Peak polycrisis? Why Trump’s midterm drubbing gives us reason for cautious hope

For the better part of a decade, reading the news has felt like watching a pile-up in slow motion. A pandemic. Wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan. A cost-of-living squeeze that never quite eases. Wildfire smoke settling over Canadian cities. And the climate numbers keep setting records nobody wanted: according to the EU’s Copernicus service, 2023 to 2025 was the first three-year stretch to average more than 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels. Scholars have a word for this tangle of overlapping, mutually reinforcing shocks: the polycrisis. It’s an accurate and exhausting word. Read more: ‘Polycrisis’ may be a buzzword, but it could help us tackle the world’s woes So let me say something in the aftermath of the midterm elections in the United States that may sound naive. I think we may have passed peak polycrisis. Not because the problems are going away. Most of them will get worse. Climate change does not negotiate, wars do not end on schedule and the next pandemic is a question of when. What I think may have peaked is something else: the political dysfunction that made all of this so much harder to govern. A long view of bad times Humans have always lived with shocks they did not choose. Plague, famine, war, depression. What has varied across history is whether societies could pull together to manage them. The institutions built after the Second World War in 1945 were not designed by people who thought the world was safe. They were designed by people who had just seen how bad things could get and decided co-operation was worth the trouble. That capacity to work together is precisely what’s eroded over the past decade. Right-wing populism spread across democracies by turning frustration into grievance, and grievance into contempt for experts, institutions and anyone on the other side. Read more: The ‘freedom convoy’ protesters are a textbook case of ‘aggrieved entitlement’ Trust collapsed. This year’s Edelman Trust Barometer found that 70 per cent of people worldwide are unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values. In Canada, the figure is 73 per cent, and only 16 per cent of Canadians expect the next generation to be better off. It’s impossible to govern a polycrisis under those conditions. Climate policy, pandemic preparedness and trade all depend on people accepting a shared set of facts and accepting that losing an argument is not the end of the world. Populism attacks both requirements. A devastated residential block in Jasper, Alta., is shown during a tour. Wildfires encroaching into the townsite of Jasper forced an evacuation of the national park. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Amber Bracken Global shifts Which is why the U.S. midterms matter. American voters handed President Donald Trump a sweeping rebuke, giving Democrats control of both the House and the Senate. Democrats flipped at least seven Senate seats, including Ohio, North Carolina, Iowa and even Kansas and South Carolina. Susan Collins lost her Senate seat in Maine, and in Texas of all places, James Talarico beat Ken Paxton. With races in Alaska and Mississippi still too close to call, Democrats will hold at least 54 Senate seats. One midterm, on its own, proves little. The president’s party usually loses ground. But this one doesn’t stand alone. In April, Hungarians ended Viktor Orbán’s 16 years in power, giving Péter Magyar’s Tisza party 53.6 per cent of the vote to the Fidesz party’s 37.8. Orbán was never just another populist. He was the model, the leader the international right flew to Budapest to learn from. Lula da Silva also defeated Flávio Bolsonaro in the recent presidential runoff, 51.8 to 48.2 per cent. Read more: Hungary turns the page into uncertainty after Péter Magyar ends Viktor Orbán’s enduring rule President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva addresses supporters during a victory rally in Sao Paulo after winning a fourth term in the presidential runoff on Oct. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko) In Britain, Reform UK looked unstoppable a year ago. Since Andy Burnham replaced Keir Starmer as prime minister this summer, Labour led every voting intention poll conducted in October, while Reform slid from around 30 per cent to roughly 22. In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu’s long hold on power may finally be slipping. His right-wing and religious bloc fell short of a majority in the recent election, winning only 53 of 120 seats, while Arab-led parties won a record 19. When President Isaac Herzog consulted the new Knesset, 67 lawmakers recommended challenger Gadi Eisenkot and only 46 backed Netanyahu, and Herzog gave Eisenkot the first chance to form a government. Read more: Can Gadi Eisenkot turn the ‘disaster bloc’ into Israel’s next government? And in Canada, Mark Carney’s approval sits at 65 per cent, a remarkable number for a prime minister a year and a half into the job. Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre, whose brand rests on the claim that Canada is broken, is viewed unfavourably by 52 per cent of Canadians in the same poll. There is a pattern here. After a decade of rage politics, voters in very different countries seem to be reaching again for competence and something closer to normal. Taking on the social media accelerant Something else has changed too. The platforms that pour fuel on the polarization flames no longer operate in a regulatory vacuum. Late last year, the European Commission fined social media platform X 120 million euros for breaching its transparency obligations, the first penalty issued under the Digital Services Act. Australia’s restrictions on social media accounts for those under 16 years old have been in force since December 2025. After years of hearings and white papers, regulating big tech has moved from talk to enforcement. Read more: Australia’s social media ban has an enforcement problem. These new laws aim to fix it Hope, with the fine print None of this calls for a victory lap. In Brazil, Lula won by under four points, and his opponent has vowed to seek an annulment. In the U.K., Reform still polls above 20 per cent and some predict the Burnham bounce will fade. Stephen Miller in the Oval Office in August 2026. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) Trump remains president for two more years, veto pen in hand, and has made the most fiery hardliner in his administration, Stephen Miller, his chief of staff. The grievances that populists exploited are real and unresolved: housing, wages, the sense of being left behind. And the polycrisis carries on regardless of who wins elections. Cautious optimism is still optimism, though. The shocks may not be over, but our ability to respond to them, together, may be returning. Historically, like in the post-Second World War period, that’s mattered most during crises. For those of us who work on democracy, information integrity and multilateral co-operation, this is no time to ease off. It is a moment to press the advantage: to rebuild trust, shore up the institutions that let us govern shared problems and make the case once more that working together beats tearing each other apart. The problems are not getting smaller. But for the first time in a while, we may be getting better at facing them.