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19th centuryEditOriginsEdit

The Liberals are descended from the mid-19th century Reformers who advocated for responsible government throughout British North America.[1] These included George Brown, Alexander Mackenzie, Robert Baldwin, William Lyon Mackenzie and the Clear Grits in Upper Canada, Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia, and the Patriotes and Rouges in Lower Canada led by figures such as Louis-Joseph Papineau. The Clear Grits and Parti rouge sometimes functioned as a united bloc in the legislature of the Province of Canada beginning in 1854, and a united Liberal Party combining both English and French Canadian members was formed in 1861.[1]

At the time of confederation of the former British colonies of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec), New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the radical Liberals were marginalized by the more pragmatic Conservative coalition assembled under Sir John A. Macdonald. In the 29 years after Canadian confederation, the Liberals were consigned to opposition, with the exception of one stint in government.[1] Alexander Mackenzie was the de facto leader of the Official Opposition after Confederation and finally agreed to become the first official leader of the Liberal Party in 1873. He was able to lead the party to power for the first time in 1873, after the MacDonald government lost a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons due to the Pacific Scandal. Mackenzie subsequently won the 1874 election, and served as Prime Minister for an additional four years. During the five years the Liberal government brought in many reforms, which include the replacement of open voting by secret ballot, confining elections to one day and the creation of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Royal Military College of Canada, and the Office of the Auditor General. However the party was only able to build a solid support base in Ontario, and in 1878 lost the government to MacDonald.[1] The Liberals would spend the next 18 years in opposition.

In their early history, the Liberals were the party of continentalism and opposition to imperialism. The Liberals also became identified with the aspirations of Quebecers as a result of the growing hostility of French Canadians to the Conservatives. The Conservatives lost the support of French Canadians because of the role of Conservative governments in the execution of Louis Riel and their role in the Conscription Crisis of 1917, and especially their opposition to French schools in provinces besides Quebec.

It was not until Wilfrid Laurier became leader that the Liberal Party emerged as a modern party. Laurier was able to capitalize on the Tories' alienation of French Canada by offering the Liberals as a credible alternative. Laurier was able to overcome the party's reputation for anti-clericalism that offended the still-powerful Quebec Roman Catholic Church. In English-speaking Canada, the Liberal Party's support for reciprocity made it popular among farmers, and helped cement the party's hold in the growing prairie provinces.[32]

Laurier led the Liberals to power in the 1896 election (in which he became the first Francophone Prime Minister), and oversaw a government that increased immigration in order to settle Western Canada. Laurier's government created the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta out of the North-West Territories, and promoted the development of Canadian industry.[32]

Until the early part of the century, the Liberal Party was a loose, informal coalition of local, provincial and regional bodies with a strong national party leader and caucus (and when in power, the national cabinet) but with an informal and regionalized extra-parliamentary organizational structure. There was no national membership of the party, an individual became a member by joining a provincial Liberal party. Laurier called the party's first national convention in 1893 in order to unite Liberal supporters behind a programme and build the campaign that successfully brought the party to power in 1896; however, once in power, no efforts were made to create a formal national organization outside of parliament.

As a result of the party's defeats in the 1911 and 1917 federal elections, Laurier attempted to organize the party on a national level by creating three bodies: the Central Liberal Information Office, the National Liberal Advisory Committee, and the National Liberal Organization Committee. However, the advisory committee became dominated by members of parliament and all three bodies were underfunded and competed with both local and provincial Liberal associations and the national caucus for authority. The party did organize the national party's second convention in 1919 to elect William Lyon Mackenzie King as Laurier's successor (Canada's first ever leadership convention), yet following the party's return to power in the 1921 federal election the nascent national party organizations were eclipsed by powerful ministers and local party organizations largely driven by patronage.

As a result of both the party's defeat in the 1930 federal election, and the Beauharnois bribery scandal which highlighted the need for distance between the Liberal Party's political wing and campaign fundraising,[33] a central coordinating organization, the National Liberal Federation, was created in 1932 with Vincent Massey as its first president. The new organization allowed individuals to directly join the national Liberal Party for the first time. With the Liberals return to power the national organization languished except for occasional national committee meetings, such as in 1943 when Mackenzie King called a meeting of the federation (consisting of the national caucus and up to seven voting delegates per province) to approve a new platform for the party in anticipation of the end of World War II and prepare for a post-war election.[34] No national convention was held, however, until 1948; the Liberal Party held only three national conventions prior to the 1950s in 1893, 1919 and 1948.[35] The National Liberal Federation remained largely dependent on provincial Liberal parties and was often ignored and bypassed the parliamentary party in the organization of election campaigns and the development of policy. With the defeat of the Liberals in the 1957 federal election and in particular 1958, reformers argued for the strengthening of the national party organization so it would not be dependent on provincial Liberal parties and patronage. A national executive and Council of presidents, consisting of the presidents of each Liberal riding association, were developed to give the party more co-ordination and national party conventions were regularly held in biennially where previously they had been held infrequently. Over time, provincial Liberal parties in most provinces were separated from provincial wings of the federal party and in a number of cases disaffiliated. By the 1980s, the National Liberal Federation was officially known as the Liberal Party of Canada.[36]

Under Laurier, and his successor William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Liberals promoted Canadian sovereignty and greater independence within the British Commonwealth. In Imperial Conferences held throughout the 1920s, Canadian Liberal governments often took the lead in arguing that the United Kingdom and the dominions should have equal status, and against proposals for an 'imperial parliament' that would have subsumed Canadian independence. After the KingByng Affair of 1926, the Liberals argued that the Governor General of Canada should no longer be appointed on the recommendation of the British government. The decisions of the Imperial Conferences were formalized in the Statute of Westminster, which was actually passed in 1931, the year after the Liberals lost power.

The Liberals also promoted the idea of Canada being responsible for its own foreign and defence policy. Initially, it was Britain which determined external affairs for the dominion. In 1905, Laurier created the Department of External Affairs, and in 1909 he advised Governor General Earl Grey to appoint the first Secretary of State for External Affairs to Cabinet. It was also Laurier who first proposed the creation of a Canadian Navy in 1910. Mackenzie King recommended the appointment by Governor General Lord Byng of Vincent Massey as the first Canadian ambassador to Washington in 1926, marking the Liberal government's insistence on having direct relations with the United States, rather than having Britain act on Canada's behalf.

In the period just before and after the Second World War, the party became a champion of 'progressive social policy'.[37] As Prime Minister for most of the time between 1921 and 1948, King introduced several measures that led to the creation of Canada's social safety net. Bowing to popular pressure, he introduced the mother's allowance, a monthly payment to all mothers with young children. He also reluctantly introduced old age pensions when J. S. Woodsworth required it in exchange for his Co-operative Commonwealth Federation party's support of King's minority government.

