When Did We Stop Waiting for Politicians?
Jun 26, 2026
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When did we stop expecting politicians to fix things?
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, which surveys people across nearly 30 countries every year, found that sixty-six percent of people worldwide now believe their own government is trying to mislead them. Not the opposition. Not some other country's government. Their own.
And barely a third of us think government brings people together anymore.
So I started wondering, where did all that distrust go? It didn't just sit there. A study that tracked 143 countries all the way back to 1958 found something curious. Trust in parliaments and governments has been sliding for decades. But trust in the police, oddly, went up over the same stretch.
Which tells me something. We haven't given up on institutions altogether. We've just stopped expecting the people at the top to fix things.
So who's filling that gap?
Look around and you'll see it everywhere. The WhatsApp group that organises garbage pickup because the truck never shows up on schedule. The neighbourhood fund that quietly covers someone's hospital bill before the paperwork even gets filed. None of it makes headlines. It just becomes how things get done.
Is that a good thing? Honestly, a bit of both. There's something genuinely hopeful about people taking charge instead of waiting around. But there's a quieter cost too. Once we get good enough at working around the system, we stop demanding the system get better. We just adjust, and call it normal.
The numbers tell us trust is falling. What they don't tell us is how easily we've learned to live without it.