In India, a powerful leader wins another term but sees the majority of his party disappear. In South Africa, the ruling party is humiliated by voters for the first time since the end of apartheid. In Britain, a populist insurgent storms an election that is shaping up to be a crushing defeat for the long-ruling Conservatives.
If there is a common thread halfway through this global election year, it is the desire of voters to send a strong signal to the powers that be: if not a clean sweep, then a defiant shake-up of the status quo.
Even in Mexico, where Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s hand-picked successor, was elected in a landslide last Sunday, voters were rewarding the forces that had uprooted the country’s entrenched establishment just six years earlier. .
With more than a billion people heading to the polls in more than 60 countries, some analysts feared that 2024 would pose a fateful test for democracy, one in which it could fail. For years, populist leaders and warlords have undermined democratic institutions, sowing doubt about the legitimacy of elections, while social media has inundated voters with misinformation and conspiracy theories.
In some of the largest and most fragile democracies, leaders such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey had been considered almost invincible, resorting to nationalism or sectarianism to mobilize their supporters and bend institutions to adapt them to your purposes.
However, now Modi and Erdogan have had their wings clipped. Soaring inflation, chronic unemployment and uneven economic growth have widened inequality in India, Turkey and elsewhere, frustrating voters who have shown a willingness to oppose the establishment.
“We have electoral systems that are producing results that the ruling parties did not want,” said Ben Ansell, professor of comparative democratic institutions at the University of Oxford. “They have all been destabilized by a difficult economic environment, and behaving like strongmen has not saved them.”
Modi and Erdogan remain in power, each now in his third term. But Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost dozens of seats and will have to govern in coalition with two secular parties. The Turkish opposition dealt a blow to Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party in April, winning a series of local elections and solidifying its control of major cities such as Istanbul and the capital, Ankara.
“In many countries where there has been talk of decline, that is where we have seen a recovery,” Professor Ansell said. “For Modi and Erdogan, taking the shine off their infallibility was very important.”
With so many elections in so many countries, it is dangerous to generalize. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia won 88 percent of the vote in a landslide reelection victory in March that spoke less to Russian public sentiment and more to the ability of an autocrat, facing no significant opposition, to mount an show. of support for his war in Ukraine.
In Europe, far-right parties are expected to do well in the European Parliament elections, which began on Thursday. Analysts said they did not believe this would jeopardize the political center that has governed Europe in the post-World War II era. And Poland provided a source of comfort last November, when voters ousted his nationalist Law and Justice Party in favor of a more liberal opposition.
Still, the success of far-right figures like Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister, attests to populism’s enduring appeal.
“Populists and right-wingers will continue to make inroads and instill fear in the European political establishment,” said Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, in its analysis of the main risks for 2024.
The British general election was shaken up on Monday when Nigel Farage, a populist politician, pro-Brexit activist and ally of former President Donald J. Trump, announced that he would run for a seat in Parliament under the banner of his Reform UK party, which There is a strident anti-immigration message.
This will add to the headache of the Conservative Party, which has trailed the opposition Labor Party by double digits in the polls for almost 18 months. The reform, which is running candidates across the country, could siphon Conservative votes among those who blame the party for a weak economy and rising immigration numbers since Britain left the European Union in 2020.
Some critics argue that the Conservative Party’s problems stem from its free-market policies, which they say have disillusioned voters in deprived areas of Britain and set it apart from right-wing parties in Europe or the Make America movement. Trump’s Great Again in the United States. State.
Most fundamentally, however, the Conservatives have been in power for 14 years and face the same pent-up dissatisfaction with the status quo that drove recent elections in India, South Africa and Turkey.
In some countries, the need to break with the past has led voters to make unorthodox decisions: Javier Milei, a flamboyant libertarian economist, came to power in Argentina last November with a promise to close its central bank and launch an attack total against what he described as a corrupt political “caste.”
