The severe economic crunch of the past few years has left millions of people from Athens to Atlanta in deep financial distress and frightened about the dismal prospects they face. The result has been a miasma of frustration, confusion and unfocused anger which is having an unsettling effect in the political sphere. In short, voters are feeling like the central character in the mid-1970s movie, Network: “Mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!”

Australians voted in June after the then-governing party, Labor, suffered a palace coup. Its leader, Kevin Rudd, had fallen out of public favour and the party held a convention, dumped him and replaced him with his deputy, Julia Gillard, who then called an election. Disenchanted voters rewarded them with Australia’s first hung parliament in 70 years. Both Labor and a coalition of the Liberal and National parties each won 72 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives. That’s four seats short of what’s required for a majority government. The balance of power now lies with two minority party members and four independents. Labor retained power by gaining the support of four cross-benchers.

The next month, grumpy British voters trekked to the polls and denied the ruling Labour Party a fourth term in office. The party, which had had an extraordinarily successful run under the telegenic Tony Blair, was now run by his very competent but totally underwhelming finance minister, Gordon Brown. He was one of the architects of the efforts by the G8 and G20 to use government stimulus to buffer the worst effects of recession but citizens were not happy about the sluggish response of the economy and the huge debts and deficits piling up. So they gave the traditional Labour and Conservative parties less than enthusiastic support but opened up to the traditional outsiders, the Liberal Democrats.

No party had a majority, so rounds of feverish negotiations began and the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats fashioned a workable deal. David Cameron of the Conservatives became prime minister and he appointed Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats as his deputy, while bringing several members of Clegg’s party into his Cabinet. They immediately began slimming down the government, social programmes and the armed forces.

Voters are in a cantankerous mood even in well-off Sweden, one of the few countries in the world running a surplus in its national budget. The country is one of the models of the welfare state, paid for, it must be noted, by high taxes. This framework was built by the Social Democratic party, which has formed the government for 65 of the past 78 years and has never before lost two elections in a row. Well, even though they had allied themselves with the relatively new Green Party, they lost the election last month to a centre-right coalition which formed the last government under Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt.

The Social Democrats have lost their magic touch to the Swedes of today, who are more focused on the economy and question their country’s generosity to outsiders, like the flood of refugees escaping the misery of war in Iraq. The election brought the spotlight on the Sweden Democrats, a xenophobic, anti-immigrant group some describe as racist, which managed to pick up 20 seats and for the first time gain a foothold in the national Parliament.

Just this week, voters in Canada’s largest city, Toronto, displayed their anger. A man who runs a lucrative label-printing business with his two brothers accurately captured the dyspeptic voters’ mood and ran with it to a very convincing victory for the mayor’s chain of office. Rob Ford, the wealthy man who nevertheless personifies Joe Lunch Pail, ran on the mantra Stop the Gravy Train. Ford had been a city councillor for 10 years and always boasted that he never touched the discretionary allowance every councillor gets to help run their constituencies. He constantly criticised his fellow councillors for their spending as well as attacking such practices as having people on staff to water the plants in the multi-storey City Hall.

Newspapers had a field day digging up his record of bad behaviour, such as calling a fellow councillor “a waste of skin” and another of Italian origin the derogatory “Gino-boy”; verbally abusing fellow spectators at a sports arena and being busted for drunken driving and possessing ganja while on a visit to Miami. But the voters liked his simple message which he stuck to during a very disciplined and focused campaign and forgave him for being himself.

What resonated was his focus on the lack of respect for taxpayers’ money and taxpayers themselves displayed by councillors and city staff even as taxes and levies kept going up. In his acceptance speech on Monday night, Ford summed up his approach: “The party with taxpayers’ money is over!” Of course, the real task now begins, as this lone wolf former councillor who never made any alliances even with like-minded colleagues will now have to learn to work with others and forge alliances in order to wield his cost-cutting cutlass.

Perhaps the most grumpy voters around are those in the United States, and they vote on Tuesday in what the Americans call the off-year elections. They will choose a new House of Representatives, one-third of the Senate, one-third of the state governors and a host of state, county and city officials as well as numerous referendums.

Much of the frustration and anger is focused on President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats. A movement taking its cue from a protest in formative years of the nation’s history has been making noise from one end of the US to the other. It calls itself the Tea Party and masquerades as a grass-roots movement but most of its supporters are well-off older white men. They clamour for a return to the past, but their detractors point out that the past was one in which discrimination was the order of the day against people who were poor or black, or both. There’s considerable overlap between members of the Tea Party activists and the Republican Party, but the mainstream party has an uneasy relationship with the Tea Partiers, some of whom come out with the most ludicrous of suggestions.

Underlying all the dyspepsia and frustration, the bleating about socialism and freedom from big government are real problems: the hollowing out of the country’s mighty industrial base, the atrocious behaviour of the big financial institutions causing millions of people to lose their houses and way of life and the growing realisation that, as happened to Britain a half-century ago, their country is losing its pre-eminent place in the world.

Tuesday’s vote will significantly change the political picture in Washington, with Republicans regaining control of one, and possibly both, houses of Congress. Then the US will be right back where it was halfway through Bill Clinton’s first term, when the leader of the House Republicans, Newt Gingrich, brought the business of government to a grinding halt. Then the fun began.

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca