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Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves (right) crying as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer speaks during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons, London, United Kingdom, on July 2, 2025.
UK PM’s freefall is a warning to centrists
A week is a long time in politics, so the expression goes. A year? Well that must feel like a lifetime – especially for UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
It was just over one year ago that Starmer took up residence at 10 Downing Street. With a 174-seat majority in parliament, and the opposition Conservatives in shambles after their worst election ever, the new Labour PM seemed ready to hit the ground running with a center-left agenda of better healthcare, lower immigration, and economic growth that benefits everyone.
He’s stumbled out of the starting blocks.
Just last week Starmer suffered a ringing defeat on a key agenda item, failing to pass welfare reforms that would have saved a mere £5.5 billion ($7.5 billion) by 2030 – just a small fraction of the overall government deficit. Members of the prime minister’s own party had objected to the cuts to disability benefits. To make matters worse, Starmer’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves was seen crying in the House of Commons after the government had to gut key provisions of the legislation.
The debacle reflected larger problems for the prosecutor-turned-politician. Starmer has failed to revive the UK’s long-sputtering economy, struggled to make good on a promise to stop illegal migrant crossings by boat from mainland Europe (they are actually rising), and had little-to-no effect on long waits for National Health Service appointments and treatments. These issues have overshadowed the prime minister’s successes elsewhere, notably the trade deals with the US and India.
The result: the Labour Party is now polling at just 24%, and Starmer’s net approval rating is a crushing -40.
“I think of him more as a barrister than a politician,” Lord Gavin Barwell, who was former Prime Minister Theresa May’s chief of staff, told GZERO. “You deal with issues sequentially, like a barrister deals with one case at a time, [but then] you don’t have any kind of overall narrative about what the government is for.”
To be fair to Starmer, he inherited some of his troubles from his predecessors. The UK’s challenging fiscal situation and the turbulent international environment would be hard for any prime minister to address within a year. What’s more, while the Conservatives are in the wilderness, there is a resurgent opposition group in the form of Nigel Farage’s nativist Reform UK. It is now polling ahead of both Labour and the Tories, the two parties that have held a duopoly on power in the UK for nearly a century.
Even so, the prime minister has often been his own worst enemy. Polling data from the opinion-research firm Early Studies suggests the government’s priorities haven’t aligned with those of the voters, especially when it comes to cost of living – 15% of voters said it’s their top concern, making it the biggest singular issue of all, yet it attracts just 1% of parliamentary attention. What’s more, Starmer’s communication with Labour backbenchers has been lacking, so rebellions – like the one on the welfare bill – occur more frequently than they should.
“I've heard from a few Labour MPs that they've never spoken to him,” says Jon Nash, a fellow at the London-based think tank Demos. “It does feel like there’s a bad level of organization within the party.”
Ominous signs for centrists. Starmer’s struggles highlight a broader issue that centrist parties across the world face: they tend to work too methodically and timidly within a system that a growing number of voters think is broken, all-the-while focusing on short-term issues while glossing over longer-term ones. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change conducts focus groups in most major Western democracies, and has found that the public’s frustrations are broad-based.
“There are these deep systemic trends where basically, voters and non-voters alike, just feel that around them is this pervasive sense of decline,” Ryan Wain, an executive director at TBI, told GZERO. “It’s mainstream politics’s job – I include the center-right in that, as well as the center left – to arrest and reverse that decline.”
And if centrist parties don’t reverse that decline, others are waiting in the wings to take their place, says Jon Nash of Demos.
“That inability to get anything done is what opens up the door to others coming along and saying, ‘Look, we’re going to do things differently. Vote for me, I’m a businessman,’ or, ‘vote for me, I’ll do something radical.’”
Graphic Truth: Last democracy domino falls in Hong Kong
Hong Kong’s League of Social Democrats, the last active pro-democracy party in the Chinese-controlled territory, announced on Sunday that it was disbanding, putting another nail in the coffin of the city’s democracy. China’s draconian national security law of 2020 has led to hundreds of arrests in recent years, all but silencing Hong Kong’s broader opposition movement. With the folding of the League of Social Democrats, Hong Kong’s Beijing-installed Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu will now rule without even the slightest hint of dissent.
