The Center Can Hold
Global strategies for taking on far-right populist extremism.
In 2024, an anti-incumbency wave came crashing down on global politics. The African National Congress in South Africa, the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, and the Conservative Party in Britain all lost their parliamentary majorities for the first time in a decade-plus. Readers of The Messina Memo need no reminder of America’s resounding rejection of Vice President Kamala Harris in favor of Donald Trump, JD Vance, and their right-wing populist movement. The governments of Canada and Germany were both plunged into chaos as far-right parties gained support, eventually forcing out Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Pundits heralded the dawn of a new populist era.
As it turns out, reports of the liberal international order’s death were greatly exaggerated. A little over a year later, the populist sentiments that powered the anti-incumbency wave haven’t gone anywhere–voters across the world remain frustrated with political elites, seeing them as out of touch, unwilling to address their economic anxieties and security fears, and incapable of offering any real hope for the future. But that anger is no longer translating as cleanly at the ballot box.
In Australia, the governing Labor Party and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese cruised to victory last year over a right-wing challenger who borrowed heavily from Donald Trump’s playbook. In Singapore, the ruling People’s Action Party dramatically increased its share of the popular vote. Even in Canada, the Liberal Party–left for dead just months earlier–rebounded under Mark Carney to win a fourth term and, for the first time since 2015, the popular vote.
At The Messina Group (TMG), we don’t believe these latest election results signal a newly-decisive turning back of the tide against populism. What they do tell us is something more actionable: incumbents and democracy-minded candidates who successfully frame elections on their own terms can triumph over populist extremists in free and fair elections.
Over the last decade, our international campaigns team at TMG (the best in the business, if you ask me), led by Ben Mallet and Justin Lines, has helped democratic leaders across the world do exactly that. In each campaign, we return to three fundamental strategic priorities: make the campaign a favorable referendum, move quickly to define it, and draw a clear contrast with the opposition.
As more and more would-be authoritarians attempt to claim popular mandates and illegitimately rise to power, defenders of democratic governance–at home and abroad–should heed these lessons.
1. Make the Election About Results, Not Change
Every election is a choice–and the campaign that sets the terms of that choice holds an enormous advantage.
Populists run on grievance, fear, and fury. Their movements are born of frustration with the status quo, and so they instinctively frame elections as a simple binary: more of the same, or change. It’s a frame that strongly favors outsiders who promise to shake things up and return power to the aggrieved. Donald Trump used it against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Javier Milei used it to win the presidency of Argentina in 2023. It works–unless the other side prevents a fight on those terms.
Democracy-minded incumbents must shift the central question away from change versus the status quo and toward something more concrete: which candidate is actually more likely to deliver results? In a country where jobs are scarce and inflation is high, the election should come down to who is better for the economy. Where people feel ripped off, the election should fundamentally be about who is best poised to tackle corruption. For a country at war, voters should feel as though they’re deciding which candidate is best to deliver peace. A campaign framed around results, rather than sentiment, gives incumbents the ground they need to compete.
Emmanuel Macron’s decisive reelection in 2022 showed how this works. Marine Le Pen’s nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-EU, pro-Putin platform was resonating with a restless French public, and her “change” message had real momentum. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, two months before the election. Macron seized the moment, reframing the election as a referendum on French security and European solidarity in a time of war. His numbers improved sharply in the weeks that followed, and he ultimately won by 17 points. The race changed because the question before the electorate changed.
Most campaigns won’t get a gift like that. But the underlying principle applies everywhere: define the question, and you define the race.
2. Frame First, Frame Fast
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unexpected, and it offered Macron a late-breaking chance to favorably shift the framework of his reelection campaign. Most campaigns are rarely afforded such an opportunity. Instead, the first campaign narrative to reach voters tends to become the lens through which everything that follows gets interpreted–a dynamic Jim has written about before. First impressions in politics are sticky, and ceding the opening of a campaign to an opponent is a hole that’s very hard to climb out of.
The most important decision a campaign will make is how to define its candidate. The second most important decision will be how to define its opponent. If a campaign defines its candidate and core issue before its opponent does, it gains control over the terms of debate, establishing what matters and why. And so it is critical that incumbent candidates move quickly and start messaging the campaign’s chosen, defining question early, before their opponent has a chance to do so.
