Across the western democracies, the centre of political gravity shifts erratically but inexorably to the right. Britain’s Brexit vote caused a tilt to the right in Theresa May’s cabinet and has been followed by the election of Donald Trump and a Republican Congress in America. This weekend, Austrians may elect a far-right president, while the centre-left Italian government could fall after this Sunday’s constitutional referendum. In France, meanwhile, the centre-right Republican party has now selected the more conservative contender François Fillon as its presidential candidate in the 2017 contest that could end as a head-to-head with the far-right Front National’s Marine Le Pen.

It is a mistake to treat these developments as simply interchangeable. Every country has its own local political dynamics. Mr Fillon, for example, is routinely depicted as an admirer of Margaret Thatcher – a charge that will be trumpeted by opponents between now and April. But his focus on France’s Catholic roots puts him in a long tradition of French conservatism which has no real equivalent in Britain. His politics are not the same as those of Mrs May, who is again sharply different from Mr Trump. The new Ukip leader Paul Nuttall, who took over from Nigel Farage today, is not Britain’s Ms Le Pen either.

Nevertheless, these developments across the western world have significant ingredients in common and reflect an overlapping mood among western voters. These include job insecurity in the face of globalisation, hostility to migration, anger against urban elites, fear of terrorism, and in some cases a more indulgent stance towards Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Mr Fillon, moreover, has rocketed into frontrunner status to be France’s next president without the media seeing him coming – another echo of the collective misreadings that marked both the referendum vote for Brexit and the Trump election win.

Mr Fillon’s rise sends a particularly resonant further signal. He spent the past three years touring France to listen to rightwing voters’ concerns. He then harnessed this experience to a hardline campaign for a very low level of immigration, the restoration of Catholic conservative values, an overhaul of labour laws and a big cut in public sector jobs. The result was that Mr Fillon swept to an overwhelming two-to-one victory over his chief rival, the more moderate Alain Juppé, defeating him in 92 of France’s 95 departments. Both men are former prime ministers, but it was Mr Juppé, not Mr Fillon, who was seen by voters as campaigning from within an establishment bubble. The loser’s promises to “placate and reform” and promising a “happy identity” found few takers in a French nation that has failed to unify convincingly against either economic decline or radical terror.

The ability of the centre-right to respond to and shape the world as it is evolving in 2016 contrasts with the inability of the centre-left to make matching responses. This failure is also simultaneously particular to individual countries and shared across borders. France’s left politics provide a textbook example. With occasional exceptions, like Canada and Portugal, the centre-left has struggled to win recent elections on both sides of the Atlantic. France’s left suffers from being part of that more general international difficulty to articulate an alternative that catches the popular mood and from being a particularly acute local example of that failure.

France’s socialists have little time to solve their problems before planned primaries in January. But the signs are not good. François Hollande has been neither a radical reformer nor a leftwing traditionalist. He has been indecisive and is increasingly the despair of both wings of his movement. He is now the least popular president since the fifth republic was formed. Polling suggests he will fail to get through the first round of the two-stage presidential election if he runs for a second term.

Already, a spread of alternative candidates is emerging, from Jean-Luc Mélenchon to the left of the socialists to Emmanuel Macron in the centre. At the weekend, prime minister Manuel Valls hinted at a run too. Mr Hollande may decide, even so, that Mr Fillon’s success opens a space in which his own chances may improve. Yet any of them will struggle to unify a majority now. The danger is that the fragmentation and incoherence on the left are too deep. Yet without a credible candidate on the left, French voters will face a baleful choice between the mainstream right and the far right. That’s a problem for France above all, but it reflects a much wider failure too.