BY ALEX STORY
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 are forthcoming. Indeed, German industry is paying two to three times more than her American and Chinese counterparts for energy.
Unemployment is at 6%, 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 do.
Merkel’s policy of green appeasement in 2011, switching from reliable energy sources to ones subject to the whims of the weather gods, are 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 her 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% of GDP and a testing 6.1% 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.
Macron’s approval ratings have hovered around 25% 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 decade-long 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.
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% 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 6 million that represented the equivalent of a thousand deaths 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 was applauded by all honest Salvadorians.
Equivalent to our population, this 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 government’s self-inflicted economic problems away.
The economy grew by a reasonable 3.4% in 2023 and slightly over 2% in 2024. Debt levels are at a manageable 84% of GDP, with inflation and unemployment low.
Bukele’s approval ratings have hovered around 90% 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, who thereafter drifted into long-lasting political instability and hyperinflation, addicted as she was to the powerful but deadening drug of a Peronist socialist and collectivist world view, now seems to have reached the end of that self-harming tunnel.
Indeed, while the country saw nine sovereign default 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% when he took office, with price rises spiking at 25% for the month of December 2023, to 120%, a fall of nearly half within a year, with a 2.4% 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”.
While the Argentine economy contracted by 2.4% in 2024, many of Milei’s countrymen, with 56% 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 8%, 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% (maybe it’s down to the Trump Dance).
Internationalists worldwide are set to be tested to their core – not least our very own Keir 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 United Kingdom, submissively drawn into the EU’s deadening orbit, can only offer further decline to their longsuffering 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 it is not challenging?
Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.
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