Louis St. Laurent succeeded King as Liberal leader and Prime Minister on November 15, 1948. In the 1949 and 1953 federal elections, St. Laurent led the Liberal Party to two large majority governments. As Prime Minister he oversaw the joining of Newfoundland in Confederation as Canada's tenth province, he established equalization payments to the provinces, and continued with social reform with improvements in pensions and health insurance. In 1956, Canada played an important role in resolving the Suez Crisis, and contributed to the United Nations force in the Korean War. Canada enjoyed economic prosperity during St. Laurent's premiership and wartime debts were paid off. The Pipeline Debate proved the Liberal Party's undoing. Their attempt to pass legislation to build a natural gas pipeline from Alberta to central Canada was met with fierce disagreement in the House of Commons. In 1957, John Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives won a minority government and St. Laurent resigned as Prime Minister and Liberal leader.[38]

Lester B. Pearson was easily elected Liberal leader at the party's 1958 leadership convention. However, only months after becoming Liberal leader, Pearson led the party into the 1958 federal election that saw Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives win the largest majority government, by percentage of seats, in Canadian history.[39] The Progressive Conservatives won 206 of the 265 seats in the House of Commons, while the Liberals were reduced to just 48 seats. Pearson remained Liberal leader during this time and in the 1962 election managed to reduce Diefenbaker to a minority government. In the 1963 election Pearson led the Liberal Party back to victory, forming a minority government. Pearson served as Prime Minister for five years, winning a second election in 1965. While Pearson's leadership was considered poor and the Liberal Party never held a majority of the seats in parliament during his premiership, he left office in 1968 with an impressive legacy.[40] Pearson's government introduced Medicare, a new immigration act, the Canada Pension Plan, Canada Student Loans, the Canada Assistance Plan, and adopted the Maple Leaf as Canada's national flag.[41]

Under Pierre Trudeau, the mission of a progressive social policy evolved into the goal of creating a "just society".[42]

The Liberal Party under Trudeau promoted official bilingualism and passed the Official Languages Act, which gave French and English languages equal status in Canada.[1] Trudeau hoped that the promotion of bilingualism would cement Quebec's place in Confederation, and counter growing calls for an independent Quebec. The party hoped the policy would transform Canada into a country where English and French Canadians could live together, and allow Canadians to move to any part of the country without having to lose their language. Although this vision has yet to fully materialize, official bilingualism has helped to halt the decline of the French language outside of Quebec, and to ensure that all federal government services (including radio and television services provided by the government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio-Canada) are available in both languages throughout the country.[43]

The Trudeau Liberals are also credited with support for state multiculturalism as a means of integrating immigrants into Canadian society without forcing them to shed their culture,[44] leading the party to build a base of support among recent immigrants and their children.[45] This marked the culmination of a decades-long shift in Liberal immigration policy, a reversal of pre-war racial attitudes that spurred discriminatory policies such as the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923[46] and the MS St. Louis incident.[47]

The most lasting effect of the Trudeau years has been the patriation of the Canadian constitution and the creation of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms.[48][49] Trudeau's Liberals supported the concept of a strong, central government, and fought Quebec separatism, other forms of Quebec nationalism, and the granting of "distinct society" status to Quebec. Such actions, however, served as rallying cries for sovereigntists and alienated many Francophone Quebeckers.

The other primary legacy of the Trudeau years has been financial. Net federal debt in fiscal 1968, just before Trudeau became Prime Minister, was about $18billion CAD, or 26 percent of gross domestic product; by his final year in office, it had ballooned to over 200billionat 46 percent of GDP, nearly twice as large relative to the economy.[50]

After Trudeau's retirement in 1984, many Liberals, such as Jean Chrtien and Clyde Wells, continued to adhere to Trudeau's concept of federalism. Others, such as John Turner, supported the failed Meech Lake and Charlottetown Constitutional Accords, which would have recognized Quebec as a "distinct society" and would have increased the powers of the provinces to the detriment of the federal government.

Trudeau stepped down as Prime Minister and party leader in 1984, as the Liberals were slipping in polls. At that year's leadership convention, Turner defeated Chrtien on the second ballot to become Prime Minister.[51] Immediately, upon taking office, Turner called a snap election, citing favourable internal polls. However, the party was hurt by numerous patronage appointments, many of which Turner had made supposedly in return for Trudeau retiring early. Also, they were unpopular in their traditional stronghold of Quebec because of the constitution repatriation which excluded that province. The Liberals lost power in the 1984 election, and were reduced to only 40 seats in the House of Commons. The Progressive Conservatives won a majority of the seats in every province, including Quebec. The 95-seat loss was the worst defeat in the party's history, and the worst defeat at the time for a governing party at the federal level. What was more, the New Democratic Party, successor to the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, won only ten fewer seats than the Liberals, and some thought that the NDP under Ed Broadbent would push the Liberals to third-party status.[52]

The party began a long process of reconstruction.[1] A small group of young Liberal MPs, known as the Rat Pack, gained fame by criticizing the Tory government of Brian Mulroney at every turn. Also, despite public and backroom attempts to remove Turner as leader, he managed to consolidate his leadership at the 1986 review.

The 1988 election was notable for Turner's strong opposition to the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement negotiated by Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Although most Canadians voted for parties opposed to free trade, the Tories were returned with a majority government, and implemented the deal. The Liberals recovered from their near-meltdown of 1984, however, winning 83 seats and ending much of the talk of being eclipsed by the NDP, who won 43 seats.[1]

Turner announced that he would resign as leader of the Liberal Party on May 3, 1989. The Liberal Party set a leadership convention for June 23, 1990, in Calgary. Five candidates contested the leadership of the party and former Deputy Prime Minister Jean Chrtien, who had served in every Liberal cabinet since 1965, won on the first ballot.[53] Chrtien's Liberals campaigned in the 1993 election on the promise of renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and eliminating the Goods and Services Tax (GST). Just after the writ was dropped for the election, they issued the Red Book, an integrated and coherent approach to economic, social, environmental and foreign policy. This was unprecedented for a Canadian party.[1] Taking full advantage of the inability of Mulroney's successor, Kim Campbell, to overcome a large amount of antipathy toward Mulroney, they won a strong majority government with 177 seatsthe third-best performance in party history, and their best since 1949. The Progressive Conservatives were cut down to only two seats, suffering a defeat even more severe than the one they had handed the Liberals nine years earlier. The Liberals were re-elected with a considerably reduced majority in 1997, but nearly tied their 1993 total in 2000.

For the next decade, the Liberals dominated Canadian politics in a fashion not seen since the early years of Confederation. This was because of the destruction of the "grand coalition" of Western socially conservative populists, Quebec nationalists, and fiscal conservatives from Ontario that had supported the Progressive Conservatives in 1984 and 1988. The Progressive Conservatives Western support, for all practical purposes, transferred en masse to the Western-based Reform Party, which replaced the PCs as the major right-wing party in Canada. However, the new party's agenda was seen as too conservative for most Canadians. It only won one seat east of Manitoba in an election (but gained another in a floor-crossing). Even when Reform restructured into the Canadian Alliance, the party was virtually non-existent east of Manitoba, winning only 66 seats in 2000. Reform/Alliance was the official opposition from 1997 to 2003, but was never able to overcome wide perceptions that it was merely a Western protest party. The Quebec nationalists who had once supported the Tories largely switched their support to the sovereigntist Bloc Qubcois, while the Tories' Ontario support largely moved to the Liberals. The PCs would never be a major force in Canadian politics again; while they rebounded to 20 seats in the next election, they won only two seats west of Quebec in the next decade.

Ontario and Quebec combine for a majority of seats in the House of Commons by virtue of Ontario's current population and Quebec's historic population (59 percent of the seats as of 2006[update]). As a result, it is very difficult to form even a minority government without substantial support in Ontario and/or Quebec. No party has ever formed a majority government without winning the most seats in either Ontario or Quebec. It is mathematically possible to form a minority government without a strong base in either province, but such an undertaking is politically difficult. The Liberals were the only party with a strong base in both provinces, thus making them the only party capable of forming a government.

There was some disappointment as Liberals were not able to recover their traditional dominant position in Quebec, despite being led by a Quebecer from a strongly nationalist region of Quebec. The Bloc capitalized on discontent with the failure of the 1990 Meech Lake Accord and Chrtien's uncompromising stance on federalism (see below) to win the most seats in Quebec in every election from 1993, onward, even serving as the official opposition from 1993 to 1997. Chrtien's reputation in his home province never recovered after the 1990 leadership convention when rival Paul Martin forced him to declare his opposition to the Meech Lake Accord. However, the Liberals did increase their support in the next two elections because of infighting within the Bloc. In the 1997 election, although the Liberals finished with a thin majority, it was their gains in Quebec which were credited with offsetting their losses in the Maritime provinces. In particular, the 2000 election was a breakthrough for the Liberals after the PQ government's unpopular initiatives regarding consolidation of several Quebec urban areas into "megacities". Many federal Liberals also took credit for Charest's provincial election victory over the PQ in spring 2003. A series of by-elections allowed the Liberals to gain a majority of Quebec ridings for the first time since 1984.