In 2024, TMG worked with the ruling party of an Asian democracy to do just that. The party had a genuine record to run on–meaningful economic stabilization, driven by strong mineral exports and solid recovery growth. So rather than letting the populist opposition define the election around vague promises of change, we helped the party get out front early with a clear, simple frame: stability, development, and continued growth on one side; uncertainty, stagnation, and risk on the other. Despite widespread voter frustration and strong global populist headwinds, the party won a third-term majority in parliament, the first time a party has ever won a third term in the country’s democratic history.
The lesson isn’t complicated, but it demands discipline: know your frame, own it early, and don’t let your opponent take it from you.
3. Fear Runs Both Ways
In the wake of the Democratic Century, fear largely operated as a one-directional force in democratic politics. Distrust of institutions, economic anxiety, and a visceral sense that the system was rigged drove voters toward insurgent alternatives. They were willing to gamble on the devil they didn’t know rather than stay with the one they did.
Those underlying conditions haven’t disappeared. But something important has shifted. Modern-day far-right populists are no longer an abstract alternative. Donald Trump has held power in America for nearly six years. Viktor Orbán was first elected Prime Minister of Hungary 16 years ago. Jair Bolsonaro was elected President of Brazil in 2019. Voters across the globe have had a real-world window into what populist governance actually delivers: the chaos, the volatility, the erosion of norms that once seemed permanent. And increasingly, that preview is giving voters pause.
For a while, MAGA’s global appeal made it a tempting model for right-wing movements to emulate. But MAGA mimicry has proven to be something of a trap. Orbán lost his reelection campaign this past weekend after rallying with JD Vance and (via telephone) Donald Trump, and after closely aligning himself with the MAGA coalition. In Canada, Trump’s return to power, his reckless trade agenda, and threats to annex the country transformed the political landscape almost overnight. The Liberal Party, which in early 2025 had appeared headed for a historic defeat, not only held power but also recorded its strongest popular vote performance in years, running explicitly against the chaos south of its border. Months later, in Australia, when opposition conservatives pledged to deepen their ties with the Trump administration and literally ran on a “Make Australia Great Again“ platform, voters recoiled. The incumbent Labor government won 94 seats and a 55.2% two-party-preferred vote–its best result in half a century, far exceeding pre-election expectations.
Fear no longer just propels change; it also restrains it. Voters have seen what populist governance looks like, and many want no part of it. Campaigns that can point concretely to the consequences–the instability, the volatility, the democratic erosion–and offer themselves as a credible, steady alternative are in a stronger electoral position than the conventional wisdom suggests.
The strategies outlined here are tactical necessities for winning elections. They’re also tools for preserving something far more fundamental: the basic compact between a government and its people that holds democratic life together. Every election lost to a far-right populist is a door opened to the dismantling of the institutions, norms, and freedoms that took generations to build and that, once eroded, are extraordinarily difficult to restore.
History offers no shortage of cautionary tales. Democratic backsliding rarely arrives as a sudden rupture. It comes, like Mike Campbell’s bankruptcy, slowly at first, then all at once. It begins with the slow delegitimization of courts, the capture of the press, the rewriting of electoral rules, and the cultivation of a politics built entirely on fear and grievance. By the time voters recognize what has been lost, the tools available to reclaim it are often already gone.
This is why the work of democratic campaigns matters, and it’s why I’m so proud to work at TMG. Each contest where a defender of democratic governance successfully outmaneuvers a populist extremist is proof that the center can hold–not through complacency or nostalgia, but through discipline, clarity, and an honest reckoning with the legitimate frustrations that give populism its oxygen in the first place.
Meeting voters where they are, speaking plainly about their struggles, and offering a credible vision of something better: it’s good politics, yes. In this moment, it’s also a democratic imperative.
Tara Corrigan is TMG’s COO, overseeing day-to-day operations of the firm and focusing on the company’s corporate and international political work. Tara has worked in politics domestically and abroad for nearly twenty years. She previously led TMG’s international political campaign work on six continents, and worked for President Obama for seven years.
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