A Canadian border services superintendent, stands at the Canada Border Service Agency (CBSA) border crossing with the United States in Stanstead, Quebec, Canada
Hard Numbers: Canada tracks illegal Iranians, US slashes pro-democracy programs, small town sees last graduate, bear goes to the dentist
115: Canada’s border agency has opened at least 115 investigations into how suspected agents of Iran were able to enter Canada despite being banned from the country since 2022. Three individuals have been given deportation orders, and another has already been removed from the country.
1.3 billion: The US State Department has been advised by the Office of Budget and Management to end nearly all pro-democracy programs, effectively halting $1.3 billion in grants supporting pro-democracy activists or minority populations in authoritarian countries like China and Yemen.
20: The remote town of McCallum, Newfoundland, is home to just 20 people, and the youngest of them just graduated as the high school’s only student. The celebratory event has reopened conversations about the future of the town, where residents remain fiercely connected to a place and a community at risk of dying out within a generation.
800: A visit to the dentist is always a bit of a bear, but this time … quite literally. Tundra, an 800-pound Alaskan brown bear, was sedated in a northeastern Minnesota zoo and fitted with the world’s largest dental crown ever created — marking the first time the procedure has been performed on a bear.
Burkina Faso’s junta leader Captain Ibrahim Traore attends the first ordinary summit of heads of state and governments of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) in Niamey, Niger, on July 6, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Burkina Faso foils coup effort, Trump dents democracy rating, Spain to hit defense-spending target, Musk to reduce his DOGE hours, Migrants arrested while fleeing US, Japan rids foreign debt, Tourists killed in Kashmir
40%: Burkina Faso’s ruling military recently foiled an attempted coup aimed at removing junta leader Cap. Ibrahim Traoré, the country’s security minister said on Monday. The Sahel nation has had to deal with widespread insurgency in recent years, with rebel jihadist groups reportedly controlling around 40% of the country’s land mass.
55: US President Donald Trump made a dent in American democracy almost as soon as he won the 2024 election, according to a survey of 520 political experts. The Bright Line Watch benchmark gave US democracy a rating of 55 in February, down 12 points from where it was on the day of Trump’s election victory and 14 points from where it was in October 2024. It’s the country’s fastest drop since the survey began in 2017.
2%: Our globally minded readers will immediately recognize this figure as the proportion of gross domestic product that NATO member nations are encouraged to spend on defense. Under pressure from the Trump administration and its European allies to expand its military, Spain said Tuesday that it will finally hit that figure again this year, after falling short for over 30 years.
130: Elon Musk is DOGE-ing himself. The Tesla CEO says he will cut back his role in the government after his electric vehicle company reported a massive profit drop. Musk says he will spend just one to two days each week on DOGE following accusations that he has let his focus on Tesla slip. Regardless, temporary government employees like Musk are normally limited to working 130 days a year, which would expire at the end of May.
8: So much for the Great Escape: From January through April, US authorities arrested eight undocumented Dominican migrants in Puerto Rico who were trying to return to their home country. The arrests raise questions over the Trump administration’s stated goal of encouraging undocumented migrants to leave of their own accord.
$20 billion: Trump’s tariffs have Tokyo in a selling mood. Japanese investors said sayonara to more than $20 billion of foreign debt early this month. The selloff shows how Wall Street jitters can ripple across the Pacific. It’s not clear which foreign debt Japanese investors unloaded, though they are the largest holders of US Treasuries of any country worldwide, so their investment choices are observed hawkishly.
26: Outrage is rising after gunmen killed 26 tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir’s Pahalgam on Tuesday. Several other victims remain critically injured. The Resistance Front – believed to be an offshoot of Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba – has claimed responsibility.
Can Venezuela's opposition leader unseat Nicolás Maduro?
Venezuela stands at a crossroads. Amid fraud allegations and Nicolás Maduro’s controversial third term, opposition leader María Corina Machado fights from the shadows. On GZERO World, Ian Bremmer speaks with Machado about Venezuela’s future, America’s role, and why she believes Maduro’s grip on power is weaker than it seems. For Machado, it’s not just about toppling a dictator; it’s about rebuilding democracy in Venezuela from the ground up. The real question isn’t just how Maduro’s rule ends but what comes next.
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).GZERO World with Ian Bremmer airs on US public television weekly - check local listings.
National Rally leader Marine Le Pen poses prior to an interview on the evening news broadcast of French TV channel TF1, in Boulogne-Billancourt, outside Paris, France, on March 31, 2025.
Can France’s Marine Le Pen run again?
