Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election could turn the ideological vector of Western powers from left-liberal to more centrist.

In recent years, the West has been dominated by a predominantly left-liberal ideological agenda, which has led to a prejudiced perception of Western values around the world. The influential publication The Economist states that there is a growing divergence in values between the West and the rest of the world, and Western values are no longer considered as progressive as they used to be.

Two decades ago, people in Asia and Africa admired Western equality, respect for human rights, and democracy, and were stunned that women in the West had the right to choose whom they married. The West brought progress, justice, and destroyed prejudice. And today, most of the top topics in the Western media cause misunderstanding and even ridicule among Indians, Arabs, or Africans. “A man in a woman’s dress has taken a position in the US Department of Energy”, “Can transgender people use women’s toilets and showers?” – such major social topics on the pages of the BBC, the New York Times and other popular publications are not perceived as progressive in the rest of the world, and especially in the Global South. It is difficult to be a moral guide for the whole world when Western values are not understood by everyone.

However, the actual “mono-majority” of Republicans in the Senate and the White House may slightly turn the dominant American and all Western political rhetoric in a more conservative direction. Although Trump’s conservatism is quite specific and borders on radicalism and populism, in many aspects his fellow party members declare the defense of family and national values and real freedom of speech, as opposed to leftist initiatives.

Many analysts argue that Trump’s victory was an electoral response to Kamala Harris and the Democrats’ leftist rhetoric about identity politics. And in the American segment of social media, Kamala Harris is being compared to a communist and memes with her in a communist image are being shared. This was facilitated by some of Harris’ statements about state control over prices, etc. American society is frankly tired of a system of values that is far from traditional, declared true before it has even been formed and constantly updated by increasingly leftist initiatives. It is significant that even the majority of Latinos voted for Trump, whom Democrats considered a minority in need of liberal identity rhetoric, while they chose pragmatic conservative ideas that they understand better.

It is likely that the new Trump administration may even reduce grant assistance from U.S. government foundations aimed at spreading left-liberal values abroad or even turn these organizations to the right. Statements coming from the Trump camp about replacing a number of officials with Republicans may also lead to the arrival of conservatives in the sphere that has done so much to spread leftist values in the modern world. Although the influence of private liberal foundations and Brussels-based foundations will remain prominent, Trump’s election could slow the evolution and current pace of spread of their worldview on a global scale.

It can be assumed that in the next few years, the United States will slow down the promotion of liberal values and focus on promoting more conservative rhetoric.

Author: Valeriy Maydanyuk

The Conservative Party of Great Britain, which lost its electoral advantage for the first time in 14 years, elected a new leader this year. “The Tories were led by British MP Cami Badenoch of Nigerian descent.

She became the first black woman to lead a major political party in the United Kingdom. Badenoch beat her opponent Robert Jenrick to become the sixth Tory leader in 9 years, at a time when the party is experiencing significant turbulence. According to the results of the party elections, Badenoch received 53,806 votes against 41,388 votes for Jenrick, and this result was the smallest gap in the party’s history.

Having replaced former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak after her defeat in the parliamentary elections, Badenoch said in her post-election speech that the party must “win back” the sympathy of voters who voted for their main opponents, the Labor Party. According to the new Conservative leader, the Tory party must admit that it has “made mistakes” and “broken standards” over the past 14 years in power. These words were bound to be said, as the Labor Party won 209 more seats in the July 2024 snap election than in the 2019 election. And the Conservatives won only 121 seats, 244 fewer than in 2019, when they had 365 seats.

Cami Badenoch has been in British politics for a long time. She has previously served as the Member of Parliament for North West Essex since 2017, where she was re-elected in 2024.

From February 2023 to July 2024, Badenoch was State Secretary of the Department of Business and Trade.

From 2022 to July 4, 2024, she served as Secretary of State for International Trade and was also Minister for Women and Equality at the Center for Equality.

Earlier, from September 2021, Badenokh headed the state Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Self-Government. She also had experience as treasurer of the Treasury and parliamentary deputy secretary of state at the Ministry of Education.

Obviously, the British Conservatives are trying to gain support in an increasingly diverse society in an effort to compete for votes that have been shifted to their left-wing opponents this year. Only time and the mistakes of their opponents will tell whether the candidacy of the new leader will help them.

Author: Valeriy Maydanyuk

Criticism of the “Single Telethon” in Ukraine and concerns about the state’s monopoly of the Ukrainian television space have been voiced again from Europe. However, in the third year of the war, more and more Ukrainians are raising this question.

At the beginning of the large-scale invasion, the Single Telethon was necessary and even played an important stabilizing role. When the enemy broke through in nine regions, when we were suffering losses and no help was coming, it was important that the nation did not see the full scale of the disaster, did not panic and did not lose faith. And then it helped us recover and fight back.

If we recall the events of the ATO, when some Ukrainian TV channels were owned by Medvedchuk and most criticized any actions of the government, sowing betrayal and disbelief, we can only imagine how the media, which already exaggerate the scale of problems for the sake of sensationalism, would have presented the situation of the Russian invasion in February-March 2022. At the beginning of the ATO, even such shocking events as the appearance of DPR militants on a national TV channel, who were broadcasting their own propaganda via video link on the most popular talk show while the host politely asked what their position was.