The Chrtien Liberals more than made up for their shortfall in Quebec by building a strong base in Ontario. They reaped a substantial windfall from the votes of fiscally conservative and socially liberal voters who had previously voted Tory, as well as rapid growth in the Greater Toronto Area. They were also able to take advantage of massive vote splitting between the Tories and Reform/Alliance in rural areas of the province that had traditionally formed the backbone of provincial Tory governments. Combined with their historic dominance of Metro Toronto and northern Ontario, the Liberals dominated the province's federal politics even as the Tories won landslide majorities at the provincial level. In 1993, for example, the Liberals won all but one seat in Ontario, and came within 123 votes in Simcoe Centre of pulling off the first clean sweep of Canada's most populated province. They were able to retain their position as the largest party in the House by winning all but two seats in Ontario in the 1997 election. The Liberals were assured of at least a minority government once the Ontario results came in, but it was not clear until later in the night that they would retain their majority. In 2000, the Liberals won all but three seats in Ontario.

While the Chrtien Liberals campaigned from the left, their time in power is most marked by the cuts made to many social programs, including health transfers, in order to balance the federal budget.[54] Chrtien had supported the Charlottetown Accord while in opposition, but in power opposed major concessions to Quebec and other provincialist factions. In contrast to their promises during the 1993 campaign, they implemented only minor changes to NAFTA, embraced the free trade concept andwith the exception of the replacement of the GST with the Harmonized Sales Tax in some Atlantic provincesbroke their promise to replace the GST.

After a proposal for Quebec independence was narrowly defeated in the 1995 Quebec referendum, the Liberals passed the "Clarity Act", which outlines the federal government's preconditions for negotiating provincial independence.[55] In Chrtien's final days, he supported same-sex marriage and decriminalizing the possession of small quantities of marijuana.[56][57] Chrtien displeased the United States government when he pledged on March 17, 2003, that Canada would not support the 2003 invasion of Iraq.[58] A poll released shortly after showed widespread approval of Chrtien's decision by the Canadian public. The poll, which was conducted by EKOS for the Toronto Star and La Presse, found 71 percent of those questioned approved of the government's decision to not enter the United States-led invasion, with 27 percent expressing disapproval.[59]

Several trends started in 2003 which suggested the end of the Liberal Party's political dominance. Notably, there would be a high turnover of permanent party leaders, in contrast to their predecessors who usually served over two or more elections, particularly Trudeau and Chrtien who each led for over a decade.[60] The Liberals were also hampered by their inability to raise campaign money competitively after Chrtien passed a bill in 2003 which banned corporate donations, even though the Liberals had enjoyed by far the lion's share of this funding because of the then-divided opposition parties. It has been suggested that Chrtien, who had done nothing about election financing for his 10 years in office, could be seen as the idealist as he retired, while his rival and successor Paul Martin would have the burden of having to fight an election under the strict new rules.[61] Simon Fraser University professor Doug McArthur has noted that Martin's leadership campaign used aggressive tactics for the 2003 leadership convention, in attempting to end the contest before it could start by giving the impression that his bid was too strong for any other candidate to beat. McArthur blamed Martin's tactics for the ongoing sag in Liberal fortunes, as it discouraged activists who were not on side.[62]

Paul Martin succeeded Chrtien as party leader and prime minister in 2003. Despite the personal rivalry between the two, Martin was the architect of the Liberals' economic policies as Minister of Finance during the 1990s. Chrtien left office with a high approval rating and Martin was expected to make inroads into Quebec and Western Canada, two regions of Canada where the Liberals had not attracted much support since the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. While his cabinet choices provoked some controversy over excluding many Chrtien supporters, it at first did little to hurt his popularity.

However, the political situation changed with the revelation of the sponsorship scandal, in which advertising agencies supporting the Liberal Party received grossly inflated commissions for their services. Having faced a divided conservative opposition for the past three elections, Liberals were seriously challenged by competition from the newly united Conservative Party led by Stephen Harper. The infighting between Martin and Chrtien's supporters also dogged the party. Nonetheless, by criticizing the Conservatives' social policies, the Liberals were able to draw progressive votes from the NDP which made the difference in several close races. On June 28, 2004 federal election, the Martin Liberals retained enough support to continue as the government, though they were reduced to a minority.

In the ensuing months, testimony from the Gomery Commission caused public opinion to turn sharply against the Liberals for the first time in over a decade. Despite the devastating revelations, only two Liberal MPsDavid Kilgour (who had crossed the floor from the PC Party in 1990) and Pat O'Brienleft the party for reasons other than the scandal. Belinda Stronach, who crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals, gave Martin the number of votes needed, although barely, to hold onto power when an NDP-sponsored amendment to his budget was passed only by the Speaker's tiebreaking vote on May 19, 2005.

In November, the Liberals dropped in polls following the release of the first Gomery Report. Nonetheless, Martin turned down the NDP's conditions for continued support, as well as rejected an opposition proposal which would schedule a February 2006 election in return for passing several pieces of legislation. The Liberals thus lost the no-confidence vote on November 28; Martin thus became only the fifth prime minister to lose the confidence of the House, but the first to lose on a straight no-confidence motion. Because of the Christmas holiday, Martin advised Governor General Michalle Jean to dissolve Parliament and call an election for January 2006.

The Liberal campaign was dogged from start to finish by the sponsorship scandal, which was brought up by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) criminal investigation into the leak of the income trust announcement. Numerous gaffes, contrasting with a smoothly run Conservative campaign, put Liberals as many as ten points behind the Conservatives in opinion polling. They managed to recover some of their momentum by election night, but not enough to retain power. They won 103 seats, a net loss of 30 from when the writs were dropped, losing a similar number of seats in Ontario and Quebec to the Tories. However, the Liberals managed to capture the most seats in Ontario for the fifth straight election (54 to the Tories' 40), holding the Conservatives to a minority government. While the Conservatives captured many of Ontario's rural ridings, the Liberals retained most of the population-rich Greater Toronto Area. Many of these ridings, particularly the 905 region, had historically been bellwethers (the Liberals were nearly shut out of this region in 1979 and 1984), but demographic changes have resulted in high Liberal returns in recent years.

Martin resigned as parliamentary leader after the election and stepped down as Liberal leader on March 18, having previously promised to step down if he did not win a plurality.

On May 11, 2006, La Presse reported that the Government of Canada would file a lawsuit against the Liberal Party to recover all the money missing in the sponsorship program. Scott Brison told reporters that same day that the Liberals has already paid back the $1.14million into the public purse; however, the Conservatives believed that there was as much as $40million unaccounted for in the sponsorship program.[63]

After their election defeat Martin chose not to take on the office of Leader of the Opposition. He stepped down as parliamentary leader of his party on February 1, and the Liberal caucus appointed Bill Graham, MP for Toronto Centre and outgoing Defence Minister, as his interim successor.[64] Martin officially resigned as leader in March, with Graham taking over on an interim basis.

The leadership election was set for December 2, 2006, in Montreal; however, a number of prominent members such as John Manley, Frank McKenna, Brian Tobin, and Allan Rock had already announced they would not enter the race to succeed Martin.[65] Throughout the campaign 12 candidates came forward to lead the party, but by the time of the leadership convention only eight people remained in the race; Martha Hall Findlay, Stphane Dion, Michael Ignatieff, Gerard Kennedy, Bob Rae, Scott Brison, Ken Dryden, Joe Volpe.

