The end of the popular politician

Decade after decade of peace and affluence in the West has ironically made voters less and less satisfied, even with competent governments.

- Ianan Ganesh

In April, I wrote that Britain's soon-to-be-elected Labour government would be disliked in "no time". "No time" meant six months or thereabouts. Apologies for the naivete.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer's approval rating has dropped 45 percentage points in a little more than two months.

His crime? Well, there has been a hint of financial sleaze, though on a scale so small as to bring home the relative innocence of British politics. A cut to pensioner perks, sensible on its own terms, looked bad next to a generous wage deal for National Health Service doctors. Here was a reminder that Labour, however moist-eyed it gets about miners and steelworkers, is the political arm of the public sector middle class.

Still, none of this is gross misgovernment. Labour hasn't had long enough to be terrible. The likelier explanation for so steep a fall is that voters were ready to deplore the new administration and took the first excuse.

If this seems a cynical analysis, look around the West: Popular leaders are rare, and it would be some coincidence if it was their own incompetence at fault in each case.

Mr Olaf Scholz is set to become just the second one-term chancellor of Germany since the Federal Republic's creation in 1949. President Emmanuel Macron has incurred the most vehement protests in France since 1968, twice. In a nation that used to have era-defining presidents, neither of his two predecessors made it past their first term. Australia has had seven changes of prime minister since 2007. It had four in the previous 32 years.