Right Rumbles: Conservatism recovers its nerve

When George W. Bush became president, he was simultaneously celebrated as the lone star of conservatism in the Western world. Almost everywhere else-notably in the four major European countries of France, Britain, Germany, and Italy-the social-democratic Left was in power, apparently having established itself as a compassionate administrator of market capitalism. And that looked likely to be a permanent state of affairs because of the disarray of conservatives, who were either split into warring factions, as in Italy and Germany, or floundering about in search of issues, as in Britain. By comparison, the Bush GOP, buoyant from its victory, looked a very plausible candidate for the wave of the future; foreign conservatives were looking to Dubya to learn how to get back into power.

Much has changed in the last year, in particular on September 11, and the president is generally thought to be a more impressive leader than he was a year ago. His handling of the war on terrorism earns him almost universally high marks. Even so, the gap in political stature and prospects between him and overseas conservative leaders-and between their parties and the GOP-has narrowed significantly. And the main reason for this is the revival of conservatism in the advanced world.

This revival is seen most plainly in election results. In the last year, conservative parties have held or regained power in Italy, Australia, and Denmark. In each case, the result was remarkable. Australia's John Howard substantially increased his coalition's majority in an election that had been generally forecast, only two months earlier, to yield a Labour landslide. He achieved this in part because the economy was gradually improving, but mainly because he defended Australia's right to regulate immigration. In November, Denmark unexpectedly rejected its social-democratic coalition and put in a conservative government dependent on the votes of a nationalist party that had campaigned against further European integration and high rates of immigration. And in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi's conservative coalition-by uniting free marketers and nationalists-won a solid parliamentary majority against an international campaign that included The Economist magazine, which editorialized that he was unfit to govern. On top of these results, the Irish voted against ratifying the Nice Treaty on further European integration, against the urgings of all major political parties; and the Portuguese socialists lost heavily in municipal elections that are generally seen as a guide to the next parliamentary contest. All in all, a strong advance by the Right.

Against this trend, the Left can boast only of holding on to a majority in Belgium and of New Labour's retention of power in Britain. The first was not seen as important by anyone, and the second, though undoubtedly a substantial victory, was a guide to the past rather than the future. It represented a slightly surly willingness on the part of fair-minded British voters to give Tony Blair a second term to fulfill his first- term promises, and a determined unwillingness to listen to the Tories until they had served more time in opposition for prior crimes of sleaze and incompetence. Nor are elections the sole guide to how opinion has been moving: In the Tory leadership battle, the most conservative of the five candidates, Iain Duncan Smith, won the contest handsomely, defeating one of the few remaining conservative standard- bearers of Europeanism by two to one. Derided initially as a xenophobic Neanderthal, he is now winning media plaudits for the modest reasonableness of his speeches. In Italy, Berlusconi responded to the complaint of his foreign minister, Renato Ruggiero, that other ministers were not sufficiently enthusiastic about the euro by sacking Ruggiero. And, in a surprisingly swift and painless coup, the Bavarian prime minister and leader of the socially conservative Christian Social Union, Edmund Stoiber, defeated the more liberal Angela Merkel of the much larger Christian Democratic Union to become the candidate of the CDU-CSU coalition for chancellor in September's elections.

Stoiber's sudden eminence is perhaps the most significant of all the above developments. To begin with, he has a fair chance of beating the Social Democratic chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, to become the leader of what is still Europe's largest economy. He is leading Schroeder in the polls by about 5 percent; he is a seasoned and effective campaigner; and the German economy is in the doldrums and likely to remain so between now and September. This economic weakness plays to one of Stoiber's greatest strengths, for he is known to have made Bavaria's the most successful economy in Germany, with low unemployment and a flourishing high-tech sector. Far from alienating traditionalist and nationalist voters-which many American conservatives believe to be an inevitable side effect of free-market modernization-Stoiber has championed their causes. His Bavarian success is known as the "lap-tops and lederhosen" miracle, and he already has a national following because he has consistently sided with the German electorate against the powerful political establishment: He was skeptical about abandoning the mark for the euro, and favors strict limits on immigration.