Throughout the campaign Ignatieff, Rae, Dion and Kennedy were considered to be the only candidates with enough support to be able to win the leadership, with Ignatieff and Rae being considered the two front-runners.[66][67] However polling showed Ignatieff had little room to grow his support, while Dion was the second and third choice among a plurality of delegates.[68] At the leadership convention Ignatieff came out on top on the first ballot with 29.3 percent,[69] With Kennedy's support Dion was able to leapfrog both Rae and Ignatieff on the third ballot, eliminating Rae. On the fourth and final ballot Dion defeated Ignatieff to become leader of the Liberal Party.[70]

Following the leadership race the Liberal Party saw a bounce in support and surpassed the Conservative Party as the most popular party in Canada.[71] However, in the months and years to come the party's support gradually fell.[72] Dion's own popularity lagged considerably behind that of Prime Minister Harper's, and he often trailed NDP leader Jack Layton in opinion polls when Canadians were asked who would make the best Prime Minister.[72][73]

Dion campaigned on environmental sustainability during the leadership race, and created the "Green Shift" plan following his election as leader. The Green Shift proposed creating a carbon tax that would be coupled with reductions to income tax rates. The proposal was to tax greenhouse gas emissions, starting at $10 per tonne of CO2 and reaching $40 per tonne within four years.[74] The plan was a key policy for the party in the 2008 federal election, but it was not well received and was continuously attacked by both the Conservatives and NDP.[75][76][77][78] On election night the Liberal Party won 26.26 percent of the popular vote and 77 of the 308 seats in the House of Commons. At that time their popular support was the lowest in the party's history, and weeks later Dion announced he would step down as Liberal leader once his successor was chosen.[79]

New Brunswick Member of Parliament Dominic LeBlanc was the first candidate to announce he would seek the leadership of the Liberal Party on October 27, 2008. Days later Bob Rae, who had finished third in 2006, announced he would also be a candidate for the leadership. The party executive met in early November and chose May 2, 2009, as the date to elect the next leader.[80] On November 13 Michael Ignatieff, who finished second in 2006, announced he would also be a candidate.

On November 27, 2008, Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty provided the House of Commons with a fiscal update, within which were plans to cut government spending, suspend the ability of civil servants to strike until 2011, sell off some Crown assets to raise capital, and eliminate the existing $1.95 per vote subsidy parties garner in an election.[81][82] The opposition parties criticized the fiscal update, and announced they would not support it because it contained no stimulus money to spur Canada's economy and protect workers during the economic crisis.[83] With the Conservative Party only holding a minority of the seats in the House of Commons the government would be defeated if the opposition parties voted against the fiscal update.[83] With the Conservatives unwilling to budge on the proposals outlined in the fiscal update the Liberals and NDP signed an agreement to form a coalition government, with a written pledge of support from the Bloc Qubcois.[84] Under the terms of the agreement Dion would be sworn in as Prime Minister, however he would only serve in the position until the next Liberal leader was chosen. Dion contacted Governor General Michalle Jean and advised her that he had the confidence of the House of Commons if Prime Minister Harper's government was to fall.[84] However, before the fiscal update could be voted on in the House of Commons Prime Minister Harper requested the Governor General to prorogue parliament till January 26, 2009, which she accepted.[85]

While polls showed Canadians were split on the idea of having either a coalition government or having the Conservatives continue to govern, it was clear that because of Dion's personal popularity they were not comfortable with him becoming Prime Minister.[86] Members of the Liberal Party therefore called on Dion to resign as leader immediately and for an interim leader to be chosen, this person would become the Prime Minister in the event that the Conservatives were defeated when parliament resumed in January.[87] With an estimated 70 percent of the Liberal caucus wanting Ignatieff to be named interim leader, Dion resigned the post on December 8, 2008 (effective December 10, upon Ignatieff's becoming interim leader).[87][88] LeBlanc announced on the same day that he was abandoning the Liberal leadership race and endorsing Ignatieff as the next leader.[89] The following day Rae announced he was also dropping out of the race and was placing his "full and unqualified" support to Ignatieff.[90]

With Ignatieff named interim leader of the party (on December 10), the Liberal's poll numbers saw significant gains, after they plummeted with the signing of the coalition agreement.[91][92] When parliament resumed on January 28, 2009, the Ignatieff Liberals agreed to support the budget as long as it included regular accountability reports, which the Conservatives accepted. This ended the possibility of the coalition government with the New Democrats.[93]

Throughout the Winter of 200809, opinion polls showed that while the Ignatieff led Liberals still trailed the Conservatives their support had stabilized in the low 30 percent range. However, by the time Ignatieff was confirmed as party leader on May 2, 2009, the Liberal Party had a comfortable lead over the governing Conservatives.[94][95][96] After a summer where he was accused of being missing in action, Ignatieff announced on August 31, 2009, that the Liberals would not support the minority Conservative government.[97][98][99] After this announcement the Liberal Party's poll numbers, which had already declined over the summer, started to fall further behind the Conservatives.[100] On October 1, 2009, the Liberals put forth a non-confidence motion with the hope of defeating the government. However, the NDP abstained from voting and the Conservatives survived the confidence motion.[101]

The Liberal Party's attempt to force an election, just a year after the previous one, was reported as a miscalculation, as polls showed that most Canadians did not want another election.[102] Even after the government survived the confidence motion popularity for Ignatieff and his party continued to fall.[103] Over the next year and a half, with the exception of a brief period in early 2010, support for the Liberals remained below 30 percent, and behind the Conservatives.[104] While his predecessor Dion was criticized by the Conservatives as a "weak leader", Ignatieff was attacked as a "political opportunist".[60]

On March 25, 2011, Ignatieff introduced a motion of non-confidence against the Harper government to attempt to force a May 2011, federal election after the government was found to be in Contempt of Parliament, the first such occurrence in Commonwealth history. The House of Commons passed the motion by 156145.[105]

The Liberals had considerable momentum when the writ was dropped, and Ignatieff successfully squeezed NDP leader Jack Layton out of media attention, by issuing challenges to Harper for one-on-one debates.[106][107][108] In the first couple weeks of the campaign, Ignatieff kept his party in second place in the polls, and his personal ratings exceeded that of Layton for the first time.[109] However, opponents frequently criticized Ignatieff's perceived political opportunism, particularly during the leaders debates when Layton criticized Ignatieff for having a poor attendance record for Commons votes saying "You know, most Canadians, if they don't show up for work, they don't get a promotion". Ignatieff failed to defend himself against these charges, and the debates were said to be a turning point for his party's campaign.[110] Near the end of the campaign, a late surge in support for Layton and the NDP relegated Ignatieff and the Liberals to third in opinion polls.[111][112][113]

The Liberals suffered their worst defeat in history in the May 2, 2011, federal election. The result was a third-place finish, with only 19 percent of the vote and returning 34 seats in the House of Commons. Notably, their support in Toronto and Montreal, their power bases for the last two decades, all but vanished. All told, the Liberals won only 11 seats in Ontario (seven of which were in Toronto) and seven in Quebec (all in Montreal)their fewest totals in either province. Newfoundland and Labrador was the only province with majority Liberal seats at 4 out of 7. They also won only four seats west of Ontario. The Conservatives won 40 percent of the vote and formed a majority government, while the NDP formed the Official Opposition winning 31 percent of the vote.[114]

This election marked the first time the Liberals were unable to form either government or the official opposition. Ignatieff was defeated in his own riding, and announced his resignation as Liberal leader shortly after. Bob Rae was chosen as the interim leader on May 25, 2011.[115]

On April 14, 2013 Justin Trudeau, son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, was elected leader of the Liberal Party on the first ballot, winning 80% of the vote.[116] Following his win, support for the Liberal Party increased considerably, and the party moved into first place in public opinion polls.[117][118]

