‘Doing a Biden’ is new international shorthand for ousting past-due leaders

When President Joe Biden exited the presidential race to make way for Vice President Kamala Harris this summer, he knew his decision would be closely watched around the world.

What he didn’t realize is that it would make “doing a Biden” the new political shorthand for an embattled national leader who sees the writing on the wall and steps aside for others within his party. Or the move’s ripple effects: setting an example for those within democracies closely tied to the United States to pressure their own leaders to step down.

At least three unpopular leaders facing looming national elections — Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz — have felt that pressure themselves in the two months since Biden bowed out.

“Why isn’t Scholz doing a Biden?” asked the German news magazine Der Spiegel earlier this month after a string of regional election losses, saying the chancellor “would be doing his party, his country and himself a favor” by stepping aside. This summer, in the wake of Biden’s announcement, the Canadian broadcaster CBC posed the question: “Could Trudeau go next?” And Kishida was “having a Biden moment” when he stepped down as the leader of his party last month, one expert quipped.

Griping about an unpopular leader and calling for alternatives is nothing new, and the political dynamics in each country are different: Kishida was already on the ropes before Biden stepped down, and it’s not clear either Scholz or Trudeau will bow to internal party pressure the way Biden eventually did.

But the explicit references to Biden making the rounds in Tokyo, Ottawa and Berlin are proof that his decision in July has established a global model for a politician doing the most unnatural thing: choosing to willingly give up power without defeat or death.

Rough political waters ahead

Kishida, Trudeau and Scholz are oceans apart, but they have found themselves in remarkably similar political territory in recent months facing suggestions they follow in Biden’s footsteps and call it quits.

All three leaders, well into their terms and increasingly unpopular, have been bombarded with questions from within their parties — Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, Canada’s Liberals and Germany’s Social Democrats, respectively — about whether they’re the right standard-bearers for national elections in each country slated for next year.

Kishida, first elected as Japan’s prime minister and head of his LDP party in 2021, has faced declining approval ratings after a series of corruption scandals rocked his party. On Friday, Kishida’s LDP elected its new president — and he wasn’t among the hopefuls vying for the job.

There had already been speculation that Kishida might bow out of his party’s leadership race this fall, but after Biden’s exit from the U.S. presidential race in July, politicians and journalists began drawing direct comparisons between the two politicians.

“Biden is out and Kishida should retire quickly and honorably, too,” one LDP official told the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest newspapers, while a member of Kishida’s Cabinet told the Japan Times: “We need to closely watch the impact of [Biden’s withdrawal] on the party leadership race.”

In mid-August, only weeks after Biden’s decision, Kishida made a surprise announcement that he too would be giving up the slot as his party’s top candidate.

“It is necessary to firmly present a newly born LDP to the people,” Kishida said at a press conference last month. “The most obvious first step to show that the LDP will change is for me to step down.”

Scholz, who took over from Angela Merkel as chancellor just two months after Kishida became Japan’s prime minister, has been fighting for political survival amid record-low approval ratings. Like Biden, he’s faced calls to yield to a politician better positioned to lead the center-left SPD in next year’s federal election.

“There is a deep disappointment with the government, with the coalition and with Scholz,” Peter Matuschek, chief political analyst at the German polling firm Forsa, told POLITICO.

That disappointment with Scholz’s government stems from both the Ukraine war’s ongoing impact on Germany and infighting within Scholz’s three-party governing coalition. Scholz’s approval rating stood at just 20 percent earlier this month, according to a poll from the German broadcaster ARD.

Voters have punished Scholz and his SPD at the ballot box this year, starting with June’s European Parliament elections in which the party’s support was nearly halved compared with its 2021 federal election result. A pair of regional elections in the eastern German states of Thuringia and Saxony earlier this month, where the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party made major gains and the SPD was relegated to single-digit support, intensified clamor for Scholz to step aside — with an explicit nod to Biden’s actions.