Ukrainians were lucky that in 2022, oligarchic TV channels did not show us the “other point of view” where they would talk about “fascists” in Ukraine and the goals of the “SVO”. Back then, Telethon protected Ukrainians from both the massive amount of false Russian propaganda and internal political strife at a time when it was time to consolidate.

But years passed and the Single Telethon, in the absence of any competition, began to “lose ground.” Due to various circumstances and funding from European partners, the Ukrainian monopolized TV broadcasting has become as refined as possible, devoid of subjectivity of one’s own opinion and somewhat detached from the national patriotism that was important in the times of the struggle for independence.

Instead of enlightening historical TV programs that would show Ukrainians how our people have been abused by Moscow for centuries, instead of charismatic patriotic speakers, instead of informative programs on media literacy, etc., Ukrainians mostly continued to be shown “talking heads” – a dozen balanced, positive and cautious experts on video. In between, they showed footage of the Ukrainian Armed Forces firing, blue and yellow flags, rescuing people and cats.

Unlike private TV channels, which can broadcast their own and extraordinary opinions, a democratic state, even in times of war, can rarely afford intolerant statements about the enemy. As a result, the Ukrainian airwaves have turned into a low-content and neutral stream of state-funded, censored information, whose biggest “sin” is inefficiency.

Having watched monotonous and frankly “toothless” broadcasts that avoid the most pressing social problems and mostly show only good things when it is time to show people a little more truth, the Ukrainian viewer has moved to Telegram and You Tube. And it is there, in the free and diverse information space (including Russian propaganda), that our enemy has directed the point of his attack.

Knowing that state television “does not tell the whole truth,” Ukrainians began to listen to pseudo-experts, scandalous bloggers, hype eaters, and even political psychics who presented shocking, extravagant, false, but interesting information, while Telethon broadcast the same positive blue and yellow picture for years.

As a result, those private TV channels that remained on the air show much more lively and interesting stories than the journalists of Telemarathon, who were deprived of competition and mothballed by state regulation. We wanted to do the best, but didn’t know where to stop in time.

The current version of “United News” needs to be convincingly reformatted, because such scarce budget money allocated to the “Telethon” no longer converts to the original impact on the viewer, who has moved from the sweet positive on TV to the online space of betrayal and scandals that undermine the stability of the Ukrainian state.

Author: Valeriy Maydanyuk

Switzerland’s economic success and political stability are largely due to the peculiarities of its political system, in which Christian Democrats also play a prominent role.

The Swiss Christian Democratic People’s Party (Christlichdemokratische Volkspartei, CVP) is the smallest of the four members of the Swiss ruling coalition and is an associate member of the European People’s Party. The party was founded in 1912 as the Swiss Conservative Party and was created to represent Swiss Roman Catholics. The party also included representatives of Christian trade unions.

Today, the party supports the involvement of religious institutions and religious values in solving social problems, and its policies are aimed at strengthening the family and helping developing countries.

From 1975 to 1983, the Swiss Christian Democrats were the largest party in the country. This period was one of the most important for strengthening the country’s economy and taking the economic place in Europe that Switzerland can boast of today.

But in the mid-1980s, electoral support began to decline. At the beginning of the 21st century, it was the weakest of the four coalition partners that formed the government, and in 2003 its representation in the Federal Council was reduced to one seat.

In the 2019 elections, the party was supported by 275,842 thousand voters, which is 11.4% of the electoral support. In recent years, there has been a clear decline in the number of votes cast for the Swiss Christian Democrats, which had support at the level of 20% back in the 1980s.

Moreover, losses are noticeable even in traditional Catholic constituencies, where Christian politicians have always been supported. This is due to the fact that young people in urban areas are more oriented toward socially liberal ideas than conservative Christian democratic rhetoric. The loss of a Christian Democratic deputy-senator in the canton of Fribourg, which was even called the “Christian Republic,” led to a party debate about the appropriateness of the Christian component in the party name, which was rejected by the majority of party delegates at the party conference in Frauenfeld.

Today, the position of Christian democracy is characterized by volatility, and in some countries where Christian democrats were in opposition yesterday, they have a high chance of forming a government. Switzerland is no exception.

Author: Valeriy Maydanyuk

A few years ago, Ukrainians watched shocking news about North Korea or Iran and thought, “Well, this evil does not concern us.” All this abuse of people is somewhere far away, on the other side of Asia, and we have our own problems.

Some believed that if those nations live like this, it must be good for them. Some even condemned the United States for interfering, criticizing, and threatening military intervention in Iraq, Iran, or the DPRK. During the war in Iraq, when the press reported on a possible American military campaign against Iran, some Ukrainians, especially those who were victims of the dominance of Russian television at the time, strongly criticized Washington’s possible attempts to “interfere in the internal affairs of dictatorial regimes. Our compatriots were sincerely surprised: what do the Americans care about Iran or North Korea? But years have passed, and they have proven themselves so that Ukraine has felt it for itself.

