European Phoenix? - 19 October 2026

It’s easy to be down on Canada these days. Still, the country continues to produce an unusual concentration of high-profile, right-leaning public intellectuals and writers: Jordan Peterson, Mark Steyn, Meghan Murphy, Gad Saad, and Conrad Black among them.

Black’s latest piece (linked below) addresses something I’ve been turning over recently: whether the concurrent rise of conservative-populist parties in Europe—Reform UK, the Rassemblement National, and the AfD—tracks with any broader revival of cultural or religious self-confidence. The question occurred to me a few weeks ago after seeing the scale of the reception given to the Pope in Paris, where estimates put the crowd on the Champs-Élysées at roughly 800,000.

Black puts into clearer words the connection I had only half-formed. By contrast, the ongoing riots in France are being framed, as usual, almost entirely through a socioeconomic or “anti-system” lens that downplays their more explicitly ideological drivers.

One way or another, Marine Le Pen remains the figure most likely to represent a genuine break with the postwar French consensus. That she is a woman invites the Joan of Arc analogies that are already circulating; whether those analogies prove useful or merely romantic is another matter. The more relevant point is that she, Farage, and the AfD leadership have all shown markedly less interest than their centrist and left-wing counterparts in treating Russia as an existential civilizational threat rather than, primarily, a potential source of energy. That difference in priorities is worth noting.

As Europe falters a phoenix awaits?

Conrad Black: Europe Need Not Fear the Rise of Right-Leaning Parties