It has been declared as the Year of Democracy. With more than one and a half billion votes cast in elections in 73 countries, 2024 has presented a rare opportunity to take the social and political temperature of nearly half the world's population.
The results are now in, and they have delivered a damning verdict on public office holders.
The incumbent in each of the 12 developed Western countries that held national elections in 2024 lost a share of the vote at the ballot box, the first time this has ever happened in nearly 120 years of modern democracy. In Asia, even the dominant governments of India and Japan were not spared the strong winds.
Centrists, whether current or otherwise, were often the losers, as voters cast their ballots behind extreme parties on either side. Right populism in particular has surged forward, driven largely by a rightward shift among young people.
The results paint a picture of angry voters affected by record inflation, tired of economic stagnation, concerned about rising immigration rates, and increasingly disillusioned with the system as a whole.
In a way, the Year of Democracy has produced a cry that democracy no longer works, with the younger generation, many of whom are voting for the first time, making some of the strongest rebukes against the establishment.
On average across the developed worldThe vote share of incumbents fell by seven percentage points in 2024, an all-time record and more than double the decline as voters punished elected officials in the wake of the global financial crisis.
The range of countries producing similar results suggests a common undercurrent, with inflation being the obvious culprit.
Come 2024, rising and rising prices were the main concern of the public in the vast majority of countries that went to the polls. Although recessions are not popular, their effects are unevenly distributed. Inflation bites everyone.
But if the cost-of-living crisis was a disincentive for incumbents, a closer look across countries and regions shows that it was not the only driver of discontent.
The biggest backlash against the existing government came in Britain, where the Conservative indictment included not only rising prices, but also a corruption scandal, a crisis in the provision of public health care, a self-inflicted economic shock, and a sharp rise in immigration.
Across the Channel in France, President Emmanuel Macron's attempt to ward off the populist right by calling for early legislative elections backfired. The resulting political chaos has not been fully resolved months later.
In India, Narendra Modi's massive Bharatiya Janata Party won a narrow victory but lost its parliamentary majority, struggling to stem discontent with the growing disconnect between strong economic growth and weak job creation.
This was particularly evident among young people, whose unemployment rate rose to nearly 50 percent before the election, according to data from the Center for Monitoring the Indian Economy.
Even the exceptions to the anti-presidential wave become less surprising when viewed in the context of other central themes of the year's political transformations.
In Mexico and Indonesia respectively, Claudia Sheinbaum and Prabowo Subianto both improved on the incumbent's margins. In both cases, they ran wide-ranging campaigns in which they pledged continuity with their anti-elite predecessors, illustrating the near-universal success that populists have achieved over the past twelve months. Prabowo also relied heavily on the new hegemony Social media Landscape, another common theme.
From the perspective of the world as a whole, the poor performance of centrist parties and the march of populists, especially right-wingers, has been as strong a theme as the anti-presidential wave, perhaps even stronger.
Even the Labor Party's victory in Britain is no exception here, as it won fewer votes this year than it lost in either of the previous two election cycles. A few months after the landslide victory, public opinion turned sharply against the party and the leader.
At the same time, French public dissatisfaction with Macron and his centrist party reflects the broader global mood of disillusionment with the political establishment, and a feeling that… Elected officials I either don't know or I don't care what ordinary people think.
Although the French National Rally party was ultimately narrowly short of the desired victory, the 15-point swing achieved by the French National Rally party in the parliamentary elections was the largest recorded by any party in any developed country this year. The second, third and fourth biggest gains of the year all came from fellow right-wing populists, such as the Freedom Party in Austria, the Reform Party in the UK, and Chiga in Portugal.
This speaks to the fact that immigration has been a growing concern across the developed world in recent years, and has been one of the main issues on voters' minds when they go to the polls.
When conservative parties lost power, the right-wing parties that generally rallied around them were the main beneficiaries. The success of Nigel Farage's UK Reform Party in convincing Conservative voters in Britain is widely attributed to the latter's failure to deliver on its promise to reduce immigration numbers.
But anti-establishment successes were not limited to the right. The UK Green Party was one of a few far-left parties that also gained more ground as voters disillusioned with the stale center split in both directions.
While the timing and size of the anti-corporate wave point primarily to the short-term shock of rising prices, the populist surge looks more like a continuation – or perhaps an acceleration – of a stagnation. direction This has been happening in an increasing number of countries for at least two decades.
One prominent theory about why we're seeing this development was put forward in an influential article paper It was published earlier this year by a team of economists at Harvard University, who found that people who grow up against a background of weaker economic growth and less intergenerational progress are more likely to view the world as zero-sum, where someone's gain must come on Someone else's gain. It costs.
Steady decline in upward economic mobility in Rich countries This can therefore explain much of the rise in these opinions, which They tend to be related With the support of parties and politicians from the left and right who promise to tear down the existing order or protect against external threats.
Another possibility It is that the radical changes to the media landscape over the past two decades have played a role in eroding long-standing norms against populist rhetoric and talking points. The rise of social media has made it easier for political outsiders to speak directly to the public, leveling the playing field that had previously been skewed toward established figures and parties.
Under the surface Among the key findings, one of the most striking patterns seen country by country was rising support for right-wing populism among young people.
In Britain, support for reform is now higher among men in their late teens and early twenties than among those in their thirties, and a noticeable gender gap has opened among younger voters. We can see a very similar pattern in the United States, where young people also turned sharply toward Donald Trump in November, and the same pattern is emerging across much of Europe.
It is worth noting that there appears to be plenty of scope for this trend to continue: the proportion who say they would consider voting for the far right is even higher than those who have already done so.
Such an apparent shift is astonishing, but it is not without a plausible explanation. If dissatisfaction with economic stagnation leads to zero-sum attitudes, few groups have experienced such persistence as young people, whose relative socioeconomic status has been at a disadvantage. Steady decline Across the west.
But it is not just young people who turn to extremism. Young women in the United States also turned toward Trump, while in the United Kingdom they turned largely toward the Green Party.
This fits with research From polling firm FocalData earlier this year, which found that young people are much more likely than older people to support a hypothetical national populist party, and Study 2020 Which found that satisfaction with democracy in the developed West is declining more and faster among young people than among any other group.
All signs point to that Both trends set for 2024 are set to continue next year. The latest opinion polls show that the current governments in Australia, Canada, Germany and Norway are on track to lose power in the coming months.
In most of these countries, it is once again the populist right that will make the biggest gains. Right-wing populist Norway Progress Party Currently riding high after finishing fourth in 2021, the AfD is currently in second place.
The severe inflation crisis may have passed, but with stubbornly weak economic growth, a widening generational wealth gap, and a fragmented media, 2024 may be less of an anomaly than a particularly jagged point in a downtrend.
