance-Musk and “Mrs. Europe”, Ursula von der Leyen.

Viktor Orbán comes next. Despite Orbán's independent positions on Russia and Chinese investments in Hungary, ideological affinities have maintained the connection and the exchange of compliments.

Poles – such as the national-conservative presidential candidate Karol Nawrocky, whom Trump, who has never received Prime Minister Tusk, has now received at the White House – are also on the list. As is the English nationalist Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform Party, and has been for a long time. Interestingly, from France, it is not Marine Le Pen who is elected, but Eric Zémour, who was invited to the inauguration on 20 January.

Bipolarization

The great bipolarization in Euro-America today is clearly the division between nationalists and globalists or, to generalize and simplify, between the defenders of a world of independent nations, guided by their national interests, and the defenders of a world-humanity, an immense market governed by a Davos-type oligarchy. It was in the name of this immense market that the policies that led to deindustrialization and the acceleration of demographic decline in Europe were implemented, especially in the three decades after the Cold War. And while such policies may have benefited – and did benefit – part of the populations in the peripheries, especially those in Asia, they did so at the expense of the working classes and the middle classes in the West.

In recent years, large popular movements have emerged in Europe and the United States against the globalists. Despite being opposed and defamed by the “system” and its powerful propaganda machines, they have achieved success. The latest and most resounding of these successes was Trump’s victory; then came the rise of the German AFD in the February elections, and now the rise of the Reform Party in the United Kingdom and Simion’s victory in the first round of the Romanian elections.

The “system” (I would like to use a less conspiratorial term, but it is difficult to find another) has resorted to several instruments to stop this offensive. The first is propaganda, even that which appears as respectable “reference opinion”; and when the Social Communication, the fourth power, does not work, it resorts to the Justice, the third power, and even to the powers of the “Deep State”, in the desperate race to save “democracy” from the antidemocratic impulses of the people.

Thus, in November, the Romanian Constitutional Court annulled the election of Calin Georgescu, arguing that there had been mysterious Russian interference in favour of the far-right candidate. The Russians had allegedly manipulated Romanian voters at the time of voting, using an algorithm taken from the arsenal of the new KGB, the SVR, the successor to the same KGB that in the 1980s recruited Donald Trump for “the Russian cause”.

The next victim of the third power was Marine Le Pen, the likely winner of the 2027 French presidential election, who was convicted of “misappropriation of European funds”. She did what other parties in Brussels and across Europe have done and are doing, putting Rassemblement National officials, paid by the European Parliament, to work for the party.

Let's see if this time they allow the second round of the Romanian presidential election to take place on May 18, the day of the first round of the Polish presidential election.

Surprise in the Bundestag

Finally, the election of the German government. Friedrich Merz, the new leader of the CDU-CSU, the party that won the February elections, negotiated a coalition with the center-left party, the SPD; but when he presented himself to the Bundestag on Tuesday, May 6, he was six votes away from being approved as the new Chancellor.

The Chancellor's election is by secret ballot, and it seems that some CDU-CSU or SPD MPs did not vote for Merz. Given the alarm and the prospect of a new election, a second vote was called; only then, if there was no majority, could there be a new election. Faced with the need to negotiate with the Social Democrats, Merz, a man from big finance who was a director of Black Rock and is considered to be on the right wing of the CDU-CSU, gave in to the SPD on key issues such as immigration, climate and spending flexibility, which displeased many of his voters and, apparently, also some MPs from his party. Polls now give the AFD (the radical right-wing party that in February, with 21% of the vote, elected 152 MPs) 26% of the popular vote, which would make it the leading party in Germany.

Given the risk to the coalition (and therefore “to democracy”) that the AFD (which, in the meantime, part of the political class, the media and the Deep State want to ban) would come first in a new election, a second appeal vote was held in Berlin; and Merz ended up passing, with nine more votes than needed for a majority.

The POLITICO website, unsuspected of radical right or populist sympathies, concluded after the second vote on May 6 that the fact that Merz “began her role as Chancellor in this way” was “an undeniable sign of weakness”.

The unprecedented overcoming of all obstacles to achieve the unorthodox second attempt at election was only possible thanks to an agreement between the two coalition parties – CDU-CSU and SPD – with the Greens and the ex-communist Left.

This is how Democracy goes…