An initial surge in support in the polls following Trudeau's election wore off in the following year, in the face of Conservative ad campaign after Trudeau's win attempting to "[paint] him as a silly dilettante unfit for public office."[119]

In 2014, Trudeau removed all Liberal senators from the Liberal Party caucus. In announcing this, Trudeau said the purpose of the unelected upper chamber is to act as a check on the power of the prime minister, but the party structure interferes with that purpose.[12] Following this move, Liberal senators chose to keep the designation "Liberal" and sit together as a caucus, albeit not one supported by the Liberal Party of Canada. This independent group continued to refer to itself in publications as the Senate Liberal Caucus until 2019.[120]

By the time the 2015 federal election was called, the Liberals had been knocked back into third place. Trudeau and his advisors planned to mount a campaign based on economic stimulus in the hopes of regaining the mantle of being the party that best represented change from the New Democrats.[121]

Justin Trudeau's Liberals would win the 2015 election in dramatic fashion: becoming the first party to win a parliamentary majority after being reduced to third party status in a previous general election, besting Brian Mulroney's record for the largest seat increase by a party in a single election (111 in 1984), and winning the most seats in Quebec for the first time since 1980.[122][123][124] Chantal Hbert deemed the result "a Liberal comeback that is headed straight for the history books",[125] while Bloomberg's Josh Wingrove and Theophilos Argitis similarly described it as "capping the biggest political comeback in the countrys history."[126]

Scholars and political experts have recently used a political realignment model to explain what was considered a collapse of a dominant party, and put its condition in long-term perspective. According to recent scholarship, there have been four party systems in Canada at the federal level since Confederation, each with its own distinctive pattern of social support, patronage relationships, leadership styles, and electoral strategies. Steve Patten identifies four party systems in Canada's political history:[127]

Stephen Clarkson (2005) shows how the Liberal Party has dominated all the party systems, using different approaches. It began with a "clientelistic approach" under Laurier, which evolved into a "brokerage" system of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s under Mackenzie King. The 1950s saw the emergence of a "pan-Canadian system", which lasted until the 1990s. The 1993 election categorized by Clarkson as an electoral "earthquake" which "fragmented" the party system, saw the emergence of regional politics within a four party-system, whereby various groups championed regional issues and concerns. Clarkson concludes that the inherent bias built into the first-past-the-post system, has chiefly benefited the Liberals.[128]

Pundits in the wake of the 2011 election widely believed in a theme of major realignment. Lawrence Martin, commentator for The Globe and Mail, claimed that "Harper has completed a remarkable reconstruction of a Canadian political landscape that endured for more than a century. The realignment sees both old parties of the moderate middle, the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals, either eliminated or marginalized."[129] Maclean's said that the election marked "an unprecedented realignment of Canadian politics" as "the Conservatives are now in a position to replace the Liberals as the natural governing party in Canada"; Andrew Coyne proclaimed "The West is in and Ontario has joined it," noting that the Conservatives accomplished the rare feat of putting together a majority by winning in both Ontario and the western provinces (difficult because of traditionally conflicting interests), while having little representation in Quebec.[130] Books such as The Big Shift by John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker, and Peter C. Newman's When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada, provocatively asserted that the Liberals had become an "endangered species" and that an NDP-led opposition would mean that "fortune favours the Harper government" in subsequent campaigns.[131][132]

The Liberal victory in 2015, leaving Alberta and Saskatchewan as the only provinces represented by a majority of Conservative MPs, has now challenged that narrative.[133][134]

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Liberal Party of Canada - Wikipedia

Turns out liberals are the real authoritarians.

A political-science journal that published an oft-cited study claiming conservatives were more likely to show traits associated with psychoticism now says it got it wrong. Very wrong.

The American Journal of Political Science published a correction this year saying that the 2012 paper has an error and that liberal political beliefs, not conservative ones, are actually linked to psychoticism.

The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed, the journal said in the startling correction.

The descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysencks psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.

In the paper, psychoticism is associated with traits such as tough-mindedness, risk-taking, sensation-seeking, impulsivity and authoritarianism.

The social-desirability scale measures peoples tendency to answer questions in ways they believe would please researchers, even if it means overestimating their positive characteristics and underestimating negative ones.

The erroneous report has been cited 45 times, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science.

Brad Verhulst, a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher and a co-author of the paper, said he was not sure who was to blame.

I dont know where it happened. All I know is it happened, he told Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks corrections in academic papers. Its our fault for not figuring it out before.

The journal said the error doesnt change the main conclusions of the paper, which found that personality traits do not cause people to develop political attitudes.

But professor Steven Ludeke of the University of Southern Denmark, who pointed out the errors, told Retraction Watch that they matter quite a lot.

The erroneous results represented some of the larger correlations between personality and politics ever reported; they were reported and interpreted, repeatedly, in the wrong direction, he said.

Read more:
Science says liberals, not conservatives, are psychotic

If we want to keep the European Union together, liberals must respect the rights of non-liberals, Prime Minister Viktor Orbn said in a samizdat letter published on his website on Monday.

At the latest European Council meeting, the rainbow-flagged prime ministers paraded in a phalanx. They wanted to to clarify in a debate whether the unity of values still existed, Orbn said.

He said the debate was eerily similar to the one that broke out in June 2015 over the migrant invasion of Europe.

Both were morally difficult, politically important and intellectually beautiful debates. In both cases, the answer is the same: there is no unity of values and therefore no political unity either, Orbn said.

Related article

Dutch PM Rutte said that Hungary should leave the EU. The government continues to say that the focus of the law is non-discriminatory, meant for the protection of children.Continue reading

He said that in both cases, the Liberals started from the premise that these were issues to which there was only one answer, one in line with the Liberal hegemony of opinion. Non-liberal democrats, on the other hand, said there are different answers and that only an approach of unity in diversity can hold the European Union together, Orbn said.

Liberals believe that everyone has the right to migrate and to enter the territory of the European Union, even if it is not directly from a dangerous country but through a safe third country. The right to migrate, they say, is essentially a human right.

Regarding the current debate on sexual education in schools, Orbn said liberals state that children should be given awareness-raising publications that can educate them about heterosexuality, homosexuality, leaving the biological sex and sex-change operations and this is their human right. In their view children can be educated about those issues without parental consent and without state restrictions.

Non-liberal democrats, however, see the sexual education of children as the right of the parent, and without their consent, neither the state, nor political parties, NGOs, or rainbow activists can play a role, the prime minister said.

Related article

While the national teams of Hungary and Germany will face off in Munich, the countries' political officials are already facing off on social media.Continue reading

Orbn said that today rainbow countries have the right to move beyond the binary social arrangement based on man-woman and mother-father relations. They used to be like that, but deliberately and by elevating their intentions to the level of state policy, they have moved to another dimension, he said.

Whether it is better to live in a binary or a rainbow world and why is a question on which both sides argue their own opinion. Everyone has ones own truth, Orbn said.

But from the point of view of law, international law, EU law and the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the right position is beyond doubt. Migration is not a human right, and how a child is brought up sexually is not a childs human right. There is no such human right. Instead, there is Article 14 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights on the right of parents to ensure that their child is provided with an appropriate upbringing. If we want to keep the European Union together, liberals must respect the rights of non-liberals. Unity in diversity. That is the future, the prime minister said.

Featured photo illustration by Balzs Szecsdi/MTI

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Orbn: 'Liberals Must Respect Right of Non-Liberals to Hold EU Together' - Hungary Today

Voting is at the core of American democracy. Its a fundamental right of all eligible voters that should be free from political gamesmanship. Unfortunately, the politics of voting is creating the false narrative that we have to choose between security and accessibility when the fact is both are not only desired by the clear majority of Americans, but some states are demonstrating that both can be achieved.