National Rally leader Marine Le Pen was found guilty by a French court on Monday for embezzling European Parliament funds. She was sentenced to four years (with two years suspended and the remainder under house arrest with electronic monitoring) and faces a five-year ban from running for public office.
Coup de grâce? Le Pen shared her anger with French voters. “Like you, I’m scandalized, indignant, but this indignation, this feeling of injustice, is an additional push to the fight that I fight for [the voters],” she said on French television Monday night.
Le Pen’s lawyer said she will appeal the decision, which will likely lead to a retrial in 2026 — months before the 2027 presidential election. Le Pen can also petition the Constitutional Council to review her case and ultimately decide her eligibility. Last week, this court ruled that local politicians can be barred from office immediately if they are convicted of a crime — but this won’t apply to national figures like the National Rally’s longtime leader.
“Le Pen will now seek to make her appeal explicitly political, arguing before the Constitutional Council that she is too important a politician to ban and that doing so would be an affront to French democracy,” said Rahman. Even so, her route back to eligibility won’t be easy.
Next in line. If Le Pen is ultimately barred from running, National Rally President Jordan Bardella would be the most likely candidate to succeed her. The clean-shaven millennial, who grew up in the Paris suburbs, has tried to expand the party’s tent by courting younger voters and distancing the party from Le Pen’s father, the Holocaust-denying founder of National Rally.Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro walks after the Supreme Court voted that he should stand trial for allegedly attempting a coup after his 2022 electoral defeat, in Brasilia, Brazil, on March 26, 2025.
Brazil’s top court greenlights Bolsonaro trial
Much like Jair Bolsonaro’s beloved Seleção, which lost its soccer match to Argentina this week, the former Brazilian president has reason to be concerned about his own defensive strategy. On Wednesday, the country’s Supreme Court ordered him to stand trial for his alleged efforts to overturn the last election. The ruling raises the prospect of the 70-year-old ending up behind bars and imperils his hopes of running for office in 2026.
The case at hand: Brazil’s Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet charged Bolsonaro and 33 others in February with attempting a coup on Jan. 8, 2023, and accused them of forging a plot to poison President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and kill a Supreme Court justice. Bolsonaro has denied any wrongdoing.
It is “highly likely” that the court will also find Bolsonaro guilty, said Eurasia Group Managing Director Chris Garman, but that wouldn’t stop him from holding significant sway at the next election in 2026.
“From an electoral point of view, he will remain a kingmaker on the right for the 2026 presidential election,” said Garman. “Polls consistently show his public support hasn’t dropped since the last presidential election, and he will be seen as a martyr among the conservative voters who will agree with claims he is being politically persecuted.”
A drone view shows a flooded area in the city of Bahia Blanca, in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Hard Numbers: Deadly Argentinian floods, Palestinian protester arrested, Mexico’s grim discovery, DRC sets rebel bounties, America losing its butterflies, Internet shutdowns imperil democracy
13: The port city of Bahia Blanca, Argentina, was devastated by a massive rainstorm this weekend that dumped a year’s worth of rain in just a few hours, killing 13 people and displacing hundreds. A similarly devastating rainstorm in December 2023 also claimed 13 lives in Bahia Blanca.
200: A grim discovery was made in a clandestine crematorium in Jalisco, Mexico: 200 pairs of shoes. The footwear is believed to belong to people killed by organized criminal gangs. It was uncovered by relatives of some of Jalisco’s 15,000 missing people, the most of any state in Mexico, where over 100,000 people are registered as “disappeared.”
5 million: The Democratic Republic of Congo has announced a $5 million reward for information leading to the arrest of three M23 rebel leaders, and a $4 million reward for the arrest of two journalists in exile deemed as “accomplices.” But with the DRC’s army increasingly outmatched by rebel forces, the chances of capture are considered slim.
22: A new study reveals that America’s butterfly population has declined by 22% since 2000, with the Southwest hardest hit with a drop of over 50%. The change is primarily attributed to insecticides, climate change, and habitat loss, and it could imperil certain crops, including Texas cotton, of which half is pollinated by butterflies.
296: The latest twist in cyber warfare? Internet shutdowns. In 2024, 296 shutdowns were reported across 54 countries, compared with 283 shutdowns in 39 countries the previous year. Shutdowns were used for political control, to suppress dissent, and to disrupt elections, and they were particularly acute in Africa, where at least five have been in place for over a year.