“The chancellor could follow the example of U.S. President Joe Biden: Instead of clinging to power and letting himself be taken apart piece by piece in the coming months, he is clearing the way for a new political start,” Spiegel wrote in its daily politics newsletter earlier this month.

Political circles in Berlin already have a potential successor in mind: Boris Pistorius, Scholz’s defense minister, who has consistently ranked as the most popular politician in the country. After months of behind-the-scenes chatter, some party members started to voice those thoughts publicly. “The SPD must think about Pistorius as a candidate for chancellor,” Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter said last week.

Polling out this week from Matuschek’s Forsa finds that two-thirds of German voters — including 63 percent of those who voted for the SPD in the last federal election — agree Scholz should step aside and allow Pistorius to run as the SPD’s chancellor candidate.

And across the Atlantic, Trudeau faces serious questions about how much longer his third term as prime minister can last. Trudeau, who came into office in 2015 promising “real change,” has been weakened by a series of scandals throughout his tenure and saw his Liberals’ support erode further in the 2019 and 2021 elections.

This year, a special election for a Toronto-area parliamentary district in June signaled more acute trouble for Trudeau’s Liberals, who lost a seat the party had held for 30 years. The vote, which came just days before the disastrous debate performance that ultimately doomed Biden, prompted comparisons between two stubborn North American leaders clinging to power.

A loss in a second special election for the Liberals earlier this month, this time in Trudeau’s home region of Montréal — just days after his party’s governing partner in parliament announced it would quit the informal alliance — led to more explicit demands to leave office. As in Japan and Germany, Biden’s example loomed as an analogy. “Is it time for Justin Trudeau to Be Like Joe?” one columnist asked.

Some have even extended the metaphor to other political figures in Canada, wondering who in the Liberal Party has the clout to get Trudeau to change his mind.

“I don’t know that we have an equivalent of a Nancy Pelosi here, somebody who would bend his ear and have that tough conversation in a way that would really be impactful on him,” Lori Turnbull, a Canadian political analyst and professor at Dalhousie University, told POLITICO ahead of the vote. “Not necessarily to quit, but [to say], ‘We need to change gears. We need to do something colossally different.”

Canada’s next parliamentary elections are slated for fall 2025, but Trudeau’s primary political rivals, the Conservatives, hope to force a vote sooner. The Conservative Party’s firebrand leader, Pierre Poilievre, introduced a vote of no confidence in Canada’s parliament this week in an effort to trigger snap elections.

Avoiding Biden’s fate?

Of the three politicians facing these calls to emulate Biden, only Kishida has thus far surrendered — both Trudeau and Scholz are holding their ground and appear unlikely to bow out any time soon.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Trudeau said earlier this month. “I’ve got a fight to lead against people who want to hurt this country, who want to hurt our communities and who want to take the country in directions that, quite frankly, are exactly the opposite of where the world needs to go.”

In Germany, last Sunday’s regional vote in Brandenburg, where the SPD eked out a narrow victory in a state it has led for 34 years, is likely to give Scholz at least a temporary reprieve from questions about his political future.

Scholz, reacting to the state election results from the U.N. General Assembly in New York this week, insisted he and his party “will repeat what happened in Brandenburg and what we succeeded at doing in the last federal election: that is, that the SPD is the strongest party in the running.”

But questions about his viability as the party’s standard-bearer in next year’s federal election remain, given the belief that the SPD won its narrow victory in spite of Scholz, not because of him. A looming budget showdown between members of the governing coalition — which one coalition party leader referred to as the “autumn of decisions” — may well see the collapse of Scholz’s government.

“I don’t think there will be immediate calls to change tactics for the SPD,” Sudha David-Wilp, a senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund’s Berlin office, told POLITICO. “Now that these three crucial state elections are behind them, it’s not going to happen immediately like some have thought.”

Kyle Duggan, Nick Taylor-Vaisey, Matthew Karnitschnig and Nette Nöstlinger contributed to this report.