Last Tuesday night, in advance of this weekend’s first round of French parliamentary elections, there was a debate featuring the standard-bearers for the country’s three major political groupings. To open the proceedings, each candidate was asked to hold up a picture “that symbolizes your project for France.”
Manuel Bompard of the left-wing La France Insoumise (which roughly translates as “France Unbowed”) showed a photo of a white-haired woman looking for a job at an employment office. He said it represented the current government “confiscating two years of our lives” by raising the retirement age to 64. He promised better and earlier pensions.
Jordan Bardella, president of the right-wing Rassemblement National, put up a picture of an electricity bill, which he called “a source of anxiety for millions.” He said that, if elected, he would be “the prime minister of purchasing power.”
And Prime Minister Gabriel Attal of the centrist and governing Renaissance party – which appears headed for severe defeat – showed an image of a classroom, “where we combat inequality, where France is built, where the republic is taught.” He said voters had to choose what type of society they want, a choice that “will translate its way down to the classrooms of your children and your grandchildren.”
The French debate was held just a few hours after the Liberal Party of Canada’s stunning but unsurprising defeat in its former stronghold of Toronto-St. Paul’s, and it got me wondering: What photo would Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hold up?
What story would he tell? Why does he want to win another election? What does the current incarnation of the Liberal party, made in his image, stand for?
And is that what Canadians want?
The Liberals were in power more often than not throughout the 20th century because they learned to be the middle-of-the-road party in a moderate, middle-of-the-road country. They repeatedly found and held the vote-rich centre of the spectrum.
But, like the magnetic north pole, the electoral centre never sits still. Liberals of the past always moved with it. They resisted some expansions of the welfare state in the Mackenzie King years, then embraced them under Pearson. Their coziness with Yankee business in the early 1960s sparked George Grant’s furious Lament for a Nation, but by the 1970s, they had were standard bearers of mildly anti-American Canadian nationalism. Under Jean Chrétien, they restored fiscal balance, being more progressive conservative than the Progressive Conservatives.
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Is Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal Party in trouble because the centre is disappearing? Or has it lost its sense of the centre?
The late Liberal strategist John Duffy used to tell a story about campaign slogans – the official ones on the lawn signs versus what people thought the party actually stood for. He only half joked that Ontario’s provincial Liberals lost the 1990 election when voters came to believe that their motto was “Higher Taxes for a French Ontario.”
What slogan comes to mind when voters think about the Trudeau government? “Announcements Over Execution”? “More Immigration for Higher Housing Prices”? “Spent More, Did Less?” Or what the Liberals to some extent always run on, often successfully: “Yeah, But The Conservatives Are Worse”?
The continued effectiveness of that last slogan is a reminder that the electorate still has a big, moderate centre. The Liberal Party survives and thrives when it finds its evolving location. The Liberals win when voters believe their motto is, “On Balance, We’re The Most Reasonable.”
In 2015, Mr. Trudeau’s team benefitted from Canadians being tired after nearly a decade of the Harper Conservatives. But the Liberals and not the New Democrats captured that wind of change, because what the Liberals put in the window aimed at the sweet spot in the middle – a middle that was shifting left after the Harper years.
The Harper government’s brand was lower taxes paid for by less government; the Liberals promised a tilt in the other direction, toward improving and expanding social programs. The Liberals, unlike the Conservatives, also promised real action on carbon emissions, which at the time appealed to key suburban voters.
Why did that menu work? “Because it’s 2015,” as Mr. Trudeau once said. Why is it no longer working? Because there’s been a lot of water under the bridge, and it’s no longer 2015. There’s still a moderate middle out there, but it has moved. Liberal actions and Liberal missteps moved it.
For the Liberals to win the next election, or at least not to lose too badly, they almost certainly need to find another leader. More importantly, they need to get out the map and the compass, and find the electorate’s lost centre.