It does not take a political scientist to understand that the Western populist-right has been on a roll lately. In literally every corner of the Western world – from the United States to the Black Sea to the British Isles to north-eastern Europe to the Mediterranean – populist-right parties are winning elections. But while this string of electoral victories has been exciting, they have also been just a string of electoral victories.

And in politics, like gravity, what goes up must come down. These parties will not win forever. The fact that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party’s poll numbers have been so high – at 30 per cent – for over two years is, in political time (particularly Italian political time), something close to an eternity. The Dutch right-wing coalition, cobbled together after long negotiations, is already in hot water; if an election were to be held today, the results would be a jump ball, the referee tossing the ball between two opposing players. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose Budapest was a light in the dark of the Joe Biden interregnum, is likewise in a tight race against his opposition. And in America, President Donald Trump’s victories, while impressive, have been somewhat close affairs.

Elsewhere, a surge in support has not led to governing. The French populist-right National Rally was the clear first-place finisher in last year’s parliamentary elections in the popular vote – but due to France’s political system, it placed third in the seat count. And while the German AfD and the British Reform Party both have passed their respective governing parties in polling, both countries will not have elections until 2029, meaning both will need to keep up their momentum until the decade is nearly out.