It’s in the nature of democracies that power alternates between rival parties. But this past year – the busiest global election year ever – has been a particularly dismal one for governing parties. Everywhere around the world, the anti-incumbency factor has been evident.
Look at the US, where Donald Trump defeated the incumbent vice-president by a much clearer margin than expected; or Britain, where the Labour Party returned to power after 14 years; or Sri Lanka, which witnessed a dramatic shift to the left with the victory of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP’s) presidential candidate, Anura Kumara Dissanayake. In two of the more robust democracies in Africa, Ghana and Botswana, the opposition came out on top – the Botswana result was particularly dramatic, evicting the party that had been in power ever since independence in 1966.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Even where governing parties have held on, some have lost their single party majority. The slip in support for the African National Congress in South Africa was long forecast. But the poor performance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was the big surprise of ‘election 2024’ – and a sharp reminder never to take the voters for granted. In Japan too, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) – which has been in power almost continuously over the past 70 years – suffered a sharp reverse and lost its parliamentary majority.
And spare a thought for President Emanuel Macron in France. He called a surprise parliamentary election – and lost it catastrophically. The big winners were the hard left and the far right. While Marcon remains in office, France has a deeply unstable government and a sharply polarised political landscape.
In several of those nations that bucked the anti-incumbency trend, the results have been contested and the electoral process appears deeply flawed. Nicolas Maduro’s re-election in Venezuela speaks more of the governing party’s ability to manipulate the results than of the president’s popularity. In Pakistan, Shehbaz Sharif returned to power as prime minister even though supporters of the jailed opposition leader Imran Khan seem to have polled more votes. On India’s other flank, Sheikh Hasina won a fourth term in office in Bangladesh in elections which many observers described as a sham – and that appeared to be confirmed when student-led protests forced her from office, and the country, in August.
A popular uprising managed to secure the removal of an unpopular and authoritarian ruler, not just in Bangladesh, but also in Syria, where Islamist rebels took the lead in overthrowing the cruel and despotic Assad government. And in South Korea, it was a mobilisation on the streets, again mainly of the young, that forestalled the president’s recent attempt to introduce martial law.
The anti-incumbency trend is likely to persist in the coming year. It’s very difficult to see either Germany’s Olaf Scholz or Canada’s Justin Trudeau securing re-election.
There are a few elections that have confirmed continuity rather than change. Indonesia and Mexico have new presidents, but not a real change of power. But these have been the exceptions not the rule.
There’s no single global explanation behind this pattern of results but they point to a crisis of confidence in governments, and sometimes in the political system, as well as universal concerns about bread-and-butter issues such as jobs and inflation. Trump’s victory, along with some of the election results in Europe, also indicate that right-wing populism and anti-immigrant rhetoric continue to be powerful political forces in much of the West. The global health of democracy remains precarious when some of those who win elections do not seem to believe in the political system which brought them to power.
Andrew Whitehead is a former BBC India correspondent.
London Calling: How does India look from afar? Looming world power or dysfunctional democracy? And what’s happening in Britain, and the West, that India needs to know about and perhaps learn from? This fortnightly column helps forge the connections so essential in our globalising world.