The Right is resurgent! The Left is Back! The Center is on the march!

It’s always tempting to declare, on the basis of a few elections, that a political tendency is on the ascendant. I should know: I’ve done it myself. But the only commonality in the most recent consequential elections—France, the UK, and Iran—is that voters can be depended on for one thing only: their desire for change.

In this age of constant flux—when history turns on a tweet—voters have become increasingly inconstant. They want new, they want different, they want better. Why shouldn’t elections follow the same pattern as iPhones, with a brand-new model every year? We can’t wait to trade in our perfectly good phones for something only marginally better because modernity for the last half-century has been predicated upon planned obsolescence.

Politics would seem the last refuge of the obsolescent. The median age of world leaders is 62. Joe Biden at 81, for many the very epitome of unplanned obsolescence, is not even the oldest leader (eight other leaders are older).

Yet politics, too, is moving away from incumbency. Voters just don’t want the same old, same old. It’s no wonder that U.S. voters recoil with horror from the prospect of a replay of the 2020 presidential election even as they eagerly flock to movie theaters for the second, third, ninth iteration of a superhero franchise. In politics, as in entertainment, consumers want something different and yet still, somehow, reassuringly similar.

The far right has been the latest new flavor to capture voters’ tastes. In some cases, as in the United States, it has offered little more than “change,” which means for a lot of voters not simply “change the channel” but rewind the tape a couple decades to a time when minorities weren’t so uppity. But the far right, too, must reckon with the fickleness of voters, as Jair Bolsonaro discovered in Brazil in 2022, the Law and Justice Party realized in Poland in 2023, and Narendra Modi had to confront to a certain degree in India this year when his party lost its parliamentary majority.

One way to get around the mercurial preferences of voters is to game the system. Vladimir Putin in Russia, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, and others have turned themselves into leaders for life by changing constitutions, eliminating oppositions, and reducing the powers of courts and parliaments. Voters might want change, but smart authoritarians don’t give them a........

© Eurasia Review