Some analysts argue that similarly disruptive forces are driving the presidential race in the United States, where a comparatively healthy economy and incumbency advantages have not saved President Biden, who faces a neck-and-neck challenge from Trump even after the First The president was convicted of multiple serious crimes.
“It’s not about left versus right, it’s about status quo versus change,” said Frank Luntz, an American political strategist who has lived and worked in Britain. “You can’t buy a house in the UK, the NHS doesn’t work,” he said, referring to the National Health Service. “In the United States you can’t afford housing or healthcare. “It’s about broken promises, year after year.”
That sense of betrayal is even more acute in countries like South Africa, where the African National Congress, or ANC, has governed since the dawn of democracy in 1994, amassing majorities even as the economy and social infrastructure crumbled. Last week, voters finally rebelled, reducing the ANC’s vote share to 40 percent, from 58 percent in the last national election in 2019.
Among their biggest complaints is a lack of job opportunities: South Africa’s unemployment rate (42 percent, including those who have stopped looking for work) is one of the highest in the world. The stagnation has widened the country’s already deep inequality.
South Africans flock to cities in search of work. But many end up in decrepit buildings and communities of neglected shacks, often without running water or sanitary toilets. Regular power outages leave streets dark and residents in many communities vulnerable to crime. South Africa’s homicide rate is six and a half times higher than that of the United States and 45 times higher than that of Germany.
Jacob Zuma, the scandal-scarred former president, has benefited from this misery, helping to start a new party, umKhonto weSizwe, or MK, which won almost 15 percent of the vote, mainly at the expense of his old party, the ANC.
Zuma attracts a feverish following among disillusioned ANC supporters, who accuse the party of selling out to rich white businessmen and failing to act aggressively enough to redistribute wealth to the black majority after apartheid.
India’s election was a comparable anti-ruling revolt, even if Modi’s BJP remains the largest party in Parliament by a wide margin. The party’s campaign spending was at least 20 times that of its main opposition, the Congress Party, whose bank accounts were frozen by the government in a tax dispute on the eve of the election. The country’s media has largely been bribed or intimidated into silence.
And yet the results showed that Modi, 73, lost his majority for the first time since he took office in 2014. Analysts said that reflected widespread dissatisfaction with the way the fruits of democracy have been shared. Indian economy. While India’s steady growth has made it the envy of its neighbors (and created a notorious billionaire class), those riches have not reached India’s hundreds of millions of poor.
The government has distributed free rations of wheat, cereals and cooking gas. It offers home water connections, subsidizes construction materials and gives cash to farmers. But it has failed to address inflation and unemployment in India, leaving hundreds of millions of people, especially women, chronically out of work.
There is also some evidence that Modi’s appeals to Hindu nationalism were not as potent as in previous elections. The BJP candidate did not even win in the constituency that is home to the lavish Ram temple, built on land disputed by Hindus and Muslims. Modi inaugurated the temple just before the campaign began, hoping it would galvanize his Hindu political base.
The economy also influenced Mexico’s elections, but in a very different way. While overall growth was disappointing (averaging just 1 percent annually during López Obrador’s term), the government doubled the minimum wage and strengthened the peso, lifting millions of Mexicans out of poverty.
“People vote with their wallets, and it’s very obvious that there is more money in almost everyone’s wallets in Mexico,” said Diego Casteñeda Garza, a Mexican economist and historian at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Still, analysts said, there was also a desire among voters to cement the change that López Obrador, a charismatic outsider, symbolized when he came to power in 2018. Even as Sheinbaum, 61, promised to continue his mentor’s policies , presented herself – the first Jewish female president of Mexico – as an agent of change.
For Jacqueline González, 33, who works at a freight shipping company and considered Mexico’s previous governments corrupt, that made voting for Sheinbaum an easy decision.
“With Obrador we have already seen, although some people do not want to admit it, some changes,” González said. “Let’s hope he continues with Sheinbaum.”
The report was contributed by John Eligon from johannesburg, Alex Travelli from New Delhi and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega From Mexico City.