Iranian drones flew into our cities, Belarus provided its territory and technical resources to kill Ukrainians, and indoctrinated North Korean soldiers, under the threat of concentration camps for their families, came to fight against the Ukrainian army. At the same time, North Korean civilian slaves were brought to the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol to dismantle factories destroyed by the Russians. The evil that seemed to be smoldering somewhere far away from us came to our home. If Ukrainians had known what would happen then, we would not have criticized, but would have begged the United States to strike Iran in the early 2000s. Then Iranian drones would definitely not have appeared in the Ukrainian sky in 2022. The world’s evil, which seemed so far away from us and was considered someone else’s problem, appeared on our land and became our problem.

Some Ukrainians once believed that Belarus had “order” and good roads, and even wanted to live the same way. But the nature of dictatorships is rooted in war – sooner or later, every dictator will throw his people into war. War is their trump card for maintaining power. Under the slogans of national unity in the face of enemies, one can tighten the screws until they grind, and the passive majority will consider such steps necessary. A dictatorship, if it has existed long enough, always involves war. In the case of Belarus, if not of their own free will, then under the pressure of dictatorial allies, Belarusians may soon be driven into a meat-and-potatoes war.

Before our eyes, a new “Axis of Evil” is forming on the planet, which can be called an alliance or coalition of dictatorships. Their main feature is the enslavement of their own peoples by dictatorial regimes, dumbing down the population with propaganda and using people as fodder for foreign aggression. Each country of this Axis is a “prison of nations” and each dictator oppresses even his own titular nation.

There is certainly a significant share of the blame for this on the part of the “guarantors” of the world order, who told poor countries about “homework” on democracy and the fight against corruption, bombed Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya, and traded with Russia and China, from which the seeds of the Third World War sprouted. The civilized world community “missed the boat”, failed to realize the risks and did not put the world’s villains in their place in time, and now it is burying its head in the sand, trying not to notice how it is being challenged.

Every dictatorship has a weakness – an outburst of popular discontent that can escalate into a revolution and overthrow the dictatorship. But it takes a tremendous amount of work to liberate the zombie slaves before they come to us with weapons. For example, this week, Belarusian dictator Lukashenko was outraged by attempts by Russian elites to deprive Belarus of its sovereignty and even hinted at war if this happens. But this potential within the “Axis of Dictatorships” needs to be worked with. And so far, it is not clear that the forces that talk so much about human rights have done anything tangible to liberate the more than 1.7 billion people in China, Russia, Belarus, Iran, and North Korea.

Just like Ukrainians until recently, people in Western countries do not suspect that evil that has not been destroyed and marginalized in time can come to them tomorrow.

Author: Valeriy Maydanyuk

Oligarchs are a common disease for the entire post-Soviet space, shaped largely by the Russian tradition of state-building in the 1990s and 2000s.

This is a kind of consequence of the then Russian elites’ ideas about “wild capitalism,” where the strongest would win in a hard struggle and huge financial and industrial groups would be able to form, owning entire, primarily strategic sectors of the economy, and then media and parties. From a small group of red directors, “businessmen from the big road”, often relatives, several dozen national or regional semi-criminal groups were formed by artificial efforts, often with the help of official or unofficial state aid, which dismantled the main asset of the national economy

In Ukraine, the main creators of this “new class” of owners were presidents Leonid Kravchuk and, most of all, Leonid Kuchma, who even issued special decrees to facilitate the creation of “large financial and industrial groups.” These “groups” quickly seized the most tasty bits of the Ukrainian economy, bought up or, at best, created extremely costly and influential national media, parties, parliamentary factions, and courts. Today, they can overthrow or install presidents and governments, bring parties into parliament or destroy them. This situation jeopardizes Ukrainian national interests, calls into question the ability of Ukrainian citizens to influence anything, to elect someone to power, to implement a certain course of state development; in fact, the oligarchs threaten the existence of the state of Ukraine by their existence and activities.

Today, it is imperative to deprive the oligarchs of their unlimited influence on the state, including the executive, legislative and judicial branches, the information space of Ukraine, political parties, and the economy. There are many mechanisms for such tasks, and we can take advantage of the experience of different countries. First, there should be a reboot of government and judicial bodies that will be able to adopt the relevant legislation and implement it accordingly. In Ukraine, there are many bodies that can stop the phenomenon of oligarchs through their activities – the Antimonopoly Committee, the Prosecutor’s Office, the NABU, etc. In the end, most Ukrainians must realize that oligarchs are among their most dangerous enemies, who simply make it impossible for the Ukrainian state and Ukrainians to succeed. Therefore, their removal from influence is one of the most important tasks of our time.

Suggestions:

• Restarting the work of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine, the Anti-Corruption Authorities and the court, which should become the main actors in the fight against oligarchs
• Removing big business from the media
• Eliminate the influence of oligarchs in the parliament and parties
• Deoligarchization of the Ukrainian economy.

Author: Yuriy Mindyuk