(Daily Caller)—Conservatives won major elections in several nations this year, signaling a shift away from left-leaning governance in their respective countries.
Conservative political parties and politicians in Argentina, Switzerland, New Zealand and the Netherlands won major legislative and presidential elections in 2023. Many of these parties and politicians have promised to implement conservative policies after years of leftist governance that has disenchanted a number of voters.
Javier Milei, a libertarian politician and former economist, beat out left-leaning economy minister Sergio Massa in Argentina’s presidential elections in November. Milei, sometimes referred to as “The Madman” by his supporters, is characterized by his firm stance on conservative cultural, political, economic issues and his passionate rants against leftism.
Milei plans to implement the U.S. dollar as Argentina’s official currency as part of a larger effort to fix the country’s economy and culture of poverty, which has grown worse under leftist governance, according to Milei. Argentina’s total inflation passed 160% in December, having increased 12.8% in November alone, according to Reuters.
Milei has also promised to cut half of Argentina’s government agencies, which he often symbolized by wielding a chainsaw on the campaign trail. Weeks after being sworn into office, Milei signed new decrees on Wednesday to start deregulating Argentina’s economy, end export limits and privatize a number of state-owned corporations, according to Reuters.
“This is only the first step,” Milei said on Dec. 18. “The objective is to return freedom and autonomy to individuals and start dismantling the enormous amount of regulations that have impeded, hindered and stopped economic growth.”
In New Zealand, former airline executive and conservative National Party politician Christopher Luxon won the country’s election for prime minister in October, ushering in a conservative government unseen in decades, according to The New York Times. Luxon won after voters overwhelmingly rejected New Zealand’s left-leaning Labor Party which was led by former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
Many voters cited economic concerns as the reason for electing Luxon and ousting the Labor Party from governance, according to the NYT. Ardern abruptly resigned from her position as prime minister in January after facing sharp criticism from New Zealanders over her harsh COVID-19 lockdown measures.
Under Luxon and newly elected National Party parliamentary representatives, New Zealand is moving to cut taxes, lower interest rates and curtail heightened inflation rates as part of a larger plan to breathe new life into the country’s economy, according to Bloomberg. Luxon is also looking to cut some of New Zealand’s bureaucratic agencies and expand the country’s military agreements, Reuters reported.
In the Netherlands, Geert Wilder’s Party for Freedom seized a victory in November’s national elections, taking 37 of the 150-seat legislature and making it the ruling party, according to the NYT. The victory came partially in response to voter’s dissatisfaction with the liberal governance that had dominated the Netherlands for decades.
Wilder has not yet been named prime minister of the Netherlands as opposing political parties have thus far refused to work with the Party for Freedom, according to Reuters. Wilder, who had been compared to former U.S. President Donald Trump, is considered the representative of the Party for Freedom and has vowed to become the next prime minister.
“Today, tomorrow or the day after, the PVV will be part of government and I will be prime minister of this beautiful country,” Wilders said in November, Reuters reported.
The Party for Freedom advocates for banning the Quran and shutting down Islamic schools over concerns about the “existential threat” of extremist “Islamisation,” according to France24. Wilder’s party advocates for major restrictions on immigration, as the country has historically had high levels of asylum seekers, even more so in the last decade, according to Reuters.
Party for Freedom also advocates for a much stronger police force and has promised funding for 10,000 additional officers, according to the NYT.
“The police need to be in charge in the street again,” the Party for Freedom states. “Criminals have to be arrested immediately and put in prison for a long time.”
In Switzerland, the conservative Swiss People’s Party (SVP) took majority control of the country’s parliament after surging to victory in October’s national elections, according to The Associated Press. SVP campaigned on issues like reducing illegal immigration and restoring a dwindling economy, which voters seemed to be more concerned over than with issues like climate change – a key priority for “green” factions in parliament who lost seats in the October elections.
“It’s perhaps that there was a sort of competition among concerns – and that made the job harder for the Greens to make climate concerns the dominant theme in the media,” Political analyst Pascal Sciarini told the AP, referring to issues voters cared about most.
Besides the U.S., dozens of major foreign countries will host national elections next year, including China, Taiwan, South Africa, India, the European Union nations and potentially the U.K., though the latter could be delayed until the following year, according to the Guardian.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.