Democrats and Republicans are in yet another game of political football over voting. This weeks vote on the For the People Act was partially in response to Republican-led states attempts to overhaul their election rules following the 2020 election. In Texas, for instance, a proposed bill would cut down on early voting hours and empower GOP poll watchers, giving them greater independence and more access to voters. It would also require IDs for mail-in ballots. Republicans say the move is needed to restore confidence in the system. The chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Jaime HarrisonJaime HarrisonOn voting, conservatives and liberals should find common ground Democrat Chris Jones enters Arkansas governor race with dramatic viral video The Hill's Morning Report - Dems to go-it-alone on infrastructure as bipartisan plan falters MORE, called the bill Jim Crow 2.0.

Both sides have the wrong idea.

Nearly seven months after the election, there has yet to be any verifiable evidence that fraud was committed. On the other side of the coin, this is not the first time weve heard accusations of voter suppression against election reforms when data to support those charges is hard to come by. Those claims were made repeatedly in Georgia where another controversial law was recently passed in 2018 and 2020. Instead of constricting accessibility, voting turnout broke records in both years.

If there is one thing this new law, and others like it, are guilty of, it's turning the need and popular desire for both voting access and security into a political show.

As the heads of a nonprofit, Common Ground Committee, dedicated to reducing toxic polarization in this country, its become clear to us that voting laws have become deeply politicized to the detriment of our system and ultimately our country.

The most talked about aspects of these laws seem designed to score political points. Is, for example, giving more authority to poll watchers with partisan leanings really going to increase security? Or, will preventing people from handing out water bottles really cause people to leave the polls before voting? There should only be one objective when it comes to voting: provide access to all eligible voters in a safe and secure manner. The current battle over voter fraud versus voter suppression misses that point entirely.

There is room for common ground.

A recent poll from YouGov/The Economist found that most Americans opposed many of the more controversial parts of the Georgia law, which in many ways mimics the proposed bill in Texas. Yet that same survey revealed one aspect they could get behind: voter IDs. Approximately 53 percent of respondents supported that measure. And just this week, a second poll from Monmouth University found that 80 percent of Americans supported voter IDs. While some activists argue such requirements are racist, other polling shows broad support for IDs among Black and other non-white voters.

It is evident: Americans believe voters should be able to prove they are who they say they are. They also want anyone who is eligible to vote to have that opportunity. So why are Democrats attempting to hamper states ability to check voter IDs, and why are Republicans fighting for laws that are confusing and would have little impact? If the left and right would stop fighting for a moment, they would see there are states that have expanded access while ensuring security at the same time.

In the lead up to the 2020 election, there was a lot of talk about the five states that already allowed all voters to vote by mail Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington. These states have the technology and infrastructure to keep ballots secure and the proof is in the satisfaction of the electorate. Voters on both sides of the aisle in all five states are overwhelmingly supportive of vote-by-mail. Utah, which has a predominantly conservative electorate, has the second highest rate of support among that group.

Instead of passing confusing and ineffective laws for political posturing, states must invest in the type of security infrastructure that keeps mail-in ballots secure. In Washington, a deep-blue state with a Republican Secretary of State, signatures on ballots are matched to an online database to confirm identity, and "air-gap" computers are used to prevent hacking. To be sure, these systems did not develop overnight it took Washington many years to perfect this method. All the more reason states should stop wasting time and get to work now.

Its time we stop drumming up fear and distrust with the specter of fraud and suppression.

If they would take the time to listen to each other instead of hurling accusations and innuendo, Democrats and Republicans would see that states like Washington show how we can restore confidence in our elections and ensure more eligible voters can cast their ballots.

Bruce Bond, a 30-year veteran of the information technology industry, is co-founder of theCommon Ground Committee, a citizen-led initiative focused on demonstrating productive public discourse. Follow him on Twitter@BruceABond

Erik Olsen is co-founder ofCommon Ground Committee. Follow him on Twitter@ErikOlsen129

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On voting, conservatives and liberals should find common ground | TheHill - The Hill

In the summer of 1992, a 29-year-old Hungarian with political ambitions made his first visit to the US. For six weeks he toured the country with a coterie of young Europeans, all expenses paid by the German Marshall Fund, a thinktank devoted to transatlantic cooperation.

America had long fascinated Viktor Orbn, but he seemed disengaged and unaffected as the group walked around downtown Los Angeles, which was still reeling from the Rodney King riots two months earlier. One Dutch journalist on the trip recalled that the eastern Europeans in the group preferred to spend their daily stipends on a Walkman and other electronics rather than on food or fancy hotels. The free market and cutting-edge technologies certainly appealed more to Orbn than American debates and struggles over equality, justice or the rights of people of colour.

Orbns indifference to the plight of western minorities became more apparent during a tour of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon. Orbn and one of his travel companions, the Polish journalist Magorzata Bochenek, listened to local complaints about economic injustice. He responded with questions about land distribution. Why didnt the native tribes draft a strategy to monetise their common lands? After all, this was what Hungarian smallholders like his parents had been doing with local collective farms since the end of communism. Orbn began to sketch a business plan for the reservation, but when his Umatilla interlocutors didnt respond with enthusiasm, he quickly lost interest.

What fascinated Orbn most during the rest of the trip was high politics. The group tour finished in New York City in July, where he attended the Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden and watched Bill Clintons nomination to the sounds of Fleetwood Macs Dont Stop. The excitement of the occasion was not lost on Orbn. Visiting the US reaffirmed his own desire to become prime minister of Hungary.

At the time, the nature of the wests appeal to young eastern Europeans was changing. In 1989, when Orbn studied at Oxford University on a Soros Foundation fellowship, the western consensus of the late cold war deregulated capitalism, social stability, and national traditions still held sway. These were the values he wanted to bring back to his home country. Three years later, by the time of his trip to the US, a shift was palpable. While free markets still reigned supreme, European and north American culture had moved into a more introspective mode. Orbn liked Clintonism as an approach to administration and economics, but had little interest in western human rights discourse, discussions of gender and race, or the legacies of colonialism and the Holocaust.

Orbns enthusiasm for American economics and indifference to American cultural concerns was a sign of the direction Hungary and Poland would eventually take in the coming decades. In the 1990s, the two countries led eastern Europe in economic shock therapy, pushing market reforms beyond what their western advisers demanded. But in cultural terms, the Polish and Hungarian right chose a more conservative course. The result is that both countries have continued to see themselves as deeply European, even as they have steered further away from EU-style liberalism.

A decade after she visited the Umatilla reservation in Oregon with Orbn, Magorzata Bochenek became an adviser to Polish president Lech Kaczyski, who together with his brother, Jarosaw, founded the conservative nationalist party Law and Justice, which now has the support of nearly 45% of the Polish electorate. Orbns Fidesz party commands a supermajority of two-thirds of the seats in the Hungarian parliament. Both parties have enacted similar policies: filling the courts and media with pro-government judges and journalists; driving out leftwing and liberal NGOs, academics, and universities; violating the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights by restricting or banning access to abortion and denying legal recognition to transgender people; and ignoring attempts by European institutions to hold them accountable for these provocations.

At the same time, four out of every five citizens of Poland and Hungary support their countrys EU membership. For the anti-liberals in Budapest and Warsaw, the goal is autonomy within Europe, not independence outside of it.

How did the revolutionaries of 1989 become the nativists of the 2010s and 2020s? There are a number of ways to answer this question. Depending on the narrator, it can be told as a story of gradual estrangement, or a forced reversion to self-interest brought on by external shock, or the adolescent rebellion of pupils against their former teachers.

