Old Europe and the Americas are set on very different paths. Germany, France and the United Kingdom are visibly stuck. El Salvador, Argentina and the United States, on the other hand, are not. Politically, Germany and France have become difficult places to govern, to say the least.
The fragile German three-party coalition government collapsed in November 2024 over the beleaguered country’s economic policy and performance. Germany has been in recession since the beginning of 2023.
A Federal election is scheduled for February 2025. The European industrial giant needs cheap energy and regulatory flexibility. Neither is forthcoming. Indeed, the German industry is paying two to three times more than its American and Chinese counterparts for energy.
Unemployment is at six per cent, slightly higher than last year. However, there was a large increase in the number of people in part-time, state-subsidised, employment. Germany is not working as it should.
Merkel’s policy of green appeasement in 2011, switching from reliable energy sources to ones subject to the whims of the weather gods, is to blame for this. Further, the rise in terrorist incidents in the aftermath of her decision to invite the Middle East to her formerly peaceful country in 2015 has confused her discombobulated citizenry. The current German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, kept both policies alive. Not surprisingly, his approval ratings sank to 18% in the fourth quarter of 2024.
France, for her part, had three governments in 2024. Her people are not happy campers, a constant since 1789 it would seem. Macron, le president, lost much of his power in June last year after having lost the parliamentary elections. Le Pen’s National Rally came out top in the first round of elections on the 30th of June only to be beaten in the second one by the New Popular Front, an alliance of sundry Socialist and Communist groups, a week later. With stagnant growth, relatively high unemployment, crisis levels of debt at 110 per cent of GDP and a testing 6.1 per cent deficit, La Marianne is obese, depressed and hooked on the medication of ultra-high levels of North African immigration like a professional on crystal meth, much against the wishes of her own population it would seem. Macron’s approval ratings have hovered around 25 per cent for much of last year.
In Britain, as Keir Starmer is finding out, governing is not easy. His popularity sank the day he took office. It is now, perhaps irretrievably, bogged down in the scandalous quagmire of Pakistani grooming gangs. He admitted while director of the Crown Prosecution Service in 2012 that a “generation of vulnerable girls had been let down by the justice system” suggesting that “the ethnicity of the suspects had been an issue”, not their religion interestingly, lest the authorities caused communities offence.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch mentioned that there were over 250,000 victims of “Muslim grooming gangs” across Britain in a 2019 Parliamentary debate, adding that Labour’s Rotherham’s MP, “the courageous Sarah Champion, has put the figure at one million”, suggesting that nearly three times more prepubescent girls were raped over the course of the Left’s decadelong Culture War than our men died in World War II.
The systemic scale of this continuing barbarity means that only a Nuremberg-style trial for decision-makers will do to rectify (somewhat) what their tacit acquiescence of evil, for political expediency, has permitted.
Starmer cannot bridge the growing divide between Europe and the Americas, writes Alex Story
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We could look at our country’s stagnant economy, her rising debt levels and the planned “behind the scenes” alignment with the European Union, via the mechanism of the innocuous-sounding Product Regulation and Metrology bill, giving ministers the ability to introduce EU regulations into our system without the need for parliamentary debates, but it would be a distraction from the aforementioned industrial rape disgrace, which will forever shame our nation.
Starmer’s approval ratings, never high, fell to 25 per cent five months into his premiership. On the other side of the Atlantic, things, while not necessarily easier, look decidedly more propitious. El Salvador, formerly one of the most violent countries in the world, is now, so it appears, a haven of peace. President Nayib Bukele, elected in 2019, managed this stupendous turnaround. Homicide rates dropped from 38 to 1.9 per 100,000 people in the five years to 2025.
He accelerated a crackdown on gangs after 87 people were killed by them in March 2022. With a population of only six million that represented the equivalent of a thousand people in the UK. He incarcerated over 80,000 criminals and threw away the proverbial key to the consternation of the international Human Rights lawyer caste, but applauded by all honest Salvadorians. Equalising for our population, it would represent the locking up of an astounding 850,000 miscreants. In addition, he introduced Bitcoin, the decentralised digital currency, as a legal tender in 2021, removing the incentives for central banks to inflate the government’s self-inflicted economic problems away.
The economy grew by a reasonable 3.4 per cent in 2023 and slightly over two per cent in 2024. Debt levels are at a manageable 84 per cent of GDP, with inflation and unemployment being low. Bukele’s approval ratings have hovered around 90 per cent for much of his tenure. All is not rosy; poverty levels remain the highest in Latin America. But wealth follows peace, as Great King Alfred would have said. Argentina for her part, once one of the richest and most majestic countries in the world, which thereafter drifted into permanent political instability and hyperinflation, addicted as she was to the powerful but deadening drug of a Peronist socialist and collectivist worldview, now seems to have reached the end of that self-harming tunnel.
Indeed, while the country saw nine sovereign defaults and six military dictatorships since 1930, the victory in November 2023 of the unusual, and therefore interesting, self-describing anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei, brings with it the bracing winds of positive change. Since his ascent, he cut government spending by a third. He brought down inflation from 211 per cent when he took office, with price rises spiking from 25 per cent for the month of December 2023, to 120 per cent, a fall of nearly half within a year, with a 2.4 per cent monthly inflation rise for the month of December 2024. Astoundingly, the formerly fiscally incontinent Argentina has seen a surplus for much of last year. With falling inflation, the country has become investible again as the country’s central bank is bringing in “billions in new foreign currency reserves”. Argentina is becoming investible again.
While the economy contracted by 2.4 per cent in 2024, many of Milei’s countrymen, with 56 per cent approval ratings, can see the direction of travel and like the potential destination. Last but not least, further north, Donald Trump is preparing to take office again. While the US economy has grown at a good clip over the last four years, inflation, unsustainable spending, gaping government deficits at over eight per cent, open borders, identity and gender politics, and a left-liberal establishment unable to compromise with its own evermore insane world view, left the road wide open for a return of the Big Orange.
Better prepared than in 2016 and supported by some of the world’s gutsiest people, Trump knows his enemies. He understands them well and is threatening to be much more methodical when confronting them. His recent approval ratings came in at 54 per cent (maybe it’s down to the Trump Dance).Internationalists worldwide are set to be tested to their core – not least our very own Starmer and his side-kick Richard Hermer, stuck as they are between the rock of a resurgent America and the crumbling, soft, porous EU place with whom our Premier is so besotted.
The culture wars are about to enter a new phase. Having taken the puberty-blockers of shared sovereignty, an increasingly effete Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, submissively drawn into the EU’s deadening orbit, can only offer further decline to its long-suffering citizenry.
El Salvador, Argentina and the United States, on the other hand, have decided to go for the testosterone-filled dish of sovereign power, affirmation and large cojones. In the right hands, with a patriotic focus on improving the state of their nations, there is much for which the people of these three countries can hope. The road ahead might not be easy for them and their leaders. Which road, however, is worth travelling if not challenging?