In their 2019 book, The Light That Failed, Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev and US law professor Stephen Holmes made the case for the rebellion hypothesis. They argue that the transition from communism to capitalist democracy was driven by copycat liberalism. Eastern Europeans took it upon themselves to adopt the habits, norms and institutions of the western world, whose prosperity and freedoms they wanted to enjoy. The problem, according to Krastev and Holmes, was that submission to this imitation imperative was inherently stressful and emotionally taxing. Modelling oneself after an external ideal was bound to produce feelings of shame and resentment when the outcome fell short of an unattainably perfect original. Faced with the humiliation of perpetual inferiority, Orbn and Kaczyski used the 20082015 economic and migration crises to reject western liberalism and advance an illiberal alternative.

Krastev and Holmes see emigration from central eastern Europe as a key factor in the appeal of nationalist politics. Decades of brain drain have caused a demographic panic, which, they suggest, heightens fears about the arrival of Middle Eastern and African migrants. Especially in Hungary, anti-immigrant politics have indeed gone hand in hand with efforts to stem population decline through low birth-rates and emigration. Orbn has unfolded an ambitious and popular family policy involving the nationalisation of IVF clinics and generous loans and tax breaks for newlyweds and large families. Orbn has also granted citizenship to more than one million ethnic Hungarians living in Slovakia, Romania, Croatia, Serbia and Ukraine, creating a Fidesz-led diasporic civil society in what Hungarian nationalists see as a Greater Hungary.

Yet other countries have seen millions of citizens emigrate and not swung towards illiberalism. Between 1989 and 2017, Latvia lost 27% of its population, Lithuania 22.5%, Croatia 22%, and Bulgaria 21%. But the Baltic and eastern Balkan states have not changed in the same way as Poland and Hungary. Although nativism is present, it has not become the dominant tenor in national politics. In Bulgaria, a pro-EU protest movement became the second-largest party in parliamentary elections this spring, and the countrys departing prime minister, Boyko Borisov, has emphasised that he wants the countrys Euro-Atlantic orientation to be seen clearly. Romania, a fifth of whose inhabitants have left the country since 1990, has been gripped not by strongman politics, but by fervent anti-corruption efforts and pro-Brussels protests. By contrast, Poland and Hungary, where illiberalism has advanced the farthest, have some of the lowest net emigration rates in the region.

Migration shapes nativist politics, but does not fully explain the wider crisis of liberalism. Exclusionary policies on immigration are being pursued in most European countries. Yet despite general anti-immigrant sentiment, it is only in the UK, Poland and Hungary that nationalist governments have departed from the European Union or turned their back on its values, and only in Budapest and Warsaw that open season has been declared on liberal civil society and the rule of law. Kaczyski and Orbn are special among Europes nationalists not for their chauvinism, but for their authoritarian actions against domestic opponents and European and international institutions.

Poland and Hungarys ruling parties pursue what they see as a truer break with the past than the mirage transition of 1989. Anti-liberal nationalism in eastern Europe is more than an outburst of uncontrollable passions. Common to both is the belief that a historic task has befallen them, and that the end of communism was only the beginning of the road to national liberation. The fact that these ideas were formed during the transition decade also suggests that illiberal democracy is a purposive project something not just reactive, but with clear ideological goals of its own.

The revolt against liberalism began to stir in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as growing fractions of the Polish and Hungarian right started demanding a harder break with the past. Orbns first premiership, from 1998 to 2002, when Fidesz ruled together with the agrarian conservative Independent Smallholders Party, promoted Holocaust revisionism, racism against Roma populations, and support for Jrg Haiders far-right government in neighbouring Austria. But since Hungary kept recording solid economic growth and entered Nato in 1999, the cabinets rightwing policies were quickly forgotten in western capitals.

In 2002, his narrow election loss to the socialists left Orbn embittered and convinced that reformed communists throughout Hungarian society had conspired to prematurely end his tenure. When Hungary entered the EU in 2004, massive European funds flowed to a group of liberal politicians around centre-left prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsny, an economist who had been head of the Hungarian Young Communist League in the 1980s. During the transition from communism to democracy, Gyurcsny and his old comrades had made a small fortune running pop-up consulting firms with names such Eurocorp International Finance Inc. By the mid-2000s they were regulars at Davos. While this kind of shapeshifting and economic opportunism was common everywhere in eastern and central Europe, these links made it easier for Orbn to portray Soviet communism and European liberalism as successive forms of external rule.

As in Hungary, the role of reformed Polish communists in smoothing the political transition to liberal democracy ultimately radicalised the right. In 1997, conservative thinkers first began to call for a fourth Polish republic to replace the third iteration that had followed the end of communism. Four years later, Lech and Jarosaw Kaczyski founded Law and Justice, promising a radical purification and political renewal of Polish society. The Kaczyskis aim was to use the full force of executive and legislative power in pursuit of a final reckoning with the contaminants of state socialism. For many years, Polands constitutional court restricted efforts to purge state institutions and civil society of anyone with communist associations, a process known as lustration. This protection received support from EU laws protecting personal dignity and privacy.

When Law and Justice first came to power in 2005, however, it took lustration to a new level. A law was proposed that would have required 350,000 civil servants, journalists, academics, teachers and state managers to declare past political associations, no matter how mundane, on pain of losing their jobs. Widespread resistance from Polands progressive elite against this deeply intrusive purge helped push the Kasczyskis out of power in 2007 in favour of the liberal pro-European Civic Platform led by Donald Tusk.

This failed first attempt at a wholesale purification of Polish society forms the backdrop to Law and Justices renewed assault on the countrys judiciary since 2015, which has attracted more international attention. But Law and Justices illiberal agenda was not, as Krastev and Holmes would have it, a reaction against western imitation. It is precisely the desire of Polish illiberals for a more thoroughgoing expunging of the communist past, at the cost of ignoring EU protections, that has led them to stack the countrys courts and attack progressive civil society. As in Hungary, the very thing that made the transition from communism to liberal democracy so peaceful its negotiated character has provided an insurgent nationalist right with a powerful accusation of original sin. In this turncoat myth, 1989 was not a clean handover but a massive elite whitewash. What is at stake is not western identity something about which Poles have never been in doubt but rather who is fit to join a purified Polish nation-state.

Ultimately, Polish and Hungarian opposition to EU norms and civic rights has not produced, as it has among Brexiteers, a corresponding desire for economic sovereignty. Brussels financial faucet has simply been too lucrative to resist. Even as Orbn has dismantled liberal institutions, he has drawn vast amounts of EU funds to feather the nests of a loyal oligarchy of tycoons and agro-entrepreneurs tied to Fidesz. Conservative nationalists in Poland have also raked in material support from a political and economic union whose influence they routinely attack.

This insensitivity to political behaviour is the result of how the EU disburses funds to its members. Money is allocated in large tranches that are sent over many years in accordance with pre-arranged spending and investment plans; short-term political friction between national governments and Brussels does not alter these long-term entitlements. Between 2007 and 2020, eastern European member states received 395bn, half of which went to Hungary and Poland.

Just how difficult it has become to restrain illiberalism within the EU became clear at the end of 2020. As EU leaders prepared an unprecedented 1.8tn budget and stimulus package in response to the pandemic, Budapest and Warsaw nearly derailed the negotiations. Objecting to a mechanism that would tie funding to their observance of the rule of law, Poland and Hungary threatened to veto the entire EU budget for the next six years.

As member states, Poland and Hungary argued that they were fully entitled to their chunk of the funding; illiberal governments turned out to be fluent speakers of the language of law and treaty rights. Ultimately the standoff was defused through a last-minute interpretative declaration ensuring that the rule of law sanctions mechanism must be approved by the European Court of Justice before it can be applied. It is uncertain if such measures will be taken soon, if at all.

For the time being, funding will come with relatively few strings attached. The struggle between liberals and illiberals in eastern Europe will continue on its main battlefield: political, legal and cultural institutions. As the nationwide womens strike against Law and Justices abortion ban in October 2020 showed, this is an acute and important fight. What is not in dispute, however, is the character of the regions economic model. Liberals and illiberals both agree that after the end of communism, the only developmental path that remains for their societies is a capitalist one.

If Krastev and Holmes see Poland and Hungarys backlash against western liberalism as a psychological reaction, the renowned German historian Philipp Ther puts forward a different explanation. In his view, the new nationalism is a reaction less against imitation than against the exposure of entire societies to the vicissitudes of the world market. In his book Das Andere Ende der Geschichte (The Other End of History), he writes that the nativist right has a coherent worldview, which can be characterised as a cluster of promises of protection and security.

Ther argues that the rapid transition from state socialism to free-market capitalism triggered an impulse towards self-protection. Signs of popular distress became visible in elections in several countries in 1993 and 1994. Polish and Hungarian voters elected centre-left cabinets with substantial ex-Communist personnel, but this brought little protection. Polish privatisation slowed but never ceased. In Hungary, the new government soon pushed through a more savage austerity package. A different course was taken in Slovakia, where prime minister Vladimr Meiar didnt just break with the neoliberalism of his Czech colleague Vaclav Klaus, but split the unified Czechoslovak state into two parts. In every respect, the years of Meiars rule in 1990s Slovakia were a harbinger of contemporary illiberalism combining populism, nationalism and protective welfare to mask an increasingly autocratic government. It was due to Meiars arbitrary rule that Slovakia was deemed unfit for Nato membership in 1999; the country joined the organisation five years later than its Central European peers.

The eastern European transition to free markets in the 1990s was made difficult by the local weakness of liberalisms preferred agent of capitalist transformation, a property-owning bourgeoisie. Sociologists Ivn Szelnyi, Gil Eyal and Eleanor Townsley described this challenge as one of making capitalism without capitalists. Western European funds initially prioritised market expansion over democratisation: from 1990 to 1996, just 1% of the European Unions international aid mechanism for former socialist states went towards funding political parties, independent media and other civic organisations. But as markets advanced, the middle class remained anaemic.

Thirty years later, the benefits of the free economy have been very unequally divided; income gaps between city and countryside are wider in eastern Europe than anywhere else on the continent. Yet the ubiquity of free-market thinking in the region is an accomplished fact. In the famous July 2014 speech that set out the need for Hungary to adopt illiberal democracy, Orbn predicted that societies founded upon the principle of the liberal way to organise a state will not be able to sustain their world-competitiveness in the following years, and more likely they will suffer a setback and announced, we are searching for the form of organising a community, that is capable of making us competitive in this great world-race.

Yet it would be wrong to ascribe this conversion to global capitalism entirely to westernisation. In their book, 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe, James Mark, Bogdan Iacob, Tobias Rupprecht and Ljubica Spaskovska leave no doubt that eastern European elites interest in capitalism preceded their embrace of democracy. Reformist bureaucrats under late socialism looked above all to east Asia. The successes of Deng Xiaopings China were an example for Gorbachevs later economic reforms. In the 1980s, Polish and Hungarian market-oriented reforms were modelled partly on South Korea, whose authoritarian capitalism had achieved high levels of economic growth.

Eastern Europe didnt just take other regions as its end goal. Its transition in the 1990s became a new global script for African, Latin American and Asian countries to follow. Ruling elites and oppositionists from Mexico to South Africa took eastern Europes political democratisation and economic liberalisation as a guiding light. In time, eastern Europeans graduated into a position where they could offer their own experience as advice to others. In 2003 the architect of Polands neoliberal reforms, Leszek Balcerowicz, toured Washington DC to suggest how the US should overhaul the Iraqi economy. During the Arab Spring, Lech Wasa visited Tunisia to tell them how we did it in the words of Polands then-foreign minister Radosaw Sikorski, who flew to Benghazi to provide counsel to the Libyans overthrowing Gaddafi.

The fact that eastern Europeans eventually acted as ambassadors of the west solidified the belief that 1989 was a long overdue return to a natural cultural home. But that turn had been initiated long before the end of communism. In the 1970s and 80s Czechoslovak, Polish and Hungarian elites and dissidents steadily abandoned anti-imperialism and socialist solidarity with the Third World, and emphasised their common European heritage instead.

This focus on high European culture had clear anti-African as well as anti-Islamic overtones. In 1985 the Hungarian minister of culture declared that Europe possessed a cultural heritage a specific intellectual quality the European character. On a visit to Budapest two years later, the Spanish king Juan Carlos was shown the ramparts that Habsburg troops had seized from the Ottomans in the 1686 a Communist celebration of Christian Europes fight against Islam. Observing the ferocity of the Afghan mujahideen, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauescu warned that the Islamic world was a billion-strong and they are fanatics. A long-term war can be the result.

Meanwhile, Romanian exiles attacked Ceauescu himself as a foreign ruler who had foisted a tropical despotism on their country. The dissident Ion Vianu wrote in 1987 that Romania today resembles an African country more than a European one. He railed against the disorganisation of public life, the administrations inability to maintain its activity at the level of one from the old continent; the state of roads, the squalor in the streets empty stores, the generalised practice of graft; the polices arbitrariness. All this, he wrote, reminded him of Haiti. Romanians with western ideals are some sort of silent majority in todays Romania.

Before communism ended, a new sense of cultural belonging had taken hold among many eastern Europeans. This growing identification of their countries as European and Christian explains why during the last decade, anti-immigrant rhetoric about a Fortress Europe to keep out African and Middle Eastern migrants has found fertile soil in the region.

In the long run, the year 1989 therefore marked a moment when eastern Europe both closed itself off from old influences and opened itself up to new ideas. Socialist planning and international solidarity with the developing world were abandoned, while identification with a narrower European civilisation went hand in hand with integration into the liberalised world economy. Eastern European countries still display this combination of open and closed characteristics today. Hungary is the prime example of this hybrid approach: under Orbn it has repudiated the liberal idea of an open society, but has nonetheless remained firmly connected to the transnational European car industry as well as the military networks of Atlanticism through EU and Nato membership.

Orbn has further complicated the question of his international allegiance by sustaining close ties with Moscow and Beijing. Russia supplies Hungary with energy, while Chinese state capitalists have made Hungary the regional hub for Huaweis efforts to expand 5G technology across Europe. Budapest is also the terminus of the new Balkan railroad that runs from the Greek port of Piraeus through Belgrade part of Chinas sweeping Belt & Road initiative, a vast infrastructure construction spree across the world to boost trade. The construction of this freight railroad costs 2% of GDP, making it the largest investment project in Hungarian history.

In mid-March 2020, as the coronavirus spread across Europe, Hungary closed its borders to entry by all non-citizens. While Hungary was under lockdown, the only foreigners allowed into the country were 300 South Korean engineers tasked with completing the accelerated opening of the countrys second plant producing batteries for electric vehicles.

Korean conglomerates have recently moved into Hungary and Poland, establishing themselves as the main battery suppliers to the European car industry. With VW, Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Renault clamouring for batteries, the Polish government also waived its quarantine requirement to let specialists from the Korean chemical company LG Chem continue work on a massive plant near Wrocaw, a 2.8bn project backed by the European Investment Bank. Thirty-five years after eastern European economists looked to Seoul as a model of authoritarian capitalism, South Koreas industrial giants are entering the region in force.

Since the start of the pandemic, liberal commentators have frequently warned about the risk that nationalism and great-power conflict will cause a collapse of the international political and economic order. But instead of such dramatic deglobalisation, what is more likely is that we will see nationalist leaders around the world construct politically closed societies undergirded by open economies: a globalisation without globalists.

An earlier version of this article originally appeared in n+1

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The revolt against liberalism: what's driving Poland and Hungary's nativist turn? - The Guardian